Latest / Talk Commerce / Automating Complex Ecommerce Workflows with Joseph Anderson of Connex Ecommerce
Transcript
- Brent Peterson (00:01.218) Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce that I have Joe Anderson. He is the CEO and founder of Connex Ecommerce Joe, go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day to day role and one of your passions in life. Joseph Anderson (00:14.47) My day-to-day role is to help companies that sell B2B or a combination of B2B and B2C automate complex workflows with their selling channels and their accounting systems. We work with QuickBooks, we work with NetSuite, Acumatica, Sage Intact. We're building an Epicore integration. Our specialty is in complex workflows, things that need rules primarily. Found the company for 16 years and love what I do. I oversee overall operations, the staff, assigning tasks to staff, keeping the developers on track, helping out with some of the sales support work. Brent Peterson (00:58.326) That's awesome. And passions outside of work? Joseph Anderson (01:02.952) Passionate set of work. I play golf. I play tennis. I plan a travel team for a local area and I also do weightlifting. Brent Peterson (01:12.306) Awesome. All right. Good. All right. So Joe before we get going here, I do this thing called the free joke project I'm going to tell you a joke. You just give me a rating 8 through 13 So here we go I Got to do the joke first but appreciate it I'll take 12 though. Hey, that's great. I'm alright. So here we go. I'm sorry Joseph Anderson (01:24.786) Both. Joseph Anderson (01:28.444) he was joking first. Okay, I thought I had to pick a number. Brent Peterson (01:40.236) I'm never donating to anyone collecting money for a marathon again. They just took my money and ran. Joseph Anderson (01:47.88) I'm going give that a 13. That's pretty funny because here in Boston, we just had the Boston Marathon, think two weeks ago. Brent Peterson (01:53.324) Yeah, I've done it once. All right, Joe, so give us the elevator pitch for Connex. Give us the background and how you founded it and how you came about running it. Joseph Anderson (02:09.928) Well, growing up as a kid, my mother did data entry for many years and she got carpal tunnel and was later let go from her position at her employer. And it really stuck with me that the entry was a real problem. I later worked at a software company where there was an intern sitting in front of me, maybe four feet. And she was doing the same thing, entering data from one screen into QuickBooks enterprise. When I later left the company, started my own business automating data entry between QuickBooks and selling channels. And I built a software as a service solution in 2013 and it took off and did really well. Brent Peterson (02:51.278) All right. interconnects, that kind of where the story goes? Joseph Anderson (03:00.904) Correct, yes. The business, over time we've started to move up market. We tend to work with companies that have really complex workflow issues. One of the biggest challenges in syncing any two systems is data is frequently mismatched. Another problem companies have is it says... ABC incorporated in Shopify, but it's ABC and QuickBooks and they don't want to fix the data They just want to create a mapping between various systems or payment methods or something to that nature and That's something that you we fix There are a lot of data syncing tools out there, but they're not really built to handle data Not built to handle problems when data is mismatched or data needs to be mapped instead of fixed another system Especially in the lower end when you get under $100 a month. It's all just If it doesn't match, it's not going to work. Brent Peterson (03:53.824) And so Connex is would you are a replacement for Shopify, right? You're not an augmentation to Shopify. You would be a replacement to something like Shopify. Joseph Anderson (04:02.076) We're a workflow automation tool for e-commerce sellers. We help companies connect various systems like Shopify, like QuickBooks, like ShipStation together to create a workflow. It's a lot like when you woke up this morning, you got out of bed, you had breakfast, you went to work, that's a workflow. But what's interesting is you may want a different workflow depending on the weather or depending on the day. Like, well, it's Christmas, I don't want to wake up, have breakfast, go to work, I want to do something else. That's kind of what we do. Brent Peterson (04:32.192) Okay. So think of it as sort of smart workflows, helping the merchant to make the best of their data. Talk about some of the challenges that you have in all the different systems. And, you know, my background was in e-commerce and, you know, know that, you know, we dealt with AS 400s and all the older systems as well. How does some of those legacy systems work into this? Joseph Anderson (04:35.4) Yeah. Joseph Anderson (05:02.652) We have companies on QuickBooks Enterprise, which is kind of a legacy system in my opinion. People just don't want to move. It's a lot of money and time to move accounting systems, move all the data, train everybody, work out the bugs and kinks it could cost months and tens of thousands of dollars that a business may not want to invest. So they'd rather fix an existing system than go to something completely new, even though something completely new could be a lot better for them. I found that in the business companies aren't willing to change. They have a broken workflow with these workarounds and like, yeah, make it, we have a new workflow tool. Let's make all this broken workflow stuff to somewhere else. And we say, well, we want to make it run clean. So getting companies to change has been a challenge. Change the way they do things to make it fit the product. Another issue we've had is, can we make this work for everybody? How do we make? connects this really configurable system that connects can with others, can't. How do you build on all these custom workflows without breaking it for other people? And scaling, when Black Friday comes along and the quarter four order volume increases, how do you make sure your software's not going offline, especially with higher volumes of sales from more of your customers? So I think those are probably some of the biggest challenges and keeping up with the updates. Amazon, Shopify, they're frequently doing updates. mean, Shopify did a pretty big update to their API in 2025 and it costs a lot of money and time for us to do those updates. And how do you make these changes without knocking your users offline for a significant period of time? It's been a challenge for us. Brent Peterson (06:41.582) Yeah, I mean, I can remember back when we were doing Magento and we could wire in it directly into Magento. We wouldn't, on a middle layer. Having the clients keep up with that, or having the clients not worry about keeping up with all those different updates that are now happening in your space, I would assume that that's helping them to keep their workflows going and that you take on the responsibility so the client doesn't have to worry about those updates, right? Joseph Anderson (07:16.167) Correct, yes. The benefit of paying a monthly annual fee is we do all the updates. Many companies are unaware of all the work that goes into supporting and maintaining the software, doing the updates. Sometimes there'll be a change in Amazon, for example. We pull out these order reports and they changed a parameter and we didn't know. We were able to fix it. Sometimes changes happen and it doesn't work and we have to figure it out. I I feel like for what company's paying, it's really a steal just for all the support work that we do as a company. Brent Peterson (07:53.24) Yeah, think maybe a lot of clients would think of as an entry point is something like Zapier, right? I think that you're going one beyond that or multiple spaces beyond that. Joseph Anderson (08:03.931) Yeah, we're definitely a step above. You find with general eye pass systems, they can do like spreadsheets to databases. they can, it's like you go to your primary care and you say my foot hurts and the primary, you know, they have a general idea of how to treat you, but they they send you to a podiatrist and the podiatrist in 10 minutes tells you exactly what's wrong. We're kind of a specialist doc. whereas a general iPaaS is more like a primary care. You can do a lot of things with them, but you're not gonna get something really specialized that works for you. And you'll actually find that our price is usually lower than many of the iPaaS solutions because it's more specialized. It doesn't do as much, but it does what you need it to do. Brent Peterson (08:45.218) Yeah, you mentioned financials. So if somebody's wiring up something like Shopify to their NetSuite, how do you work that in for the financial workflows between the two? Joseph Anderson (08:58.887) I think that's a great question to ask. Frequently users will log into our software and pair the systems. And it's a web-based tool, there's no desktop software to install. We have a system to run a scheduled sync, like a cron job on a usually hourly or 24-hour basis. I recommend 24, it's a more accurate, reliable sync. And when users log in, we have a series of conditions or rules. If order looks like this, put it over there. If product looks like this, put it over there. That's what we do with our system. And the rules is what makes us unique. Most companies don't have these configurable rules that our software has. You'll also find with many generic iPasses, they're more of a building solution. They're not really built for business users. We have business users running Connex, whereas you'll find with an iPaas, you need someone to kind of build a tool for you. So it's just a different kind of market. Brent Peterson (09:51.756) I remember working with a company that had a custom interface that they had built. when a problem would happen, it would end up stopping the entire workflow. How do you get around capturing errors? And like you had mentioned, if somebody does an update. And also, guess, people will do an up. Like if you're doing NetSuite, somebody may do an update that ruins a... workflow for you. How do you get around those type of situations? Joseph Anderson (10:22.705) customer would open a support ticket, what's the order number, what's the error, so we get the steps to duplicate. We'll find the error message and then take the appropriate steps to solve it. We have developers go into Visual Studio and they run it step by step and see how it's breaking here at step six, fix it and publish and move on. Brent Peterson (10:41.196) And what is the, what is your typical client look like? Are you serving the whole range of mid-market to enterprise? Joseph Anderson (10:50.191) I don't like using revenue because we have really big companies and have really small ones starting up. But what they look like is they have a complex workflow. Usually three or more systems to connect. The accounting ERP is involved in that process. They usually need something custom. They have either data that's mismatched that can easily be fixed. I had one customer, he's using Shopify's multi-channel order management tool. And he's like, well, if the orders are tagged like this, I want them to go here. If they're tagged like that, I want them to go over there. Usually it's some unique set of business requirements that out of the box integration is not going to fulfill. I typically, in my opinion, I like companies with five to 10 million revenue at least. However, I do have companies that are under one to 2 million that have something going on that want to use us. Brent Peterson (11:46.274) What are you seeing for the trend with AI? How is AI helping what you're doing and helping what clients are doing? Joseph Anderson (11:52.345) It's been really helpful with writing code and tests. We'll say, hey, AI, like, here's a problem. Can you like, here's the code, can you fix it? And it's been helpful, like just writing, generating code for us, like boilerplate, like work that would take us days we could do in, you know, under an hour. I use AI to write code that would have taken me a day in like 45 minutes, fix it. So that's been, it's been really helpful in that aspect. We also have in our rules engine, AI ask it to generate rules for you that we've been. we've been working on and customers have been using that. So we've been using it for customer support. We've been using it to write some of our code. Sometimes customers will email us with a QuickBooks related error and we'll use like perplexity to Google it and it will say, yeah, here are steps to fix it. So some problems are not related to connects but we step in and fix them anyways. Brent Peterson (12:42.402) What I was just at a conference last week and complex B2B is one of the target markets for a lot of these e-commerce platforms out there. And I would imagine then for you complex B2B is one of your core client bases. Give us an example of some of the complexities that people are encountering that you've overcome. Joseph Anderson (13:08.07) Well, with many companies who ship, they put the orders into their accounting system like a QuickBooks, they send them to a ship station and then once the order is shipped, they put it back into their accounting tool, the QuickBooks, and send invoice to the customers. There's four, I think four to six steps for many of our customers. That's a frequent one that we obtain. Other customers who sell mixed B2B, B2C, they want to summarize all the B2C orders in one big order. So they want like to do it in a batch. or as the B2B sales they want individually. So that's pretty common we've seen with our customer base. One way that we're different is that we get to do meetings with customers, we onboard them, they get access to developers. We're kind of like a developer for hire, so to speak, for a lot of our customers. Brent Peterson (13:55.471) What are you most excited about coming up this year now for e-commerce and where things are headed with with all the changes that are happening? Joseph Anderson (14:04.241) Yeah, I forward to the Agenda Commerce and the checkouts. I'm looking forward to the day when we start having AI agents contacting us on customer's behalf and like, we want to buy your product. That would be really, really interesting. I think the AI will do a better job at evaluating our content. Say, yeah, you have a crazy workflow. You got to go to Connex. So that's what I'm really looking forward to with e-commerce and seeing if we could build a product around Agenda AI and help feed it more information on what products to buy. Brent Peterson (14:37.368) Yeah, I was at eTail Boston last year and I asked the, I moderated a panel and I asked the audience who's using agent to AI and nobody was using it yet. And I still think that nobody's quite using it yet, but it's on the horizon. Joseph Anderson (14:52.728) We have an order manager product. were using a Pega Launchpad. We built a workflow automation tool, kind of like a mini ERP we've also built. Brent Peterson (15:05.43) Okay. Joseph Anderson (15:06.31) I have used some, but we primarily use AI to generate some of the code and tests right now. Brent Peterson (15:13.87) What do you see in terms of AI and the agents? mean, I'll just back up a minute. I saw a couple of weeks ago, Salesforce is also offering their e-commerce solution without a front end. So it's API only. Do you see that as a solution that you would integrate with agents and buying and you wouldn't need a web interface at all? Joseph Anderson (15:41.445) That's a really good idea for product for Connex. I'd definitely be open to building an interface like that. mean, it's essentially your we work with e-commerce APIs all the time. It wouldn't surprise me if one of our iPaas solutions that we use with Connex actually build a connector to this Salesforce e-commerce API and then we could just probably work through that. But yeah, I see that as valuable for these agents to start making decisions. I think buying a software like ours is very complex. I think it'd be helpful to have agents go out to a couple of vendors and say, these are the top two. Brent Peterson (16:16.748) Yeah, the opposite side of the agent is the purchase is the is the person on the other side, right? So ideally there's an agent who's talking to an agent on the merchant side. How do you see that working in with where they're actually there where they're talking to each other? Joseph Anderson (16:36.602) How I see that working in, I think that the agent will scan the website FAQs to gather detail about the product. mean, if you go chat GPT and you say, have a complex workflow at Shopify, B2B and QuickBooks, you will probably pop us up. I see them interacting. They won't ask simple questions. Like they can probably go on the internet and say, this is what it is. And maybe more questions of like, how do I sign up, you know, discuss the guided trial, things that are gated. Here at Connex, we offer a guided trial where users pay a small fee and then we show proof of concept. I think the agents will talk about things that are gated behind some sort of paywall. That's where I see it going because if they know what's on the website, they're not gonna ask a second time They've looked at the pricing page. You've looked at the home page Brent Peterson (17:27.18) Right, yeah. Joseph, we have a few minutes left. As we close out the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. What would you like to plug today? Joseph Anderson (17:40.678) Well, I'd like to talk about complex workflows with e-commerce. I think one of the challenges that many companies face is that they're doing things by hand. And I think a lot of accountants, salespeople, people in operations are frustrated. I think that there is a way to automate this. So I urge companies that have a complex workflow between an e-commerce or ERP or selling channel. If the integration hasn't been built yet to give us a call, we'd love to talk to you. work things out. Brent Peterson (18:11.628) And how do they get a hold of you? Joseph Anderson (18:13.722) They can go to our site at connexecommerce.com and click on the speak with an expert on the top right and complete a quick questionnaire and they can set up a call and we'll do a 15 minute workflow assessment. Brent Peterson (18:25.016) That's awesome. Joe Anderson is the CEO and founder of Connex Ecommerce. Thank you so much for being here today. Joseph Anderson (18:31.472) Sure, thanks a Brent.