B2B is NOT a Business Model. It's a Channel. (and every Shopify store needs to leverage it)

Jay Myers: Jay. It's so good to have you on the show. The last time we chatted, you were in a tiny house.

Jason Greenwood: I was off grid.

Jay Myers: Off of the grid. And now here you are, look at you. You've grown up. You're in a, you've purchased a home in Mexico.

Jason Greenwood: First, first house I've ever owned in my life at 50 years old. I actually bought it at 49.

Jay Myers: a piece of land in this world.

Jason Greenwood: it's crazy, man. I never would have thunk it, you know, but it's a, it was a B it was a big deal to my wife. It was a big deal to my family. It was a big deal to lots of people to have some roots somewhere at some point in your life.

You know, property never really appealed to me, but now that we actually have this house, I like, I understand, I understand. And, and the fact that we were able to pay cash for this place, no debt, no mortgage, I don't have, I don't have a car payment, I don't have a credit card payment, I don't have a house payment.

My cost of living is, is even less than what it was when I was in an off grid tiny house in New Zealand, which is mind blowing,

Jay Myers: So side note, this is a promotional show for Mexico. If you want to be a debt free and own your property, move to Mexico.

Jason Greenwood: loving

Jay Myers: well, It's super good to see you again. I know we, we, we chatted a few years ago on a podcast. And so, I feel like there's a lot, the world has changed. Also a ton since then e commerce has changed.

Like some, it was the middle of COVID when we chatted last time. So crazy,

Jason Greenwood: it was wild the last time we spoke it was it was I I want to I want to say that back at that point and we did a pot swap So you were on mine too, and I really appreciate that It was like trying to drink out of the proverbial fire hose during covid if you worked in this industry And we all well, at least for me.

I tried to keep it a little bit Under the radar, tried to keep it a little bit quiet. Cause the last thing, cause it was a lot of my friends that lost their jobs, lost their businesses, lost their houses. It was tough for a lot of people in a lot of industries. And the last thing you want to do is go to a dinner party with some friends and say, Oh, by the way, everything's fricking great for me.

And I'm busier than I've ever been. And I'm. Taking on customers left, right and center because you sound like a prick, right? And so you, you, you, if you worked in our industry and you were able to work from home, which we all were and you know, at the very, very beginning of COVID every project, because I was still running an agency and building an agency at that point and every project when we've went around into our first lockdown in New Zealand.

Every project we had on stopped every every single client because they didn't know what the hell was going to happen They had no idea and but then within less than four to six weeks Not only were all those projects back on again But so we're about 10 more because everybody realized oh my god, everybody's gonna have to be buying from home It's all gonna be online and and we're just not ready to deal with 90 percent of our revenue moving online And so it was literally trying to drink out of a fire hose, but it was it was wild in the best You Possible way but you know from a personal perspective in terms of being locked down and being in your house not being able to Go more than 15 kilometers from your house.

And yeah, it was it was wild. It was wild during that time

Jay Myers: crazy. And then 2022 hit where then it flipped back again and everyone shut down all their budgets and started laying off everyone. And it's like, what are, what are, what, but the one

Jason Greenwood: I think we got whiplash

Jay Myers: yeah, exactly. We did, we a hundred percent did, right? Like everyone over invested in e commerce. They thought, well, the world's going all e commerce and every retail store is meaningless, which obviously retail has come back.

And that's not the case at all. But yes, we swung, we swung too far. I would agree. The one thing though, I would say that hasn't changed. Is the last time we chatted, you were passionate about B2B and you're still passionate about B2B. And that's why I'm having you on the show. Jay. I think well, first of all, right now there's probably some listeners.

This is a, this is a Shopify podcast and people are going, what the heck B2B? Why is this guy on the show? I'm a D2C brand. What say you to those listeners? Casper

Jason Greenwood: you are a D2C brand today, It's worth pointing out that the DTC darlings that arose during COVID, for example, you know, Allbirds and a few others they're on the ropes, you know, Allbirds share prices, 98, 99 percent down from its IPO price. about ready. They're Casper eight sleep, all of the, all of the majors that were like the DTC

Jay Myers: a good point.

Jason Greenwood: struggled.

Right. And The, the reality is if those brands that had hundreds of millions of dollars worth of investment poured into them are struggling as a pure play DTC brand. What about other DTC brands that are bootstrapped and are trying to build a name brand for themselves and are trying to own all the channels that they sell into it's a, it's a big ask, especially with high and rising CAC, you know, operational costs are high and rising freight costs, high and rising staffing costs, high and rising inflation is still through the roof.

I don't care what anybody says. All you got to do is walk down to the supermarket. You'll know that inflation hasn't gone away. It's still rising. If you pay people like you do. You know, and people pay me for my work. We all know that inflation is still going up, and the reality is that in many sectors and in many categories, consumer is squeezed,

Jay Myers: Mm hmm.

Jason Greenwood: that, you know, some categories are doing super well.

The essentials categories, they're doing super well, and people that have been able to pivot and bring out lower priced ranges and options and bundles have been able to do very well. Whereas other businesses that. Have always had compressed margins and challenging margins are really, really struggling to survive.

And you rightly point out that post COVID the e commerce TAM collapsed, like it just

Jay Myers: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Jason Greenwood: went much, much, much back more to the mean, right? We're still up into the right, but it's not parabolic up into the right.

Jay Myers: Well, when you draw a line from like 2000 to 2020, then there's the spike and it comes back down and, but you, it kind of traces through,

Jason Greenwood: The trend is still up into the right, right? But, you know, you have to be a very, very, very savvy operator today to have a pure play DTC business that wins, right? And wins consistently and it's just, it's sustainably wins. And I think the biggest challenge that I'm having in my communications to the market is DTC Is a frigging channel.

It is not a business model. And these are the conversations I'm trying to have with these businesses that maybe have seen some DTC success, but they're at the end of maybe the runway in terms of saturation, brand growth, marketing power you know, They have maybe reached a point where they're still growing, but they're not growing at a great rate of knots.

And they're looking for the next great growth opportunity. And for many of them that have differentiated product and have a strong brand strategic wholesale B2B sales. Are that solution they are that answer and these are the types of conversations i'm having every day And that's why I think it's relevant even to shopify merchants That have maybe built that built their brand on the back of shopify and even shopify itself has gotten religion b2b religion of last 18 months we can talk a little bit more about that, but even Shopify themselves recognize that the forecast CAGR compound annual growth rate of B2B e commerce versus B2C e commerce, it's 10 times or until 2030 annual growth rate is about 10 times what, what B2C and D2C growth rates will be.

Silence.

Jay Myers: they are manufacturing products And, and wholesaling them to either a distributor or directly somewhere. And, you know, they're not selling to the end consumer.

They are, you know, it's, it's like Adidas selling to the Adidas stores or whatever,

Jason Greenwood: Yes. Silence.

Jay Myers: define it for us.

Jason Greenwood: I mean, in its most simplistic form, it's a business selling to a business that that's what it is, right? It's, it's not selling to a individual consumer. It's selling to a business consumer of that product, whether it be that business that you're selling to is. Is using those products internally think of stationary or something like that, where the business is actually, or you know, office chairs or desks or something like that, where a business buys from another business that's selling wholesale to them, selling a desk wholesale or a chair wholesale to them, and they're using it and consuming those products inside their businesses.

But it's still paid for by the business is still used by the business. And the, the other form of B2B sales is a business selling to a business who ultimately sells those products on. To a consumer, right? So what we're talking about is we're talking about manufacturers, wholesalers, and distributors, and they, they oftentimes We'll play in more than one pot.

Right. And so when we think of the modern day distributor, very, or the modern day manufacturer, very rarely is that all they do. So for example, the modern day manufacturers in a specific category or vertical, they might manufacture 2030 percent of their catalog, but then they might be a distributor. Of 60, 70 percent of their catalog, or they, they, and they may not even hold stock of that 60 or 70 percent that they don't sell directly, but they will, they will effectively drop ship.

They'll send those orders on to the, to the supplier. And then those will be fulfilled alongside the products they manufacture. And what we're seeing is a sea change in the way that B2B sellers go to market. And what I mean by that is historically B2B sellers focused on selling SKUs. Now the modern B2B seller is concerned with selling solutions.

Okay. And by that, I mean, so if I, let's say I manufacture a pump, okay. Very rarely is a pump bought an isolation. We might have a water storage tank. We might have a plumbing and piping and, and valves and a whole bunch of other stuff that I don't, I don't make, I don't make all that stuff. I make freaking pumps.

That's all I make. Right. But the market doesn't want a pump. The market wants a solution. And so not only are. Manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors getting into the solution selling game, but they are also getting into the services game to complement the solutions that they sell. And I'll give you one example.

So I was working recently with a With a large scale distributor in the U. S. They again, they manufacture a very small percentage of their catalog about 20 percent of their catalog about 80 percent they distribute, but they also have full design project managed management and installation services as part of their go to market offering.

Now you don't have to take the whole thing, but let's say let's say I'm a brewery and they serviced medical and food service and a few different verticals. Mhm. And let's say I want to set up a new brewery, right? I need someone to come in and lay out all the plumbing and the piping and the stainless steel tanks and the pumps and all the fermentation equipment and all that sort of stuff.

I need someone to be able to come in, design that, source all the equipment, come in, install it, test it, make sure it's good to go. Well, they did all that. So they supplied all the equipment. Part of it they manufactured part of it. They were just a distributor of plus They provided project management and design and installation and maintenance services And this was all being sold to businesses.

This is none of this is being sold to the end consumer And so this is a fundamental shift away from the traditional monopoly model of wholesale to a full scale solution service provider at wholesale and and this is a fundamental shift because historically the way that b2b's Found success, say 10 to 30 years ago, the way that they found success is through exclusive distributorships or exclusive partnerships or exclusive regions where a manufacturer would sell via a distributor that maybe had the Western seaboard of the United States.

And they said, Hey, we get an inquiry from the Western seaboard of the United States, it's coming straight to you. And so they didn't have to do any marketing. They didn't have to do you know, they didn't have to really have much field sales because, you know, the

Jay Myers: They own that area.

Jason Greenwood: they owned that area and they had exclusivity to it.

And sometimes that was in perpetuity. Sometimes it was for a period of months or years. Sometimes it was for new products only, but there was always an element. Of monopolistic behavior in the wholesale markets and that's how wholesale came into being really is is these one to one relationships in the b2b world where there was maybe some backroom dealing and some some Some handshakes and I spit on my hand and shake your hand and hey cool.

Let's go to market together Let's do this. But as the b2b buyer has evolved The B2B seller has been forced to evolve, and I'm going to give you one statistic that will blow your mind. Most likely it will blow your listener's mind. Forrester released a report last late last year that showed that 71 percent of B2B buyers in the U S are now either millennials or Gen Z. Now, by definition, that means these are digital natives. They're not, they're not, they're not your, your granddad's distributor. They're not your, they're not your, they're not your granddad's business buyer. They, they, and they're not, they're not predominantly male, pale and stale anymore either. They're young, they're dynamic, they're female, they're, they're minorities, they're, you know, the barriers have well and truly come down in many respects in the wholesale world, especially from the buy side.

And man, those B2B sellers that are oftentimes multi generational family businesses, they have really struggled to keep up with those changes.

Jay Myers: What about B2B marketplaces? Like where does that fall in? I think I was watching one of your LinkedIn reels and you were talking about how, was it digital 360 predicted by the end of

Jason Greenwood: end of 24, 1000 dedicated B2B marketplaces.

Jay Myers: Yeah. See, I listened to your content, Jay.

Jason Greenwood: I know you do, and I appreciate it.

Jay Myers: So where does that play into this for, you know, like I'm trying to think right now what people are thinking as they're listening to this Oh shoot. You know what? Yeah. Casper kind of the all birds struggling Peloton so I can avoid being in that same situation.

And so, and now we've kind of seen nike has actually rolled back all their strategy. Like they went to, they got, actually they made a huge mistake. They got rid of all the retailers. They tried to go direct D to C and now they're trying to go back to Foot Locker and say, shoot, can you sell our shoes again?

Because it didn't work. And so,

Jason Greenwood: and even back on Amazon retail where they pulled out of that.

Jay Myers: right. So to avoid. Being in the situation and I hope all birds and all of them, they get through it. And then I think they, maybe they will, maybe they won't, I don't know. But to, to kind of be in more of a healthy state where you're, you're, you're not just the DTC channel, what should.

What should merchants be thinking about as a, as a healthy strategy? I really think this is a unique paradigm shift saying that there's not, you're not B2B or D2C. You need to be thinking about both, even though you sell to a consumer. I really think that is powerful. So now what are the next steps?

Jason Greenwood: Well, what's so first of all, I'll answer the marketplace question first and then we'll move into the following question,

Jay Myers: I have a habit of packing

Jason Greenwood: No, that's fine. That's great. That's great. I love it. I do the same as a host. So I get it. I get it So we'll talk about marketplaces first. So marketplaces even in the b2b world are still The fastest growing sales channels for channel for b2b's that it's it's still that case Even amazon business is one of the fastest growing components of the overall amazon Business and particularly in europe.

I think it was about a year ago. They released an article via reuters You

Jay Myers: What's Amazon business?

Jason Greenwood: Amazon business is the b2b side of their business.

Jay Myers: So you're talking about like AWS, like their

Jason Greenwood: No, no, no. No amazon business is

Jay Myers: Oh, the

Jason Greenwood: wholesale side of amazon. com Businesses selling to businesses at scale on amazon. So so they are that is the b2b side of their marketplace Okay Selling at scale at volume custom pricing all that sort of stuff request a quote all that sort of stuff,

Jay Myers: And you said that's the fastest growing

Jason Greenwood: One of the fastest growing divisions and categories of overall Amazon retail. So amazon. com B2B side is one of the fastest growing. Now, one of the challenges that they have faced is that they realize that two things, one is they realize that their logistics has, has almost exclusively been engineered around retail.

And so they know that. When they want to continue to grow the B2B side of their business. And if they want to continue to supply logistic services to B2B sellers suppliers, they have to now wrap their head around moving cartons, pallets, and containers instead of individual satchels and cartons to customers.

That's a totally different proposition. You need totally different infrastructure to be able to do that. And they've, they've spoken to that, that they know they're going to have to invest multiple billions of dollars over the next couple of years to get the B2B logistics side of their business to the same level that the B2C and D2C side of their logistics.

Is that already today at scale to they have called out the fact that outside of the U. S. They're pretty well covered in the United States, but they have called out the fact that outside of the U. S. They are very, very light in most B to B categories, meaning they don't have relationships with most of the major category suppliers outside of the United States, and they realize that's a weakness.

So I can't go if I'm in Italy, for example, Or if I'm in the UK right now, I can't go if I'm in the U S I can, but if I'm in one of those countries, I can't go to Amazon and kid out almost my entire business through Amazon. I can't do that because, because, because they're too light in too many categories from a B2B perspective.

So they have said that they, they have a whole team dedicated. To growing how many categories they can service from a B2B perspective. They're going out and they're, they're talking to manufacturers, wholesalers, and distributors to try to onboard them into the platform so that they can take over more and more categories from B2B perspectives.

That's the first thing. So yes, vertical specific B2B

Jay Myers: it seems like a big, like a big opportunity right now. Like they're like Amazon's trying to find I remember in. 2000 and I want to say six, I, I, I had a, I had an online store. I think maybe 2005 was called national archery supply sold online. And I remember getting a phone call one day from Amazon.

I don't know, I guess the phone was on the website and they said, Hey, we'd, we'd love to have your products on, on Amazon. And I remember at the time thinking like, Oh, Amazon wants my products on it. This was when Amazon was trying to find people to list their products. They were phoning e commerce brands to get them to put their products on.

And I didn't realize at the time how maybe big of an opportunity that would have been to be the first. And what the vertical that I was in now sounds like there's maybe a bit of an opportunity like that right now for Amazon business.

Jason Greenwood: They're using that exact same playbook for

Jay Myers: Yeah.

Jason Greenwood: that exact playbook. And they have also dramatically improved their EDI and e procurement capabilities. So that from a B to B perspective, so they have the same exact model on the B to B side of their business, where some products they sell first party B to B and some products they sell third party.

B2B. So, so they, for example, this, this, one of the, another massive national belt supplier, industrial belt supplier, so B2B, pure B2B supplier manufacturer and distributor in the United States. I'm working with them as well. 35 percent of their business is done through Amazon B2B First P. 35 percent of their business.

So Amazon buys the product, they whereas the product, they ship the product, okay, all B2B, right? So this is a big thing and growing rapidly. Not only are there competitors to Amazon coming online, but many of these wholesale distributors are also establishing their own marketplaces. So they're saying, okay, cool.

It's easier for us to onboard products into our catalog. As a marketplace than it is to actually buy them in, hold the products in our warehouses, ship them out, have all the products and all the product information in our ERP, our PIM system, all the other systems we need to be able to sell these products.

No, maybe 25 percent of our catalog will be the merchant record and 75 percent of our catalog. We're just going to create our own marketplace, which is why you see. Most of the major dedicated B2B e commerce platforms also have a marketplace module because this is becoming a common channel for these B2B sellers to establish for themselves.

And they are just one supplier on their own marketplace. Whereas they have hundreds of suppliers that they can onboard very quickly I was dealing with another client recently where they said we are 12 months behind So they didn't have a marketplace their own marketplace They they they they warehoused all their own product and sold it into the market They said we are 12 months behind onboarding.

They were distributors And they said, we're 12 months behind onboarding new brands into our business because we have to collate all the information. We have to get the images, the descriptions. We have to get all the attributes. We have to get the actual product into our warehouse. We have to do all this stuff.

And when, when you're talking some distributors, and this is very common in the distribution SKUs, if you're, if you're a reasonable size, you know, retailer, like that, that's even in fast fashion, like that's, that's a lot of SKUs, but the distribution world, a million skew catalog is common. A 2 million skew catalog is common.

A 5 million skew catalog is common. So trying to get that, all that stuff on boarded into your system is really difficult outside of a marketplace model, where then the suppliers are responsible for getting all that information into your system and you're not the seller of record. It doesn't even have to be in your ERP.

All you're doing is taking a cut of every sale that comes through your platform. So that is why this is becoming so popular. Now, next steps. Your next question was. Next steps. I'm a DDC brand. I feel like I'm tapped out. I feel like I'm, you know, hamstrung on my growth because CAC is high and rising. I feel like I've innovated as much as I can on my product.

I feel like I've, I've built a bit of a moat around my brand. I feel like I'm, I've got a unique product and a unique name and a unique position in the market, a unique price. I feel like I'm unique. Great. How do I explore wholesale?

Jay Myers: Hmm.

Jason Greenwood: prop. What's interesting is yeah. Probably greater than 80 percent of the DTC brands that come to me and say, Jason, I, I know, I need to do this wholesale thing.

I know I need to de risk my business, but I do not know what to do. I do not know where even to start this wholesale thing. Right.

Jay Myers: Hmm. Hmm.

Jason Greenwood: one of the first things we do is we look at their, we look at their sales database. And we look at, we look at things where 99 percent of the time when we examine their sales and we put it through an analytics engine, or we just export it to CSV and we start looking at it, we'll find that they probably already have some wholesale customers, meaning they've got customers that are buying at scale through them, bulk buying 10 items, 20 items at a time and reselling it at a flea market or reselling it on their own website or reselling it through a marketplace or whatever it is, especially.

For hot in demand items and this has been happening in the sneaker world with sneaker heads forever They'll wait in line at the nike store at four in the morning for a new drop They'll go in and they'll get 20 pairs and then they'll sell them out Either the out of the back of their car or online or or through whatnot or whatever it is They'll sell through whatever channel That's a wholesale customer, even if you don't recognize that they're a wholesale customer, or some of these DTC brands already dipping their toes in wholesale waters by simply giving their best customers, their bulk buy customers like a coupon code.

Cool. Use this coupon code. Every time you log in, you're going to get 10 percent off your order, 20 percent off your order, whatever it is. But that is what I would call a test and prove the market approach. It's not scalable and it's not easy to manage. And it, it bastardizes the analytics of your retail storefront.

Jay Myers: Right.

Jason Greenwood: it's it screws up your cac it screws up your all basically screws up all your analytics When you mix and you blend your wholesale sales and your retail sales through the same exact storefront So what we want to do is we want to have a dedicated b2b storefront and we want to run and we want to Actually have price lists.

We want to have formal relationships with these buyers because oftentimes these buyers will have More than one buyer under the same organization and they're responsible for different categories, etc And so we want to we want to formalize this relationship. We want to we want to Give them credit for example instead of having to pay with credit card every time we want to give them 30 60 90 day terms I'm, I was working with another I was working with another distributor of wholesale fabrics down in new zealand Their unique selling proposition.

They were a hundred percent b2b. They sold to retail stores that took the fabric Made clothes out of it and then and then sold it to customers and they serviced the whole of the whole of the pacific islands So they were making you know They were selling fabric for sarongs and all sorts of tribal tribal patterns and all that sort of stuff and they were selling You know selling hundreds and hundreds of meters at a time To these to these clothing makers and local manufacturers who then sold via retail and Their unique value proposition funnily enough had nothing to do with price had nothing to do really with range Because there was a few competitors that had similar things.

It was the fact that they gave 120 day Interest free terms to their b2b customers And the reason why that was so beneficial to their customers is because it was roughly 120 day cycle between the time they got the fabric and the time that they made the clothes the time they got them into retail and the time that they got the money in to Be able to pay the supplier of the fabric and so and so they they didn't have to discount they they They were a wholesaler.

So they already had pretty good prices, but they never needed to gut their pricing They always had great margins because the service that they provided was the breadth of range combined with The the days of credit that they provided for free to their customers So they just bundled that into their cost structure as a business.

They factored that in and and so In the b2b world you have the art of the deal becomes

Jay Myers: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Jason Greenwood: And it's it's the it's the totality It's the totality of your offer to the market that makes the difference not your price on any individual skew

Jay Myers: I mean, I, I grew up in a archery store. My family ran a retail archery pro shop range, everything. And I remember we used to always go to the, there was a, the archery show and usually it was like February. And yeah. We would book our orders for the year and we had what was called fall dating. So it would be, we, you know, we didn't have to pay for the bows until the end of August or the end of September.

And we would get all of our inventory at the beginning of the year and fill up our shelves and make the store look awesome. And then some, some would offer like scheduled pay payments. Some would be fall dating. You know, what Bose went up on our walls that we sold was the, was the ones that offered the best terms, the ones that offer the best fall dating terms is the products that we would move.

Not necessarily the best products or the biggest discounts, but the ones that had the best terms is what we would, what we would stock ourselves with.

Jason Greenwood: The best trading value for you and the, and the way you could keep the cash flow highest in your business, because these, these small businesses, they, they live and die by cashflow. And so a lot of the buyers within the B2B ecosystem, they're small businesses. There's, there's small HVAC companies that do installations.

There's small plumbing companies, they're small, this, that, and the other thing with, with maybe five or 10 staff, and That offer services into the market around those products. And so the trading terms become very, very important for these small businesses, because they're trying to make payroll and they're trying to, they're waiting for payments from their customers.

And this, this whole trade credit thing is still a very, very big

Jay Myers: Oh, absolutely. Okay. So if you're on Shopify, all of our listeners are Shopify. What do you recommend? There is without talking about okay, maybe there's different platforms and different ways you can do you're on Shopify. What's the best way to, to, I know there's a lot of different B2B. This is a big question, but you you've got a pretty successful brand.

You're, you're doing five to 10 million a year, maybe even just a couple of million a year, but you've, you've proven you've proven your, your brand. It's doing okay. And you're like, okay, I know I need a B2B strategy. Where do they, what do they do? Are they, are they spinning up another store? Are they going on Shopify plus and using sub stores?

Are they like, what do you advise someone listening right now? It was like, yes, I know I need to do this. I've been putting it off. What's Jason Greenwood recommend.

Jason Greenwood: If they're already on plus, this becomes an easy, it's an, it's an easy discussion because it's just an expansion store. And now with B2B on Shopify plus it makes this their old wholesale solution was, was crap and I would have never recommended it to almost anyone, but the new B2B on Shopify solution, which they've been admittedly pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into over the last 18 months, it's not, it's not what I would call a super mature or advanced B2B solution, but all the core data primitives are there now.

So in other words, the concept of an account versus an individual customer. So that's where you can nest where you can nest individual logins underneath a parent account that that data primitive is exists. The concept of priceless exists. The concept of. Custom and restricted catalogs now exists inside Shopify where it never did before, where I can assign a specific restricted catalog to a specific customer or a specific account, right?

Custom payment methods and credit terms. And so basically payment method by customer now exists within the platform. So there's quite so, and even other. More esoteric data primitives are now native to the platform. Things like minimum order quantities are native to the platform. Things like buying increments.

So, okay, cool. This, this SKU I gotta buy in blocks of 20, units of 20. And this other SKU I buy in blocks of 5, okay? I can't buy 1, I gotta buy 5, minimum. So, buying increments. Completely native in the platform. So these product attributes and these catalog attributes are now a hundred percent native to Shopify.

So, so what Shopify doesn't yet have are pretty common things like quote management, things like shopping lists that are pre approved buying hierarchies where inside the buying organization, I've got a junior buyer, a senior buyer, and a procurement, a procurement manager, where we're When I place an order, it's actually got to go to my procurement manager to approve before the purchase can go through.

So there's, there's, there's a number of different things that Shopify didn't have, but there was another major thing that they just released in their, in their latest additions, which was populate cart by CSV upload. So this is a very common thing in the B2B world. The carts have 50 to a hundred lines in them routinely. units routinely in the cart, right? You don't want to have to search browse add to cart individually 50 items that take forever So a lot of these guys will have a p. o a purchase order on the buy side and they they've got the spreadsheet And I want to just upload that to shopify populate the cart and boom in one hit they check out and job done multi line add to cart in a grid format is also very common experience.

Multi entry pad effectively is what it is that's coming to Shopify. So Shopify gets it and they know that they're playing catch up in a massive way, but they know that the enterprise growth opportunity in B2B is much bigger than in B2C, D2C. So that's, that's where they see the growth op at, right? So they've got religion about B2B.

I think the last remaining question in my mind is, is this a side quest or are they in this for good? I don't think you can spend, you know, you know, nearly a billion dollars, which is on the street, what they The scuttlebutt is that they roughly spent on developing B2B on Shopify. Plus, I don't know if it's true or not, but you know, I don't think you put that much effort, time, love, money changing the core of the platform.

This isn't just a, this is just an app you plug in. This is core to the platform now. So I don't, I don't get the sense that this is a side quest. And as a result of that answering your original question, I think the fastest and easiest way, if you're on Shopify, set up an expansion store. B2b on shopify plus get some help from your agency partner to help Get the configuration set up right because you may not know where to begin with the basic configuration of a b2b storefront with those dedicated price list those dedicated catalogs the Hierarchy between the the parent company and all the accounts that sit underneath that making sure But you know the the reality is is that a lot of this stuff is so simple To configure in the shopify back end that if you're even remotely tech savvy It might take you a couple of days, but the help documentation around this in shopify is so damn good that you know, probably the biggest challenge that most of these people will handle will face is what do we do for our back office?

What do we do for order management? What do we do for fulfillment? What do we do with integrating with B2B marketplaces? What do we do with you know, our accounting and, and making sure that that's, you know, separated out in our accounting system and, you know, that's probably the bigger, you know, how do we establish the trading rules and relationship and sign trade contracts and, and issue credit and do background checks for credit to make sure that the customer's worthy of the credit we're going to give them the operational side of their B2B side of their businesses.

Probably going to be much harder than getting the, the, the selling channel set up on Shopify. Cause Shopify has got all the basics there to get up and running quickly. It's what do we integrate with on the backend to make this a smooth experience for our B2B customers, but for B2B customers, sorry, DTC customers that already have a robust backend, if you're running NetSuite on the backend, or they're running, you know, they're, let's say they're running NetSuite, NetSuite, PeopleVox, and, you know, you know, Klaviyo or, you know, Yotpo or something like that.

The reality is your B2B operations from a commerce perspective are probably gonna be a lot simpler because you're not gonna have a loyalty system. You're probably not gonna have, not necessarily gonna have a reviews platform. You're not necessarily gonna have a standard marketing automation platform because those marketing automation platforms don't work great for B2B anyway.

You're not gonna necessarily have a CDP at play. You might have a CRM at play. But you know, The system stack that you're going to need in terms of apps that plug into your B2B store is probably a, it's a lot simpler, right? But it's, it's your backend operational system for fulfillment and billing and, and, and credit management to where, okay, cool.

We're going to give them a 10, 000 credit limit. Cool. When they hit 10, 000, how do we stop them from buying? How do we, how do we sync that credit limit from a back office system to the front office system so that we don't let them continue to buy, or we have a rule. We let them buy, but when that order hits our ERP for fulfillment or WMS for fulfillment, we hold the order until our account manager.

We might only have one to start off with that works across all of our B2B customers because we're only starting out. Are they going to call them and say, Joe, you, you've reached your 10, 000 credit and we need you to pay that down and then we can, we can release this order, right? Or do you want to give me a credit card over the phone and I'll take that payment and I'll pay your, I'll pay your credit account down.

So it's, it's more about operational readiness probably than it is even technical readiness from the start.

Jay Myers: yeah. And they have, I actually admittedly haven't spent a ton of time in the plus B2B area, but there's, there's dedicated themes for, for these B2B stores as well, too. Right? Like it's, they're, they're like meant for speed of ordering and

Jason Greenwood: Well, and, and those new themes that are B2B certified, they by default, out of the box surface all of the new data primitives to the front end. So for example, if I want to show the MOQ of a product, I want to show the buying increment of a product. I want to enforce that on the PDP. For example, the theme has to, has to pull that data from the backend as, as the Product attribute, and it has to enforce that on the front end effectively through JavaScript.

And so these themes that are B2B ready, they enforce everything you configure in the backend and they visually surface that to the customer on the front end.

Jay Myers: Seems like a good space for theme developers to get in if, if, if Shopify is investing in it, right? Yeah.

Jason Greenwood: it's a huge opportunity, huge opportunity. Yes,

Jay Myers: is Amazon acting as a distributor? So,

Jason Greenwood: They are.

Jay Myers: so brands can have their products stored at Amazon business in pallet loads and whatever. So. They're still, are they, are they, do they give their dealers a login to order through Amazon?

Or is that coming through their Shopify store and then pushing to Amazon, like just for the distributor fulfillment, or does Amazon have a B2B ordering portal?

Jason Greenwood: The good thing about it is Amazon's been very clever about this. So for the B2B buyer, when the, the, the. Experience is 100 unified. You'll never know that you are buying Off of amazon business. You'll never know that you'll just you'll find a product that I might be buying in bulk On what i'm searching on amazon and i'm i'm buying a product in bulk.

It might be surface to me Like let's say i'm buying Printer paper or something like that or i'm buying a electrical box or something like that And I want to buy 50 units of those they'll they'll serve they'll show to you the the quantity breaks for example Just right on the pdp of that product

Jay Myers: Okay. But that's someone just finding by product, like here, here's my question. Let's say I sell shoes and I. Want to I want to sell B2B. I want to sell to dealers. So I sign up for Amazon business. They, are they buying them from me or is it more like Amazon fulfillment where I just pay to have them in their warehouse,

Jason Greenwood: They do, they, they offer both models, so they, they offer both services and they will do, they, they will both on the buy side and the sell side, they will both buy via EDI, e procurement, whatever, which, however, the supplier wants to get that, that, that catalog information to them. They've got that ability.

So instead of me having to manually log into seller central, because, because when I'm. Working with amazon in a b2b perspective. I'm logging into vendor central not seller central Because i'm a vendor. Okay So let me just finish so the other on the other side of the equation when they're selling If I want to buy via amazon via e procurement, they also offer that available in so let's say i'm a buyer I'm a b2b to be buyer and I want to connect to amazon and I want to pull down their b2b catalog into my E procurement system to make a transaction without having to log into amazon.

com and make that transaction. They also facilitate that too You

Jay Myers: Okay. And then does the manufacturer. Have control over who's allowed to order.

Jason Greenwood: No, the,

Jay Myers: So

Jason Greenwood: the way that

Jay Myers: to, I like, I want to approve dealers. Let's say my shoes. I like, this was the case with archery to, for certain bows, you had to be you had to have a range. You had to have a a work, a work shop. Like it was called a bow press.

Jason Greenwood: you could string it and the whole thing.

Jay Myers: you have to be have certified stuff to sell certain Bose. And so like I can see there being cases where like maybe my shoes are high end shoe. I only want to, I want to pick who's allowed to buy them. Can I use Amazon's distribution service? But I still manually pick, I have my 75 dealers, but they're ordering them through Amazon.

Or once it's on Amazon, it's open.

Jason Greenwood: Once it's on Amazon, it's open. But what you can do is you can use fulfillment by Amazon, just for the fulfillment service, even for

Jay Myers: Okay. Okay.

Jason Greenwood: So I, so I can, I can route my orders to them for fulfillment. Now, the other thing that Amazon will do is that for some B2B products, like with, with the, the, the, the manufacturer I was telling you about, about belts, they will hold a certain amount because they've got 16, 000 SKUs.

Amazon only holds in inventory to sell B2B about a thousand of those SKUs. But they will list all 16, 000 of those SKUs. When they get an order for that there, the manufacturer becomes almost like the drop shipper. So what Amazon will do is they'll send that order down to the supplier by EDI, and then they'll ship that direct to the customer.

And whether it's one unit or a hundred units or a thousand units, now, what the, now what the manufacturer or distributor can tell Amazon is, We will only sell this or they'll, they'll create a virtual skew in their, in their ERP. For example, let's say they, they say, Hey, Amazon, you can't sell single units of this item.

You can only sell 50 units at a time of this item. They'll create a virtual skew in their ERP with a bomb, a bill of materials associated with it. And that virtual skew represents 50 units of the, of the parent skew. And then what they'll do is they'll, they'll send that virtual skew to Amazon. And what that virtual skew is composed of is 50 units of this item.

Jay Myers: Gotcha.

Jason Greenwood: And that's how they control Amazon. Instead of saying Amazon, you know, you can sell just one unit of this. Well, no, you can't because you don't have access to the single, you don't have access to the single unit skew. You only have access to the 50 unit skew.

Jay Myers: Is Amazon going to eat up all the distributors in North America?

Jason Greenwood: I think they are, they. Will really struggle to do that. There are certain categories where they can dominate like that But where there is a heavy services component and where there is a heavy sort of package, you know a packaged service offering that goes along with that and there's a lot of You know There's a lot of market intelligence and a lot of tribal knowledge and institutional knowledge inside the sellers That do a lot of consultative work alongside of the selling.

It's not just Here's a widget. I know I need to buy it, but they actually need to be consulted to before they make their purchase to make sure they're buying the right thing for the right application. I, I think they'll take the things that are really, really easy commodity items and commodity categories.

If it's a freaking, you know, if it's a ream of paper, a box of paper, then they'll take that. Yeah, sure. Amazon's probably going to dominate that. Right. Or if it's, if it's office chairs or something like that, it's probably easy, pretty easy for Amazon to dominate, but for, but, but for more complex products with more complex sales cycles and more complex consulting and service cycles associated with them, like even HVAC and things like that.

I just can't see it. I can't, Amazon is not in the business of complexity. They are in the business of simplicity.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Yeah. What other players I mean, there's a thousand marketplaces, but what are there any other ones that people should be keeping an eye on? Best Buy, Walmart, like some of these others, like what are the other ones that you're

Jason Greenwood: Fair, fair, fair is probably the one that most of your listeners will know about, right? Fair, Jor, J O O R, another

Jay Myers: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Greenwood: marketplace. Okay. So there are, there are a lot of name brand B2B marketplaces, but there are probably many more marketplaces that your listeners probably will have never heard of because they don't operate in the wholesale space yet, but they're, but they're becoming much more well known in the marketplace.

In their circles, in their categories, in their verticals, they're becoming much more well known. And oftentimes a customer who buys off of a distributor wholesale, they might not even realize they're buying off of a marketplace. Because they're just buying off the distributor, right? It just looks like they're, they're buying off that distributor, but the relationship that they have with their suppliers is one of a marketplace model.

So they, they don't necessarily hold inventory of all those items on their website, they, they, they operate a marketplace model of which they are one. Of the suppliers in that marketplace. And so sometimes you won't even know because it's so well integrated in with the site overall site experience. You won't, you won't even recognize, maybe there might be a little note on the PDP, for example, on a specific product.

It might say supplied and shipped by X, but you're buying, it's just like buying through Amazon. You're buying through that distributor and, and you expect if you need service or you need help or whatever, you're going back to that distributor for that help.

Jay Myers: What are your thoughts on, you know, Caro,

Jason Greenwood: no, never

Jay Myers: familiar with Caro? C A R R O.

Jason Greenwood: No, never heard of

Jay Myers: So they are a service that connects your Shopify store to any other store. And so there's a car, there's a Caro marketplace. So if you install the app, you can choose to let. Your products show in the marketplace. So say you sell a pair of shoes for 200.

You can say I'm willing to let people make 50 percent or 25 percent or whatever margin you want on it. They sit in the marketplace. Now you have a Shopify store. You can say, Oh, I want to sell those shoes. If they also have the car app pulls into their Shopify store, creates a product, does everything.

And it shows on their store, people can shop a store that it's basically pulling in products from. Other stores. And then when the order is placed, it goes through Caro. Caro takes a percent or two.

Jason Greenwood: the ticket.

Jay Myers: Yeah. And then it goes to the, to the original store, the manufacturer, they fulfill the order, and then they charge.

If it's a 200 shoe, Caro charges the store that sold it 150 cause they keep the 25 percent and then they keep 50 bucks. It's kind of a neat, it's an interesting model. And I think Shopify has some native way of doing this too. I can't remember what it's called.

Jason Greenwood: Yes, they, they do. And they, they bought a, they bought a company that was providing it's, it's, it's a, it's a mark marketplace and it's a network driven marketplace, right. It's re is effectively what it is. And you could potentially in that model, you could potentially have a score store where none of the products you sell are yours that you fulfill directly.

Jay Myers: correct. A hundred percent.

Jason Greenwood: You can populate it with a bunch of other people's products. Now, I think that in Carded and Mike Angel, and there's been a few other players in the market that have tried to create a universal commerce API off of this network of Shopify stores. So this is, this is not, I've never heard of this specific company you're talking about, but there's been a few other players in the market that have tried to do this. The problem is. That I think they will have a relatively low shelf life in the long term, primarily because retail margins are so compressed already, that by the time you start sharing it with the ultimate seller of the product and the middleware provider that connects these, this network of stores together, it's There's not a lot of extra margin to go around.

And so a lot of these, you know, maybe, maybe if you're a manufacturer, maybe you've got enough margin because you've got the, you got the wholesale margin. You got the retail margin of both are a little bit compressed. You're still viable as a business, but I think if you're a me too retailer, or if you're just an aggregator retailer or something like that, that just, there just isn't the margin to go around to make this viable for you, unless you are just.

I mean, I guess if you're a Kardashian or you're driving people to your website and you've curated your list of products and it's, it's, it's all falls in line with kind of your personal brand and you are able to get distribution very cheaply and you don't have to run Google ads or you don't have to run meta ads or whatever to get people to your site,

Jay Myers: Right. Well, and I, I, I think there's certain use cases where I saw there was a company that sold a blender blender. I think it was blend yet. And so they're, they're a one skew company. And, but the thing that, what they wanted to have was to have complimentary items that went with it. So like in that scenario might make sense.

And even though it's only 25 percent margin, it's. Zero extra cost and they're

Jason Greenwood: no lift for them,

Jay Myers: There's no lift.

Jason Greenwood: them, yeah.

Jay Myers: adding AOV to the traffic that they're already, that they're already servicing. Right. So.

Jason Greenwood: What I would want to be able to do in that scenario is I would want to be able to create bundles. I don't know if that's possible with this scenario where I can say, okay, cool. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, you can't buy, let's say I've pulled in a set of measuring cups and maybe a shaker bottle and maybe a couple of other things to sell with my blender.

Right. I don't want to sell those individual SKUs because I don't want people to be able to compare individual SKUs from my site to somebody else's site. So, and this is, and this is a, this is a lesson we can take out of the B2B playbook. So in the B2B playbook, again, going back to this idea of instead of selling SKUs, we're selling solutions and, and I, I get so frustrated when I go to Amazon and I've got to pull five, six different items together.

To get a package for a solution that I want, even at my house, you know, for my, for my, you know, my Weber, which I buy the Weber branded barbecue, which I did, but then I need these 15 other things. I need the gas bottle. I need the cover. I need the grill grade. I need the, I need there's this whole, I needed, I needed a whole bunch of barbecue utensils.

Cause I just moved here to Mexico and I didn't have those anymore. Like I needed, I needed a bundle of 10 things.

Jay Myers: Yeah. And all, and all they can fit is two in the frequently bought together box, right?

Jason Greenwood: Exactly. And I'm just going, you know, the fact that Weber themselves or somebody else who is an authorized retailer or reseller of the Weber products, why they didn't do like a, just an all in one bundle where, you know, and I had to then do the research on, will this cover actually fit the model that I'm buying?

And, and it does the valve on the tank actually work with the custom fitting that Weber has on the Frickin barbecues. And I had to do, I had to go to a forum and say, yes, this will work as long as it's labeled QC, QCC. And it took me like an hour to, to populate my cart with all the things I wanted. Right.

Well, Amazon should have made that easier or a seller on Amazon should have made that easier for me. Right.

Jay Myers: There is so much money to be made. If you're willing to. Bundle things together. So much money is on the table right now. I'm like, I experienced this on a daily basis.

Jason Greenwood: Well, and it's crazy you know, why does my, you know, my air filter, I've got a whole house air filter that plugs into the wall here because we live close to a volcano and I need that like the, the seller on Amazon that sold that co way air filter, why didn't they do bundles with you know, A year's worth of filter cartridges Why didn't they do a combination of an air filter with a whole house fan to circulate that filtered air around my house?

Why did there's probably The amount and types of bundles you can do are almost innumerable and and it just blows my mind that both d2c retailers b2c retailers and B2B suppliers, for that example, they haven't gotten the memo yet that anything that makes the buyer's life easier is going to cause you to sell more.

Jay Myers: Yeah. A hundred percent. Jay, we're, we're, we're getting close on time here. I feel like we could talk about this forever. This is I'm, I'm going to definitely have you back on because if, if I know, you know, how urgent this is. The focus on B2B is right now. I feel like in the next couple of years, it's going to be even more so if you're not paying attention now, you're

Jason Greenwood: Silence.

Jay Myers: beginning of the show really struck me, like B2B is not a business model. It's a channel and everyone should be thinking about it. And to me, that was like, if that one snippet is that is all people take away from it, like that's so much more, but that's so valuable.

What can you leave us with one, one kind of thought. You know, to, to Shopify stores on the importance of thinking about their B2B strategy. Any advice, just anything you want to leave us with on, on this topic.

Jason Greenwood: I would say that my one piece of advice, if you're looking at dipping your toe in the B2B waters, keep a very, very tight leash on the proliferation of price levels. Don't get caught in the trap of thinking every single one of your b2b customers needs a custom catalog custom pricing on every skew That you have to negotiate absolutely everything because that rapidly becomes unsustainable From a maintenance perspective it become rapidly becomes unsustainable from a forecasting and modeling perspective when I change prices And if i've negotiated on just this one skew then am I going to remember to manually update that one skews price?

When I make a wholesale change to the rest of my catalog and I add three percent to everything in my catalog I remember to update that one thing so I would say stick to the simplest wholesale pricing model You can and if that's only three tiers a 5%, a 10%, and a 20 percent discount. And that's based on annual rolling, annual spend, and you automatically progress between the tiers, depending on what your trailing 12 month spend is.

Then great. Awesome. Just don't get in the caught in the trap of totally unsustainable pricing models at wholesale, because that becomes an absolute maintenance nightmare. I can tell you that for sure.

Jay Myers: Yeah, that's great advice. Jay, where can people find you?

Jason Greenwood: Everywhere they Google my name but

Jay Myers: I know you're, you're LinkedIn is the platform you're most active on, right?

Jason Greenwood: Yeah, it is. It is definitely from a social perspective. They can go and check out the e commerce edge podcast everywhere, including YouTube and rumble and everywhere else. But yeah, just, just connect up with me up with me on LinkedIn. I love connecting with people there.

I love sharing my insights, their videos, long form content. And then if you're thinking. About getting in the b2b world go and check out the b2b e commerce association a professional membership I think is only like 400 bucks a year. You can join the community. You can get some education You can take the level one course for free once you're a member which is put on put on by the amazing justin king So there are resources out there.

You just just become part of the community and learn before you try to earn

Jay Myers: I will put links to all of that in the show notes. And I do know you love connecting with people because I think you're connected to 33, 000 of them on LinkedIn. So I, I can, Jay, thank you so much. I, this has been fantastic. Thank you for coming on.

Jason Greenwood: pleasure. Thank you for hosting me. And I can't wait to do it again soon.