BigCommerce + NetSuite Integration Made Easy with iPaaS - Anchor Group Podcast | Episode 27

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• Michael Mueller, eCommerce Account Executive at Anchor Group
• Robert Rand, Chief Partnership Officer at iPaaS.com
• Anchor Group (Company Page)

Podcast Transcript:

Michael (00:00)

Hey everybody, thanks for tuning in to this edition of the Anchor Group podcast. We've got another great one for you. Today joining me on the podcast is Robert Rand from ipass.com. ipass.com is a middleware platform that we have helped use in the BigCommerce and Shopify ecosystems. Now today Robert's going to be talking a little bit about ipass.com, but we are also going to announce a new partnership between ipass.com and Anchor Group. It's called the BigCommerce NetSuite Accelerator Program. And so if you're on NetSuite and you're thinking about going with BigCommerce, you're definitely going to want to stay tuned for that. So let's dive in. Well, Robert, thanks for joining the podcast today.

Robert (00:41)

No, my pleasure. And you already told everyone it's going to be a great episode. I've got to perform today.

Michael (00:47)

That's right. We got standards on this episode. That's for sure. Well, Robert, just to give everybody who's listening to this, whether they're on their commute home from work, maybe they're on the treadmill before they head into the office, let's give them a feel for kind of who you are and how you ended up at ipass.com.

Robert (01:06)

Boy, this could be a long episode. So I head up partnerships and alliances here at ipass.com, but I've been in the industry for maybe longer than I want to admit. I didn't have any of these gray hairs when we started. I helped to lead a digital agency for about a decade dealing with design, development, and digital marketing in the e-commerce space, brought brands like Swiskey and Invicta watches into e-commerce. Certainly worked with lots of organizations that you've never heard of. Some of my favorites are in the B2B space where they're behind the scenes in the supply chain. And from there, I went to head partnerships at an integration platform and a web hosting firm. And I joined the team here about two and a half years ago to lead the charge in bringing ipass.com further into the market through relationships like the relationship that we have with Anchor Group. Really, my history with the company started in my agency days when they were more of a systems integrator. And they got tired of dealing with the same integration challenges with the available technology. And while I was off in the next chapters in my professional journey, they were creating what's now Ipass.com, a more modern next generation integration hub to really help propel businesses forward without a lot of the pain that they were used to seeing organizations experience.

Michael (02:43)

Now that's wonderful context. When you say ipass.com is a hub, what do you mean by that? Can you explain that a little bit?

Robert (02:54)

Absolutely. So when you think about integrating software, normally you're thinking about what we'd consider a point-to-point integration. You're going to get software A talking to software B. And as you scale a business, you wind up with a lot of those point-to-point connectors. Often they're either black box or they're completely custom. And it just becomes a bit of a game of whack-a-mole to try to upkeep that and deal with any time something doesn't work properly, some data gets stuck or fails to flow successfully. And trying to maintain those as different systems are changing and upgrading, APIs are evolving. So ipass.com takes a different approach. We sit in the middle as a data hub. Every system that we integrate with communicates with our hub as basically a universal translator of sorts. And so when we think about an e-commerce platform that will translate and transform the data on the way into ipass.com, any issues with the data are going to get caught at that point. They're going to retry automatically. You're going to know what's going on with real-time notifications and root cause analysis. And it's all very proactive. And then once that data is in our hub, that data can go to as many systems as you need. So for instance, if you've got an e-commerce order coming down, it might go to one system for accounting, one system for fulfillment, another system for CRM so the sales team has visibility. You don't need to get that order over and over again. And if you change your CRM, all the other integrations that are hooked up to the hub stay intact. You're just turning on a new spoke to the hub for a different CRM, turning on a different integration from our marketplace and turning off the old one when you're ready. And so you go from these more brittle connectors to something that's a lot more flexible to evolve with as everyone's tech stacks continue to grow.

Michael (05:03)

And I think that's important to note. Tech stacks are going to continue to grow and develop and the software you use, their capabilities are going to change at different rates of speed, different times. Not like everything's going to improve at the same time. And I think that's the real power of going with middleware like ipass.com is because as you said, you plug in your ERP to it and say, human resources software you're using updates. Well, you still have the ERP connected to ipass.com and everything doesn't immediately break. You're just having to maybe rebuild or adjust one half of the total equation just from the human resources platform like ADP to the iPass middleware instead of needing to redo the entire thing. And I think that's the power. That's what we've seen. And Robert, I know our teams have worked on projects in the past that deal not only with NetSuite and BigCommerce or NetSuite and e-commerce, but there's also other platforms like ADP, for example, or POS systems that they've had to integrate with as well. I know that's a superpower essentially that we see at Anchor Group as a real value in the middleware type system.

Robert (06:18)

I think that it's fair to say nobody knows exactly what systems they're going to be using in the next few years as it relates to artificial intelligence, to AI. But there are outcomes that you want. And it's often really about data being siloed and different departments having access to different data uniquely, whether we're talking finance or operations or sales or marketing or fulfillment and so on and so forth. And so for instance, when I think point of sale, sometimes your e-commerce orders are probably syncing up with some kind of marketing stack, like a Klaviyo or Dotdigital or MailChimp or something. But often if you've got retail point of sale, those orders are siloed. And so you'll be sending emails or SMS messages to shoppers saying, hey, we haven't seen you lately. Here's a coupon, come on back. Meanwhile, they were in the store yesterday making a purchase and you see these kinds of outcomes all the time in different areas, left hand, right hand. We have an integration with Avalara for sales tax exemption certificate management. And you could imagine that doesn't sound like the most exciting thing, but often the accounting team knows if somebody has an exemption certificate on file, if it's a nonprofit or government or wholesale buyer. But do all of the sales and account reps know, and do they know if it's expired or not? And so being able to get that data into the necessary system so that everybody can work cohesively without having to wait in line for somebody in another department to get back to you on it, or toss the customer around in that sense, there's so many different outcomes that we see in these situations that become important. I mean, on the B2B side, we recently launched an integration with Payfabric, an accounts receivable system. In B2B, often people are paying on net terms. And you see that a lot of the orders, they're not paying in the e-commerce checkout, but now the merchant's waiting for a check in the mail or waiting for the person to catch someone over the phone and share credit card over the phone, which is not the most PCI compliant anymore anyway. And just our ability to take that order, get it into Payfabric and have them send a link where the shopper can pay through ACH or credit debit on the spot whenever they're ready and keep it all online and organized and nice and neat. And so there's just these different business outcomes for different users in different situations. But getting the customer data, the order data, the product data really unified across a growing evolving tech stack is more important than ever.

Michael (09:23)

And at Anchor Group, we're a NetSuite Alliance partner. We're a certified BigCommerce partner and we're a Shopify agency as well. So we deal with a lot of different e-commerce platforms and each project we deal with also generally has other third-party type software that's at play as well. A few of which you've just mentioned. And that's one of the reasons why at Anchor Group we like iPass.com. Robert, you guys over there, because of how essentially the middleware we're able to at times, ERP data can be very complex, but we need to essentially shape shift it in some ways that it can fit into the e-commerce engine. That can look a variety of different ways, but we've successfully been able to do that using the ipass.com platform. And so Robert, I know our companies have worked on some projects in the past and you and I both wanted to connect today to announce that Anchor Group and iPass.com are going to be partnering together on something called the BigCommerce NetSuite Accelerator Program. That's a really exciting thing. We're coming together, our companies are coming together to partner on this. And essentially it's set up to help companies that have kind of been hesitant to modernize their e-commerce website or update their e-commerce website or buyer portals online. Maybe they've been hesitant and don't quite know or feel comfortable taking that next step. We've put together a program to help remove some of the clouds and reduce the ambiguity with it, to just make it clear, easier to understand, to be more upfront with the way things can go. Robert, thoughts on that?

Robert (11:09)

Well, absolutely. Over time, what we've seen again and again is that our teams together have no problem getting these projects up and running. Anchor Group using ipass.com as the middleware and with Anchor Group's internal understanding of both NetSuite and BigCommerce, this is the kind of project where your team thrives. Really there's a standard at play. We started the episode a little bit thinking in that vein of standards. And so where a lot of businesses, they know that they need to modernize, but that risk of what's that project going to look like and is it going to be as successful as they want often leads to an amount of analysis paralysis, that it becomes hard to move forward. And with what we've achieved, really what we've seen is that there's a playbook and there's technology here that's ready to rock and roll. And so it's not only getting a beautiful BigCommerce site that's highly functional, it's being able to make sure that if they need the product data, including prices and inventory to come down from NetSuite into the e-comm, they need order data to flow back for fulfillment and shipping and tracking information and order status updates to come back to the e-comm as the order is fulfilled on the ERP side. And they need the customer data to reconcile through that process. And maybe some of the B2B data too, the company data and maybe quote requests or other things through the mix. Maybe price lists around different customers that are going to be billed a bit differently that we've solved for these sorts of things together. And iPass.com is provided at a flat monthly rate. So it's a predictable expense. Your team knows what the implementation is going to look like. And so you're in a great position to provide a menu of options where people know what they're looking at. And you can obviously tailor around any unique scope, but you're demystifying the entire process.

Michael (13:30)

And I love when it's put that way, demystifying the process. Because a lot goes into migration from an old engine, an old e-commerce engine, into something like BigCommerce. And the reason we chose to partner with, steer people towards BigCommerce is because of just how powerful you and I in our areas have seen BigCommerce, how well it has served clients and merchants in the past, whether they're specifically in the B2B realm, but also in many cases in the B2C realm as well. And so when we speak with clients on the agency side, people who are wanting to go through migration, that integration piece can get really confusing. And partnering together through this, we're able to, like you said, demystify it from the iPass integration side, all the way to the Anchor Group development side of both those iPass data flows along with the BigCommerce front end. Really, I see this program for companies that have wanted to kind of leave the Stone Age or know that they're losing their competitive edge. Other companies in the industry have modernized and now they need to play some catch up. This is a wonderful opportunity for companies like that to hedge a little bit on the risk tolerance where we're going to be very transparent in what's going to go into the project and pricing around it, exactly the deliverables. And actually, you can, if you're watching this online, whether it's on Spotify or YouTube, you can go into the show notes and we're going to have links there. We have landing pages, one-pagers, PDFs, stuff like that, where you can go and find out more information about what's specifically included in this. Just as a general overview, we got three different tiers, and you can go through essentially a chart to figure out what tier most fits your needs. Reach out to us and we can walk you through the rest of the process. But we essentially have a tier if you need a more basic website to bring you into the modern age of e-commerce, we got a tier for that. If you need a website plus some moderate enhancements, some features to help you be a little more competitive, we have a tier for that. If you need a fully custom website, maybe you want to go a BigCommerce headless route, maybe you have really complex integrations, have complex integration needs, we also have a tier for that. We try to make the pricing as transparent as possible that way if there are some people who want less risk on a project at your company, at a merchant's company, we just have a way to be very clear about that.

Robert (16:15)

Well, and thinking about the day after launch, I think it's just as important that what's being set up in that process is sustainable. So with ipass.com, our platform is managed and maintained in the cloud. It's an auto-scaling, modern microservices system. It's software as a service, SaaS. So we're responsible for the uptime and security and what have you. But thinking a step further, as APIs are changing at systems like BigCommerce, we're maintaining those integrations in the marketplace that we have. So you don't have to rewrite the whole connection between systems over and over again, as things are changing. You want to get another piece of software into the mix, you want to use a product information management system or a CRM or something else that you want flowing data, turning on another spoke to the hub. NetSuite's already hooked up, BigCommerce is already hooked up. You're just getting data flowing with one more system. And so in terms of investing into the future, having that both short-term and long-term predictability and having kind of that manifest destiny to keep making positive steps forward and having that momentum is really, really important to today's business.

Michael (17:40)

Robert, thank you for sharing your thoughts on the power of iPass.com really as it's going to be used in part of this BigCommerce NetSuite Accelerator Program. And I know you and I both think this is going to be a wonderful opportunity for many merchants out there to help bring them into more of a modern era for their e-commerce engine. Now, Robert, as we kind of close things up here, where can people learn more about you or iPass.com?

Robert (18:07)

Well me, I'd tell them to check out LinkedIn and we can put up a link in the show notes if you'd like. But for the company, if you were to send people to ipass.com, IPAAS.com integration platform as a service, they'll be able to learn more about the company, schedule a demo, learn more about all the various integrations and opportunities that are available. And really, I appreciate so much you having me on today to talk about the accelerator and really how we're taking the existing success that our teams have together and propelling forward, making it even more accessible, even easier for additional users to take advantage of.

Michael (18:55)

Definitely. And if you are interested in learning more about the BigCommerce NetSuite Accelerator powered by ipass.com and Anchor Group, check out the show notes below. We're going to have links to a couple of pages and some resources. You can check those out down there. And if it's right for you, you can just reach out to us. Reach out to myself, reach out to Robert. And of course, there are going to be different resources in the show notes below that you can find links and reach out to us there as well. So Robert, thank you for joining and thank you for sharing just some of your knowledge and understanding of the middleware system and looking forward to having you on another episode sometime.

Robert (19:35)

It was my pleasure today. It'll be my pleasure in the future. Thanks again.

Michael (19:39)

Thank you.

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Oracle NetSuite Alliance Partner, BigCommerce Certified Partner

As both a BigCommerce Certified Partner and an Oracle NetSuite Alliance Partner, Anchor Group is ready to handle BigCommerce and NetSuite projects alike! Whether you already have one platform and are looking to integrate the other, are considering a full-scale implementation of both platforms, or simply need support with ongoing customizations, our team is ready to help answer any questions you might have! Get in touch!