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On Demand Webinar

Ecommerce Integration Roadmap for Digital Transformation

Experts estimate that COVID-19 accelerated the transition to digital commerce by five years. There is no better time than now to evaluate where you are on your digital transformation journey. Is the lack of automation increasing operational costs, delaying order fulfillment, and generally holding your business back?  Knowing the right investments to make to accelerate your digital transformation is critical so you don’t waste time and resources.

Join us, as Mark Simon, VP of Strategy at Celigo walks us through an Ecommerce integration roadmap for automation that will help accelerate your digital transformation journey. In this on-demand webinar, you will learn about:

  • Ecommerce and the role of integration
  • A roadmap for Ecommerce digital transformation
  • Digital transformation stories from our customers
Full Webinar Transcript
Hello, everyone. Welcome to our webinar today. My name is Ebru, and I work in Product marketing at Celigo. And our speaker today is Mark Simon. He’s the VP of Strategy at Celigo. So Mark has been with the company for over two years, and he has extensive experience in technology, ecommerce, and integration space. And today, he will walk us through an ecommerce integration roadmap for automation that you can easily apply to your business to accelerate your digital transformation journey. So during the webinar, if you have any questions, please submit them through the questions pane, and we will answer them during the Q&A at the end of the session. Now, I will hand it over to Mark. Thanks, Ebru. Welcome, everyone. But before we jump in, to expand a little bit on the intro, help kind of explain to everybody, “Hey, why am I here talking about this?” First of all, ecommerce as a vertical is near and dear to my heart. Prior to joining Celigo two years ago, I was in consulting for 10 years, mid-market consulting, and led a practice for the majority of that. One of my teams the entire time was an ecommerce team implementing ecommerce sites. And then we also did the integration, ERP automation for customers as well. So I’ve worked with ecommerce companies, hundreds of them, over the years. But prior to that, I was a co-founder and CTO of an ecommerce company here in Seattle that we took from zero to 15 million in two and a half years without any outside funding. So [while?] that’s a lot smaller of an ecommerce business than a lot of you run, it’s also similar size and certainly know the– I’ve lived and breathed some of the automation challenges, the scaling issues, problems I’ve looked at on both sides. And it’s something that’s a– I’ve always stayed close to ecommerce as a vertical and really think of myself as an ecommerce specialist still. So let’s jump in. So let’s look at the agenda here. We’re going to break this down into three main areas. We will look at the role integration plays in ecommerce and ecommerce strategy, what a high-level integration roadmap looks like for an ecommerce company. And then we’ll talk a bit about some successful digital transformations for some clients that we worked with. But before we get going further, I want to talk about, what is digital transformation? This is a buzzword right now, huge buzzword coming out of 2020. Everyone loves to throw this around, but what is it really? And if you go to Wikipedia, it tells you that– Wikipedia describes it as the adoption of digital technology to transform services or businesses through replacing non-digital or manual processes. Actually, that’s a much-paraphrased version. They go on and on for their definition. But I think that’s a good way to summarize it because digital transformation is pretty broad right now. And we see it impacting every size of company that we work with at Celigo. I think we all can see this personally in the businesses that we work in and in different areas of our daily lives. But when we look at digital transformation, what does that really do for us? And the first thing that always comes to mind is efficiency. And I’ve always thought of it as replacing manual processes. And I go there right away in my mind and coming from a consulting background where I focused a lot on projects and for customers, helping them achieve their initiatives, become more efficient, really focus and think about that. I think about that first. But another important part of the aspect of digital transformation for organizations and I’ve seen this firsthand, is that it facilitates innovation and creativity. And that’s how on that at first glance you may realize, but it’s very hard when an organization is essentially bursting at the seams and it’s sort of everything is you feel behind the curve at times when you’re doing a lot of stuff manually that should otherwise be automated, you’re growing very rapidly, and especially in a customer-facing business like ecommerce, the stress of that can be pretty high. It makes it tough to innovate and utilize creativity and efficiency creates the space for more of that. And I’ve seen that time and again in successful companies that I’ve worked with. Another one along with digital transformation is this concept of going paperless. And a lot of us probably are in businesses right now that you don’t see or feel paper, but it’s still very much in play. And even I’d say virtualize versions of old manual paper processes taking place with. And by that, I mean reentry of digital data is a great example. And that’s something that automation integration as part of digital transformation can really help address. The other thing about transformation initiatives is that there’s a tremendous amount of untapped potential in the world’s business ecosystem. The US is actually a leader by far in digital transformation and McKinsey study that I saw pegged it as 18% in the US of digital transformation potentials already realized. Well, that leaves a tremendous amount of green fields, so to speak. And as business leaders, it’s incumbent on all of us to look at our businesses and say, “Hey, where can we be more efficient? How can we set ourselves up for a future, especially right now where things we’ve gone through a very uncertain year, there’s been a lot of change and digital transformation, we’ve seen definitely set businesses up for greater success in uncertain times? So another area here that we kind of wanted to talk about starting in is just an example of what we’ve seen with one of our customers in the last year. 2020 was an absolutely incredible year. There was just tremendous disruption, as everyone knows, pretty much in all facets of our life, right. And business more than any place saw that as well. And there was a tremendous spectrum of winners coming through the pandemic, some companies that were losers, some companies that started out as losers, losers and then became winners and companies, industries. We saw that. And that really amplified some of the effects of digital transformation And clearly, everyone here in the ecommerce industry saw the absolute explosion of this, whether you’re a seasoned ecommerce veteran or a company that lives and dies, whether ecommerce channel or you’re just getting in and it’s a relatively new channel. Everyone saw the potential and the need to optimize this category. But a key part of that is to facilitate ecommerce growth is making sure that you have the components behind it, the foundation for success based on automation and integration to enable that growth so you don’t get out over your proverbial skis. The graph we have here, the graphic here shows the growth in orders by month of one of our customers that is based in Australia, a fitness equipment provider. So obviously an intersection to benefit from the pandemic. And they saw, like a lot of companies, they saw an exploding demand. But with that, they actually saw a great deal of inefficiencies arise, challenges, problems, impact to their business. So with the good came some difficulty as well. Unfortunately for them, they started out pre-pandemic. They’d already gone down the path of digital transformation. They’d already begun to automate some of their processes and integrate their ecommerce platform to ERP. But as they saw exponential growth and grew more than almost 10x there, they realized very quickly they needed to keep increasing pace and added in until they had gone from what was initially a fairly small initiative to fully automating their entire order to cash process. And that enabled them to capitalize on the opportunity and also to more quickly roll out an expansion to Europe. And these numbers here, we’ve seen these several times over with our customers and some of them have an extra zero or two on the end. But the principle really applies and we’ve seen this pattern play out repeatedly. So let’s take a look at a typical road map for ecommerce order to cash automation. And this is by no means chiseled in stone. But we have over 2,000 that are in the ecommerce vertical in some way. And this is what we see as a typical pattern around their automation initiatives. So the first part where everyone, everyone starts almost universally, Bursley, is the order processing side. So thinking of orders, it gets down to getting your orders from your ecommerce platform into either ERP or your order management platform, and then from there, getting fulfillment information, getting those orders out for fulfillment, and getting the information back in around that fulfillment. And this kind of table stakes at this point for ecommerce. We’ve seen customers just demand fulfillment as soon as possible. They expect same day and they might get something else. But this is a key point where we see everyone start out. The next phase tends to focus on billing and payment data so this often can include a point of sale if that’s included, if we’re looking at an omnichannel experience as well. But getting this information back upstream from the ERP into the ecommerce platform in a customer-facing manner can help expedite a lot of efficiency. We also have item management. And this one, we often see moved up. It just depends on the type of business and the number of SKUs involved and the velocity of inventory and the depth of inventory for a given SKU. And so we see there’s tremendous variation here with businesses, but this is almost always one of the top three initiatives from an automation standpoint, if not being moved up into the very first phase. We talked about 3PL in WMS integration. This spans a broad spectrum. You can map out basic fulfillment integration with a couple of flows to start out, and then see them expand to 20, 30, depending on the complexity of a process and the type of activities of the 3PL, especially if that 3PL or your warehouse facility is doing value-add processes. There could be a lot more integration involved if there’s assembly build kits. And this is something to really think through because this can– we see this can very much hinder growth for companies. And then moving on, returns and refunds, a key thing– this is typically always seen at a later date, some exceptions by industry. But this is an area that typically– kind of following on as the maturity process goes to– especially as the volume grows to manage that process much more efficiently. And then finally, at the end, we look at payment reconciliation. It’s typically one of the last areas that’s addressed. And we can see big impacts into an accounting team there as volume grows. So something that the reconciliation of your payment gateways and back into your accounting system is often somewhat overlooked in the growth path, but it’s something, definitely, that needs to be considered because we see that often very much hindering growth and impacting the ability to close the books and have good visibility into the general ledger status. So let’s jump into order processing. One of the first questions we want to ask when we’re looking at order processing automation is, where is the data master? And typically, we’ve seen this as ERP. I think we’ve worked– a lot of people that have been in this business for a while have seen the ERP system, typically, as the hub and thinking of that as the hub. And we’ve actually seen– for ecommerce companies, we’ve seen this change a bit with our customers and the ecosystem, especially in the last few years. So, more and more, we’re seeing some differing models where alternate systems are being used that are very specialized for a particular need around, say, order management and so the the typical hub and spoke model is evolving a bit, or at least there’s more alternatives out there, depending on the platforms you’re using. And so that’s a very important thing right now to to take a look at when you’re beginning a process like this, if you’re planning for growth, if you’re planning to launch a ecommerce channel or a new one, is really to look at those systems and sometimes ask the some of the old patterns, are they the correct ones to use, or examine them a little bit deeper to determine if you’ve got the right assumptions around the data flow. And as soon as you’re determining where your master lives, that immediately leads into the flow direction from your data. And typically, we’re initiating our order somewhere, and then we’re moving them out into the ERP into an order management system. And then we need to get those as quickly as possible, either as a next step or out for fulfillment or sometimes in parallel, depending on how it’s architected. And this is an area where we see the business requirements just evolving and changing. And this is where good planning up front can really facilitate your growth and make sure that you’ve got the right pattern for your business and in particular to the products in line of business because there’s this can be a good deal of variance there. So if we look at what the first step in ecommerce, a digital transformation and automation initiative leads to order processing? And what are some of the savings that you see there? This is one that is very much– it’s almost an immediate no brainer, so to speak. But even for fairly small companies, we can see savings of 20 hours a week, save from manual data entry immediately, even for relatively small order flow sometimes. And so when we look at this, how that scales out, what it really points to is that it’s never too early to plan for integration and automation of that data. Brand new channels, small channels, and what we’ve seen certainly in 2020 was how you can see rapid growth, a change in the– a change in the world can lead to explosive growth. And to be ready for it, you need to be ahead of the curve to be there to take advantage of it. But we see very clearly across our customers, a quick achievement in high ROI for order processing automation. Moving on and looking at the 3PL and FPA integration. And this is an area where we can get into a lot more complexity since there’s a lot more going on in this diagram, so to speak. But once we have those sales orders into an order management platform or ERP, we need to get those out for– we need to get those out for fulfillment. So depending on the direction and method you’re taking, this is a critical function. There can be a lot of touch points here. And when you see a lot of complexity, when you have when there’s multiple 3PLs in play in maybe inhouse fulfillment of different types, if you’ve got a say, traditional brick and mortar retail locations that come into play and sometimes sometimes we’re occasionally used for fulfillment. This is an area where this can– just alone you can get quite complex patterns in place, and it’s a very good area to think through early on. Some of the growth that you’re expecting and how that can evolve, especially as you move if you’re considering multinational expansion. Any of these things are very important because as soon as you have multiple locations, channel allocation, then some of these challenges really come into play and are important to consider. We see a lot of companies here actually being very successful as ecommerce companies and growing rapidly, going quite a ways down the path of what would appear kind of a maturity, especially from a revenue standpoint. Growing rapidly, but still relying very heavily on manual processes to sync with their 3PLs or with an in-house fulfillment operation. And this is one where any type of mistake leads to a lot of pain, especially if your B2C, like a lot of ecommerce companies are. We think about that. Missed orders, not being able to fulfill something. That gets expensive, and it’s very painful. It’s expensive in multiple ways just from overhead and stress on the business. And this is something to– again, another area where it’s really critical to stay ahead of the curve and can really help with scaling in volume as you grow as a business. So that automation covers just two areas. If we look at some of the– or the order processing side and connection with 3PL can make a dramatic difference for a business. When we were previewing this deck, we saw this artifact that was displayed, and I was kind of– I was laughing at it because we’re in 2021, and despite being a company that specializes in digital transformation, we’re still dealing with Mac and Windows compatibility issues, so. But that said, we’ve got– this slide is really trying to show and break down the time efficiencies that you can see at a fairly moderate level of– and we’ve seen these numbers here for a relatively small order volume per week and that in the hundreds for a company really spending a ton of time on moving their order and shipping data across, and this adds up. It’s kind of a sneaky time, so to speak, but it’s something that is really helpful as you look to plan out an initiative like this or look to, especially expand your ecommerce operations. Because this applies whether you’ve got one ecommerce channel or you’re looking at– or you’re doing 50 and looking to expand the labor load where you have the manual inefficiencies really add up quickly. Jumping into item management. So we see this being a highly variable area. So there’s some big problems that can raise their head at scale here, depending on your quantity of SKUs. So we see companies growing sometimes very rapidly and their SKU count, and it can magnify issues. So if you feel like that the processes are down, so to speak, maybe a few hundred SKUs or 100 SKUs, and that expands out. The processes don’t necessarily scale to when you have 10,000 or 100,000 SKUs. And then if you add say broad SKU depth and shallow inventory levels, this magnifies things. And one of the biggest holdups we can see sometimes in some of the projects we work with our customers on is they come to us asking to integrate these processes. They’re ready to move in, to tighten up a lot of their item management’s velocity. That they want to address some of the velocity issues with items, get their inventory levels synched up much, much more tightly. All things where we do a lot of, we’re very good at. But one of the things that we see them often running into is a good channel allocation strategy, and especially where they’ve started to outgrow that. So they have multiple stores that they’re fulfilling from the same inventory whether it’s multiple stores, multiple types of ecommerce channels. And having shared inventory across those without a strong channel allocation strategy can lead to a lot of challenges and impact your success as a business, but the speed with which you can automate. And this is a big prerequisite for an ecommerce company to be thinking about as they scale. This is one of the bigger ones, especially if you’ve been working with limited channels, you don’t necessarily see many problems here, but you’re looking to expand. We see a lot from our customers and prospects in 2021 asking yourself, “Hey, do we have the right strategies for allocating inventory across multiple channels in a way that’s going to be successful and meet our needs?” And automation is a key part of that strategy and tight integration that’s moving inventory levels through the systems quickly helps that. But it goes beyond that as well. And it’s a good thing to be thinking about. So one of the final areas that we come to in this journey is the payout reconciliation and this can be a very, very costly process. And often we see a lot of automation for an ecommerce company driven by the ecommerce team. It’s very much thinking about the customer-facing process. So there can be a tremendous amount of automation and efficiency done there, which is fantastic, around those things that truly impact customer experience. While you’re building and growing an ecommerce business, you have to focus there. That’s number one. But along the way, [can incur?] this accounting debt, so to speak. The proliferation of payment methods now make this ever more challenging. You can certainly have, in some cases, well over a dozen or more payment methods, depending on the type of stores you’re using, the types of channels, multi-national. And you start putting volume through those. And it makes the reconciliation process for the accounting can really add up. And those are also expensive resources and that ends up becoming a burden on the business. There’s risk of revenue loss there if things are not reconciled properly and definitely delays in closing the books. So this is one where a little bit of manual reconciliation adds up very, very quickly, and we’ve seen companies especially that are trying to scale running into this, looking at what we can do, spending over $100,000 on reconciliation processes that can be automated and made much more efficient. There’s some big ROI savings here that are often overlooked. So if we look at– this is kind of another look at that reconciliation process, and this is something that [inaudible] invested in to add much more capability around these processes. So creating add-ons for our integration applications to address this. This is something we would feel was a much-needed improvement for our own offering and an area to really help our customers in a great way. And this has been a really good value add for our customers, and it’s something to definitely look at as you build out your own integration roadmap. So let’s look at a couple examples of some customers that we work with. Lights for Fun is a decorative lighting retailer that’s based in Europe and they’re expanding and they’ve been expanding to the US. And they ran into a lot of the classic problems we talked about. through this webinar so far, they had issues with order reconciliation, inventory fulfillment, tracking, a lot of third-party systems involved, and really just inefficiencies due to growing– they were growing fast and their data wasn’t all synched up to help them grow. They worked with Celigo and we applied both integration applications. So some of our pre-built solutions that connect end-points as well as our integration, our are iPaaS integration platform integrator IO to build up custom flows to support and build a complete solution that really tightens up those processes and gives them a lot more efficiency as they scaled and grew. And they saw some really meaningful savings from that immediately. So another customer of ours that’s really interesting because if they’re their big growth was perfect [inaudible] and their, again, strong ecommerce presence. And they saw 600% growth through Amazon and Shopify. And that was fantastic for the business on one hand. But they had some gaps to fill that they ended up doing through manual effort, which is again very common that we see. And again, leading to a lack of visibility across the business though and they came to Celigo after adopting NetSuite as their ERP and looked to us to quickly integrate Amazon, Shopify, and their three PLs. And we were able to do that rapidly and get them up and running and get them the visibility they needed into their business and so that they could, instead of adding more people, they could continue their growth without that manual effort. [silence] So there’s a very real tangible ROI from automating these processes that we see. We recently did a survey of our ecommerce customers, and some of you probably, I hope, responded and really tried to look at, “Hey, what is everyone saying?” And it’s easy to talk to certain customers anecdotally, but getting a larger set responding to the survey really helped confirm some of the things that we knew already around the improvements from automation and integration in these areas. I think the biggest thing that stood out for us was that over 56% of these organizations saw greater than $50,000 in cost savings tied to their implementation of our products. And that was tremendously exciting for us but I hope it’s also tremendously exciting for you as an audience to think about that and see that, hey, maybe ask yourself, “Hey, what can be done?” Where is there more savings left on the table within your own businesses? The impact of this automation, it covers a lot of areas. When you look at integrating and automating, the big ones here were the improved data quality, expanding growth without adding a lot of people, the operational costs. But some of these as well, accelerating, billing, and cash flow. There’s a lot of benefits that add up and accumulate as you move in the direction of digital transformation. So looking at an integration, we will look at the integration roadmap before for ecommerce companies, and one thing that’s interesting is we see that once companies start down that path, they tend to move very fast. So what this graph is showing you is customers that are using our Shopify to NetSuite integration application and our Amazon to NetSuite integration application, what addition they’re using and the addition defines what processes you’re automating. So Starter Edition on the left is just kind of your starter step, your basic order, order processing, order processing flows. And then as you can in the Standard Edition, you’re adding billing and item management, and then our Premium Edition, you add refunds and pay-out reconciliation. And I think if you look at the numbers of customers here that are using the Premium Edition, it really shows the–it really represents the road map. And to be honest, when I looked at this, the distribution was weighted further to the right then than I would have guessed, actually. And we think of a lot of the companies as kind of moving along this as the road map is a long road, but it’s not necessarily– it takes a long time, especially the leveraging integration applications or an iPaaS like integrator.io. You can move in this direction very, very quickly and the momentum builds. You integrate one area, see the gain, and increase that. And a lot of our customers just come in and jump right into Premium Edition and move in because they’ve already taken these initiatives before, maybe with other systems. Now they’re implementing new platforms and they move right in because they know the gains that they can be achieved. So where do you start? Or if I ask myself, I try to think about it from customers’ perspective and it’s like, “Oh, this all sounds great, but where do you start?” And a good place is just to get a map. What’s out there? What are the processes that your business is going through to support your ecommerce line of business and your ecommerce customers? And list out those processes and applications. Start with a map and it can literally be a map at the back of the napkin, so to speak, and it can start getting you to think about these things in a process standpoint which leads to quickly identifying what’s broken, what’s slow, what’s resource-intensive. Think about where you know you have pain. Another exercise that is good to go through is ask yourself, “If our business grew 10X tomorrow, what would break? If we had 10X the order volume, where are the pain points? What’s going to break?” And those are the things– you often instinctively know those things. You don’t have to think too hard about those. But those areas are often the ones where you have inefficiency already, where you have a really clear sort of a low hanging ROI to go after. So look, ask yourself those. Look at the critical data that you need to be synched 100% accurately and in a timely manner. That’s often a root cause. If you look at those pain points, you look at the root cause, it’ll direct you to that data is often the source of those issues. And then from there, as you put together that roadmap, pencil in a return on investment on it. What is it going to take to integrate it? What can be saved? And what we see very often working with our customers is that they have some stuff that we can very quickly take off their list and get them some quick wins initially. And don’t be afraid to phase out your project. It’s often a great strategy to move forward with a phased approach. Put together the complete roadmap, but if you’re not sure where to start, sometimes, just starting is the key to success here, and then, build from that. So as we look beyond putting a road map together, how can Celigo help you with these challenges and building these efficiencies? Celigo is an integration company, first and foremost. Our platform, our iPaaS platform, which iPaaS’s integration platform as a service, Integrator.io, it sits as a foundation to everything we do. So Integrator.io can connect to anything, but we can also build templates on top of that and what we call integration applications, which are pre-wired solutions that connect different endpoints together. And we have a large set of those integration applications and templates specific to the ecommerce space. And we see those allowing companies to rapidly come in, plug these in, and get up and running and see a return on investment very, very quickly. And there’s a few logos here, but we have an entire marketplace on our website where you can take a look and see those and basically support a majority of modern ecommerce platforms. And also, we’ve built connectors to the majority of the common applications we’re seeing our ecommerce customers using. So whether it’s return processing, marketing automation, we have those solutions built out at connections there. And then, we can build out those flows using our iPaaS platform and provide you a comprehensive solution across your integration needs All right. And with that, that wraps up the presentation portion. I think we’re going to open things up for questions. Yes, so thank you very much for the great presentation, Mark. And before moving to questions, I would like to point you to some resources we have. So first of all, if you enjoyed Mark’s presentation, I also recommend that you download our executive guide to best practices for ecommerce integration. So this is available on our website under resources, e-books. And it provides a detailed overview of various ecommerce business processes and best practices for integration. And also, we have a series of other webinars coming up focusing on multichannel ecommerce. And you can again register for this on our website. So if you have any questions, please type them now into the chat window. Okay, so one question we have is what kind of resources are needed to implement and maintain integrations? That’s an excellent question and it’s an important part of your long-term success to think about who is going to be supporting the integration. One of the things at Celigo that we view as a key principle is that the team has striven to build a platform that’s not just for developers, so to speak. And where we really stand out from some of our competitors is that we’ve targeted business users. That business users, line of business users, should be able to get in and we target. Can a tech savvy business user build a flow on our platform? But certainly, a business user can get in and manage an integration view. What’s happening? Look at the mappings and see what’s going on. And so it doesn’t require a developer to be successful there. One of the key things with integration is that it’s– think of it as a contract between two systems and the integration itself is built based on that contract and business has changed. So your business evolves explicitly. And sometimes it involves– or it evolves in a way and the data changes and you don’t quite catch that and it breaks the contract. So it’s key for the success of your integrations to plan for someone to own and manage those in the organization to be monitoring them ideally daily. And that might– they just look at it for five minutes? And if there’s something that didn’t flow through or they– especially with setting up notifications, it can be sent proactively via email. But whether you’re here, look, you’re doing a push or pull model on those. The key thing is staying on top of the management of your integration and keeping it up to pace with your business. And that’s something that you don’t need an overly technical resource. I always think that if someone can put together a basic Excel formula, that’s about as tech-savvy as they need to be able to manage an existing integration. And the knowledge of the business processes in the systems on either end, it’s actually more important. So that’s a really key question and a key thing you should look at as you’re planning for how you’re going to manage these in the future. Thank you, Mark. So another question is, what are the advantages of Celigo’s integration platform over other integration solutions? Another good question. So we’ve got– I just hit on a couple of them there. The key one, again, is you do not have to be a developer to be successful using the platform. That’s key. And what we see is that it really changes your efficiency in an organization, whether you’re building an in-house team, you’re building a consulting practice, any of these things. It changes your staffing so that you can have business users, and it creates essentially, you can do more. Because the business user that’s more allowable to the business process, they can do a lot more.It creates a lot of efficiency and speed for an organization. Another key point of differentiation compared to our competitors is that we have our integration applications we talked a little bit about along the way. And those pre-built flows and field mappings and transformations based on the common pattern that we see between, say, a Shopify and a NetSuite or whether using integration or a template between an Amazon and an Acumatica. But we see those common comment patterns. And that’s a big jump start to getting things up and working. But you’re not put into a box. There’s a lot of point to point integrations out there. And as soon as you do something that doesn’t match them, you’re stuck. Our solutions are different where you can grow with them. So you can deactivate a flow in an integration application and then build a custom flow on IO because your business processes don’t fit into the predefined standard. So you can evolve those. And we see that with our customers. As they grow, they get more complex. They can leverage the pre-built and leverage custom to address their needs as they scale. Thank you, Mark. Another question, does the integration need to be in the cloud? Does the integration support prime applications? Yes, so our integration solutions are– they’re all cloud based. So an integration platform as a service, we are hosting the integration platform for you in our cloud environment, connecting to your south’s applications. And then when it comes to on prem solutions, we have an on prem agent that gets installed to allow us to connect into integrator.io and bridge that gap from cloud to on prem. Thank you. So we have time for one last question. Okay, here’s another question. Operating an online solution is more than data handling. It’s reacting to an entirely new business environment. Do you have data on customer experience in this proliferation of ecommerce businesses? Ebru, could you go through that? I’m not sure if I understood that correctly. Could you just read that again? Sure. Yeah. Operating an online solution is more than data handling. It is reacting to an entirely new business environment. Do you have data on customer experience in this proliferation of ecommerce businesses? From customer data on this, yeah. So we work with a huge group of ecommerce customers on these solutions. So we certainly have collective data on the systems that are connecting to the patterns they’re using to address their customer needs. And I definitely agree wholeheartedly that ecommerce is much more than just the data. This is all about business processes. And those business processes are often very customer driven, especially in ecommerce, driven by other requirements of the businesses. And integration is just the results. It’s just the last step in good business process design, good mapping of those processes that the data fits into, and so does the integration. So I definitely agree with the point there. And yeah, we have a lot of data on what our customers are using to meet their customer needs. And that’s something we could get into the details of with you if you want to reach out to us. Thank you very much, Mark. So we are out of our time here. So thank you, everyone, for attending this session. And so if your question was answered, we will reach out to you after this session. And if you have any more questions and if you would like to learn more about how we have helped many ecommerce customers with their integration’s, if you have a challenge you would like to discuss about, please feel free to email us at [email protected] or just simply visit our website and contact us through the chat window there. So thanks again and have a nice rest of the day. Bye. Thank you.

About The Speaker

Ebru Saglam

Sr. Product Marketing Manager
Celigo

Ebru has a diverse background with over a decade of combined experience in marketing, technical sales and customer services roles across startups and enterprises. She also has hands-on experience in the e-commerce landscape, she has spent more than 5 years running her DTC multi-channel e-commerce business.

Mark Simon

VP Strategy
Celigo

Mark comes to Celigo having spent the last 21 years in technology. He started his career as a software developer in 1997, building e-commerce applications and custom integrations for several years. He then co-founded and led technology and operations as CTO for Evo, a successful e-commerce company that grew from $0 to $13M in revenue in three years. He then moved on to start a career in consulting with Explore Consulting, an award-winning Solution Provider and VAR. Mark has worked with clients across several industries including multiple software clients and publicly traded companies pre and post IPO. His efforts for software clients included designing and developing automated processes for sales order processing, subscription management, and provisioning among others.

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