CHRIS: Yeah, that's a great question. So you have the pragmatic reality of operating your business, or scaling the already successful business. And as anyone knows who’s going to be engaged in this activity, you have to prioritize. And there's a tradeoff between functioning the business and getting immediate results versus executing in a more optimized way with your B2B eCommerce platform.
There has to be flexibility to be able to focus, execute, get great results, and then progress to the next level of optimization. This is really just a constant that there is change, there is a need, a necessity for flexibility and the ability to preemptively know where you're going. Where you are going to go with your business, and what are the different steps in your scaling that you're going to need to be there before maybe even you know about them.
This is what we mean by flexibility. With the pricing. for example, one of the key factors here is that a lot of our clients will come up with a simple pricing model to begin with. But that needs to integrate with their ERP system. So whenever they make changes, possibly they make more levels of pricing or more quantity price breaks, the eCommerce system, the buying group software, needs to be able to dynamically incorporate those additional levels of fidelity, if you will.
In addition to that, it may make sense to adjust the actual pricing model for different types of users. You may want to present a certain type of model that's just pure quantity break to some users, but then roll out a robust loyalty program that is cumulative or additive with the multi-tier pricing, so that someone who's part of the CRM loyalty program gets an additional benefit and you can encourage them as more premiere or select users so that those members get bigger discounts, but they also have to maybe commit to more ongoing revenue that's going to funnel through the system.
We see these things a lot in that flexibility, it's not just a theoretical flexibility. We can do this, we can make it happen. Frankly, a lot of platforms don't have that ability to be flexible, so you should probably ask. And by probably I mean definitely. Ultimately, this is really what inspired us to build our eCommerce platform. We worked with a lot of clients who suffered from being painted into a corner and therefore not having a flexible solution. So you're going to invest a lot of resources into whatever software you're working with and you want to ask the basic question, “Is it flexible?”
Now, once you get past the theoretical, though, then it's on to the reality of scaling and growing your business. That's really what your custom integration partner should be focusing on. How can we help you to grow your business and make it more self-service for your customers and any vendors you work with—really everyone internally within your company—and how can we establish a path, a roadmap, to progress you through these different optimizations that are natural as you scale?
The point is that you want to be thinking about this with your pricing. It's actually really challenging to reset pricing expectations once you get them going. This is something we want you to be thinking about up front.
RON: Yeah, totally agree with that.