Transcript: Episode 8 - Behind the Scenes of B2B eCommerce

The three ecommerce capabilities that we have, so EDI, Punch Out, and Custom Catalogue. If we wanna do B2C, it's a completely different way of handling things in terms of how quickly we dispatch orders, the payment offerings. This website is not going to replace what you do. It may change the nature of how you do it, but we still need customer care.

Welcome to The Ecommerce Experience, the podcast that turns you into an ecommerce expert. Your host, Andrew Rogencamp, shares his wealth of B2B and B2C business experience to take you on an ecommerce adventure. Each month, you'll hear from industry experts and meet people just like you looking to take their business to new heights online.

Welcome to The Ecommerce Experience. This is episode eight. And this week, we're having a chat to Bri Vernon Cox, who's the ecommerce manager for a company called Bunzl Safety. So quite a large company here in Australia that is dealing largely with safety products and into some very large businesses, some of the largest companies in Australia or in the world, in fact. So, yeah, we have a chat to Bri and we just talk about a lot about B2B e commerce, to be honest.

Here's the chat. Okay, Bri. Thanks for joining us, and we really appreciate your time. Can you tell me a little bit about Bunzl Safety's business?

Yeah, so Bunzl Safety is actually made up of two parts or two divisions. So we've got our direct to customer component, which is the Bunzl Safety side. And then we've also got our reseller side where we supply products to resellers who on sell our products to customers. So it's an interesting dynamic to have the both of those. And then within our direct side, our business is formed from businesses that have been sort of brought up and bought into Bundle Safety.

So we also had Robertson's lifting and rigging. We had WorkSense Workwear. And so it's sort of been a few companies over time rolled up into one. And yeah, that's been an interesting challenge, even in terms of like web presences and things like that. But that's Brifly a little bit about what makes up our company, but we do safety supplies, everything from footwear, workwear, PPE, as well as lifting and rigging, height safety.

And so, yeah, it's sort of head to toe as well as environmental and site safety and everything in between.

Okay, sounds good. So I always say PPE was a term that not many people knew what it meant six months ago, but I think everybody knows what PPE means these days. It's interesting how that's coming to the front. You know, you can hear on the news something about PPE supplies and, you know, if you if you said that six months ago, nobody

knew anything.

So in terms of ecommerce, how long, you know, has Bundle Safety been active in ecommerce and, you know, how did the journey start?

Yeah. So Bundle Safety in Bundle Safety, because before there was the Bundle Safety, as I said, there were the other sort of companies. I think the Bundle Safety website, it predates my time with Bundle Safety, but I think it's probably around the five year mark. I think of Bundle Safety specifically, but before that there was the Robertson's website, which was an e commerce site. And I believe that was worked on with you guys with Commerce Vision as well.

And so that was prior to the five years that Bundle Safety has sort of had a web presence that one was around. And there was also the WorkSense one that there was a limited web offering with that. So it's sort of been evolved where it is now over that period of time.

And so there's you've obviously got a B2B site in there and a B2C site?

Yeah, that's right. So we do have B2C capabilities. So someone can immediately sign up and pay for stuff with their credit card. It isn't something that we actively pursue,

but we do have a players in that market like RSCA and stuff like that that have got bricks and mortar. So

That's right. And also as as a business, and this is something that I've spoken about internally with my teams as well. If we wanna do B2C, it's a completely different way of handling things in terms of how quickly we dispatch orders.

There's gotta be a different consumer journey and all of that sort of stuff.

So if we wanna do it, we need to do it properly. It's not something you can sort of just have off to the side. You need to be actively working towards it. And if we wanna do that, that may be something that we choose to do in the future. But for the moment it's there, But our main priority and the the customers that we really wanna service are our our b two b.

Right. Okay. And it sounds like in terms of b two b, you've really got and I speak about I think it was in my very first podcast. Those two flavors of b two b. You've got that wholesale and distribution one, and then that one where you're dealing directly with customers that are consuming those products in in their, you know, business as usual in their MRO type spend and things like that.

Yeah. That's right. And so the what we see a lot of on the our reseller side, our B2B, I'm not even sure what, if there's a different acronym for that, but our B2B reseller side, they're often smaller sort of stores. They might have a few stores in their chain, but generally it's the people on the shop floor that are also doing the ordering and our reps are in contact with them. And then conversely, on the other side, the B2B, it's the really big companies you're dealing with safety managers or you might be dealing with procurement managers and things like that.

So very different expectations, very different ways of using our sites and very different things that they wanna get out of it as well.

So you talked a little bit about before about that B2C thing where to, you know, go for that B2C market, you've really gotta do it properly. So I often bang on about the differences between B2B and B2C. You know, how do you see the differences in in b two b and b two c? It's not really just, you know, accepting a order on an account, is it?

No. It's it's hugely different. And probably before I had this role, I'd done some b two b, but it was more in a reseller capacity or selling to very small sort of businesses that were using the products for themselves. And so before I got to this level, I probably would have thought, Oh yeah, there's some differences, but can it really be that different? And it is, it is, it is.

There's no two ways about it. It's very different. And so for me, some of the differences for B2C versus B2B, B2B, the expectations around the capabilities, the site needs to do so many more things that you just wouldn't even sort of think about. Whereas with B2C, some of the expectations are more around shipping, lead times, payment options, discount codes.

It's sort of like in b two c, I think the site really controls the narrative of what you wanna deliver. Whereas what I've seen in b two b is often the customers controlling the narrative of what they wanna do if you if you want their business.

Yeah. Yeah. There's there's definitely that. And also, so much of the important functionality is behind the scenes. It's not immediately obvious.

With our website, the things that it can do, it's sort of a tip of the iceberg situation. You can see some of it, but you won't really understand its full capabilities until you're in using a specific setup or you're being talked through the options for X, Y, and Z. Whereas with a B2C site, you can get a gauge pretty quickly if it's going to be a good site, if it's gonna work for you, it's pretty straightforward. Whereas that's not at all the case with a lot of the things that we do. Yeah, so even some of our B2B customers, they'll be on a specific type of offering.

They'll be seeing their site in one specific way and it's really complex. And that's just just one of the things that we can do. A different company has a completely different setup with different options and and things like that.

Yeah. And I think some you know, one of the things that people don't often realize is is the fact that the site's being shown to them in such a simple way that, oh, that's my price, and I'm only see they don't realize that they're only seeing the products that they're allowed to see and that there's, you know, 2,000,000 business rules in the back end working all that out in, you know, four hundred milliseconds. So And

all the, yeah, and all the tiny little things even down to, you know, one customer doesn't want their users to be able to enter their own address, and another user might want them to be able to enter their address, but it needs to have rules things like that.

So yeah.

Interesting. So are you using that capability to drive new business?

Yeah. Absolutely. So we recently released some flyers and they basically talk about the three e commerce capabilities that we have. So EDI, Punch Out and Custom Catalogs, and they were to equip our sales team. When they're speaking to new customers, they've sort of got like a one page takeaway that explains

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's something I think, especially in a B2B capacity, a lot of companies don't fully grasp it or aren't doing it to the same extent that we are, or possibly, they've got the capacity, but they don't have someone that can sort of talk through it in the way that I can, which, not to over sort of oversell myself, but I think one of my strengths is think they want or they think is important and saying, well, it won't necessarily look like that, but you will get this, which will give you this instead, and that will allow you to do all of that. And it turns out

because you don't wanna be in a race to the bottom with price. But the other thing that an ecommerce site can do is have drive cost savings in that supply chain, not just for Bunzl, but also for the customer.

Yeah. So I think a cool example for us is we currently supply a local council with all of the workwear for their staff. And we've recently, before they were full EDI capabilities. We've got custom catalogs within our custom catalogs. We've got so many features.

Obviously it's something that I'm pretty passionate about because it's something that I do all day but different levels of approval. So we can say, administrator is able to order up to X dollar amount, but this user can only order this dollar amount. Or we can say that this person's team has to submit their orders to that person to be approved before it can go through. There's all the embroideries. That's like a huge component of what we do so that they can see the embroideries that they're going to get on their workwear so that they can make sure it has the right logos.

They can input their name. There's what else have we got? There's a lot of things that they can do for themselves so they can do order tracking within their portal. They can extract out data about who has ordered what on what date.

So if someone has the ordering piece. It's more that customer self-service type of environment.

Yeah. And there's a lot of that because I know even as good as my team is at getting back to inquiries that for myself as a user of other services, if I can do it for myself, that's even better. If I don't have to ask someone, if I can find all the answers for myself Yeah. Then then I like that even more. I think having the infrastructure to allow people to do that is even better.

Like you need great customer care and getting back to people. But if people can do it, you know, they've been out of the office at an appointment all day and they get back and they need to do something at 9PM. They don't wanna have to wait till the next morning for you to get back to them.

That's right.

Yeah. Build that into that system for them. That's that's a huge thing.

I've even seen with I don't know if you guys do this, but I've seen a customer do it where they can limit the colors. So, you know, you might have some high vis, and the customer might say, I only want this mine to have orange high vis. And Yeah. Yeah. Interestingly, I know why that is now.

I have of the guys that recently started in our business worked at Tarong Power. And he said the the reason they do that is is that they they know when somebody's on-site as to what color high vis they're wearing, whether they're an employee or a contractor.

That's really interesting. So yeah, we definitely have a lot of that. So within our custom catalogs, that's something that we do color exclusion. So for example, we have one customer and on one of their sites, they're only allowed orange navy high vis, but one of their other sites are only allowed yellow navy high And so having those colors locked down is that something that I probably could have never have conceived of before I started working in this role is that it's

The business rules are mind boggling, aren't

It's it's yeah. And the different combinations of that. And this one is allowed to have brown boots, but this one's only allowed to have black boots. And this this site is allowed to have a choice. They're fancy.

They're allowed to have whatever they'd like out of this selection. Interesting. And so having that lockdown and making sure that those users are only buying what they're allowed to. And as you said, it's essentially a safety thing as well so that they know that this is someone who belongs to our site or if someone rocks up on-site and they're not wearing the right thing, then they know that they potentially don't belong there. And so those color exclusions and also just an added layer of complexity to that that I always love is that on the orange navy uniforms, we have the red version of our logo.

But on the yellow navy, we have the green version of

our logo. Okay. Yeah. So you can't mix embroider different embroideries have to go with different color shirts. So if you choose a orange, you can only choose this embroidery.

That's right. And and having that linked up so that the customer doesn't have to think about it for themselves so that, you know, the person, if they're ordering for themselves, they don't have to go, oh, which one am I allowed to have? And locking that in for them so that they're always selecting the right thing. We don't need to deal with returns that way. We don't need to worry about all of those sort of things.

Locking that down to make it as easy and seamless as possible. That's a big part of what we do and a really interesting part as well, I think. Yeah.

It's often when I talk about e commerce, there's nowhere to hide with e commerce. Know, sometimes you'll come to a business and you'll go you know, I've even seen one business that we talked to once where we said, okay. How do you do your pricing? Oh, the reps just know the pricing for the customer. And I I just said, well, that's not gonna fly in an ecommerce site now.

So there's there's a whole lot of things that I see in ecommerce site that actually brings in disciplines into the back end that you would have never had had you have not exposed those things to your customers because it's gotta be defined. It's gotta be it's gotta be, you know, set in a system somewhere and obeyed. And previously, that was just in people's heads or, you know, when you win win so and so orders, make sure you don't do this and make sure you do this. But that's all defined now.

And that's a that's a big thing that even though I look after ecommerce, that's also something that I I talk about just with our internal teams in that system that we use, Pronto, and things like that. I always say that nothing should have to rely on someone remembering it because people get new jobs. What if what if someone wins the lotto tomorrow and they're not here to teach them?

Well, half their office isn't there. They've all Yeah.

That that's what if there's all of those things? So we should we should build our system so that it functions no matter what. It's not reliant because even if someone stays within the team, they might have a lot on their mind that day. We don't want our systems to operate like that. We want things documented.

We want things built into the rules. We want all of those things to flow so that they can't be left out. So that the experience is consistent always.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what are the some of the challenges you've had with ecommerce over the years?

Something that I've found sort of my whole career is getting everyone in a business to buy in to the importance of it and having that. I don't need everyone to have the same level of digital literacy that I do, but I need them to understand its importance and not just think it's a fun thing that you do on the side or it's an afterthought or something like that. It needs to be built into the basis of who you are as a business and what you care about and what you think is important. And so I think part of that as well is education. Like if people can't see the importance of something, have you as the e commerce person done enough to talk about the benefits or the savings or those sorts of things?

So I think it's two sided, but I think it's getting better. But it's, yeah, it's definitely something that I've I've come up against and just getting people to care. I don't need them to necessarily care as much as I do, but just enough so that it's it's important to the business.

I think over the years, like many years ago, sales reps in particular would see an ecommerce site as the enemy. Yeah. But I think that's really changing now where they see ecommerce sites as really a weapon in their armory that they can take to help them sell and to help them not discount. And, you know, I've never seen a sales rep lose their job because an ecommerce site's been implemented.

And that's what I I say all the time too. So we spend a bit of time, we do internal training sessions with our sales and customer care teams. And I do those every six weeks or so, as well as, you know, lots of little one on one and one off sort of things when someone's going to be talking to a customer or they're trying to do something, that's a huge part of my job. And I always say this website is not going to replace what you do. It may change the nature of how you do it, but we still need customer care.

I shop online more than anyone, I think. And a site doesn't have good customer care, doesn't have good salespeople, it's not a good site to me. If I don't have it's just sort of changing the nature. So I definitely know that our website has been able to relieve our customer care teams. Because a lot of time what they were doing was sort of manual order entry.

Waste of time.

Yeah, it's not customer care and that's what their skillset is. Good customer care is so important and you don't have the mental or physical resources to devote to that if you're just punching in quantities into a So that's really important as well. And so I include that as part of every training session, look, this is why we're doing this. Even though, it may reduce the number of calls you get about manually putting in an order, you're still gonna get the customers that wanna know lots of things. They want advice about what product to choose, especially because a lot of what we do is quite technical.

Yeah. That they wanna know, well, I've got these two things. So can you tell me how I'd best use x versus y? And yeah, that's a really important thing for everyone to understand as well.

Cool. So one of the things I often get asked is what sort of skills am I gonna need in my business to make ecommerce work? You know, what's your opinion on

Are we talking about as an ecommerce person? Like, if you're

Yeah. So if I'm if I'm starting if if I'm new to ecommerce, I wanna do B2B ecommerce. I want my customers to start ordering online. Do I need to go out and find a a digital person or is it a e commerce person or or is it somebody with a mix of all of those skills really?

Yeah. So I think if you're brand new starting out and your business is relatively small, you can start on a a smaller scale. You could get someone who has, it depends, I suppose on, do you have a site already? Are you just starting out There's lots of things to consider, but I think having someone that gets digital, and I know that's a pretty broad thing, but you can ask questions like, does this person shop online themselves? What sites do they love?

What sites do they hate? That's always, so that's when I've interviewed people to bring into my team, that's actually a question that I ask. What sites don't you enjoy and why don't you enjoy them? And those answers are really interesting and telling. I think also tangentially, if you can have someone who, and you can do this in a contract basis as well, but graphics, graphic design and things like that, It can't all just be, you know, sort of fluffing images, but at the same time you'll be let down if your site doesn't have a professional feel to it.

So graphics is important. And in terms of the digital person that you're looking for, it's not necessarily a specific one title or one name of a skill or anything like that. You really do need to talk to them, but you want to be things like digital, e commerce, sometimes digital marketing or things like that, that can bring you someone that has something or someone who has a strong background in data organisation but also has a little bit of a leaning towards digital and things like that. That can be quite helpful. They might've worked in customer care, but they've always had a passion for doing the digital side of things.

Yeah. It's not the most straightforward thing.

No. And I think it sort of speaks to the fact that, you know, ecommerce projects are company wide projects. They're not you can't silo. It's not like installing a new server that's purely an IT project. It's ecommerce hits it can hit everybody from, you know, sales to marketing to to to even accounts receivable in terms of,

you know Category.

Category, you know, merchandising, and all of that. So ecommerce is really, you know, I guess, that exposure of your business to your customer through a digital platform. And therefore, by definition, everybody there's skills across all elements that need to be taken into account. And it's very much the ecommerce role is, you know, working with those teams to ensure that what you're delivering to the customer is is good for the customer and good for your business as well.

Yeah. And being able to take, I think, something that I find is important is being able to talk to the people in the different things and explain to them why you need this thing from them, what it will end up looking like. Those sort of things really get people on board and understand, I'm not just asking you to do this thing for the sake of it, or we're not just doing this so that we can store it on a spreadsheet and never look at again. This is where it's gonna end up.

This is

what we're doing with it. And getting a little bit of exstrongment about it really helps people wanna contribute. And you're exactly right. I spend well, not that we're in the office anymore, but when we were, especially when I first started every end of the building down into the warehouse, even seeing how things go out, seeing what our packaging looks like, everything like that. What is included in our packages?

You really do have to be across all areas of it and and understand it at least.

Sounds good. Hey, Bri. Thanks very much for taking the time out to talk to us today. Your your knowledge is invaluable. I always enjoy chatting with you about ecommerce.

We're ecommerce nerds. Yes.

Thank you so much for asking me. It's been really good to be able to talk about these things. Clearly, I've talked for a long time about all of it. I'm I'm passionate about it.

Alright. Thanks, Bri. See you. Well, I hope you enjoyed that chat with Bri about ecommerce. I think she certainly has a great knowledge of B2B ecommerce and why it's very different from B2C and how the customers are different and really, you know, what what sort of things you should be looking at with with a a really true enterprise level B2B e commerce application.

That's it for this month. Probably won't be doing another podcast until the new year now. We're coming into the Christmas period. So thanks very much for listening to the podcast this year, and we'll see you back next year. Thank you.

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