Joshua Warren  0:00  
Oh when you're buying a platform, all a competitor has to do to match your features and functionality is go by that platform, when you're building a custom, then you can build in a competitive advantage that, yes, they can also build a custom solution to do that, but it's going to take them a little bit longer. Gonna be a little bit more complicated

Darin Newbold  0:30  
Good day and welcome once again to Commerce today. My name is Darren, I'm one of your co host and as always, my awesome partner here, Josh to bring us all the commerce information and news that will help you today. So all right, Josh, on the books for today, what is it, buy it or build it? What should you do? And we wait. So what should we do on the on the buy it or build it in the cart? And I guess it's in your commerce technology stack?

Joshua Warren  1:04  
I was waiting for the magic word, commerce technology stack. That's our new buzzword for this week. Yeah, we're just going to talk about when you should buy software off the shelf or subscribe to it, rent it, however you want to call it and what you should build yourself or have built for you. And this is I was mourning Darren before the episode that we're going to be careful because this is one of those where I'm gonna talk about how back in my day we build e commerce websites uphill both ways in the snow. But But all joking aside, yeah, when I started, everything was custom. There was no buying software for ecommerce you were you were having somebody write it from scratch for you. Would you look like Amazon? Imagine if Amazon was a new creation today versus back in the 90s when they first started because Amazon had to build everything from scratch, there were no platforms you could buy but these days, it's a little overwhelming. People will sell you anything and everything for your ecommerce business. It's kind of crazy. That way you can go out there and you can buy a platform you can buy a system that will do your integrations for you by an OMS and email platform there's platforms that handle your drop shipping, I'm pretty sure at this point there's even platforms that would pick your products for you. We've talked before about how you can deploy AI for your marketing it seems like you know if you have the money they will sell you anything and everything to where you don't have to do anything yourself or have anything built for you

Darin Newbold  2:30  
well and also kit you buy an all in one package I hear it often mentioned all the time on on all the advertising is all in one a buy it it'll do everything you could possibly want and I can now sell my my homemade salsa recipe bottles of homemade salsa, all the time that I've always wanted to do but have never done you know,

Joshua Warren  2:51  
this is where I get in trouble with my friends. They're in the sales and marketing world so salespeople will sell you anything and E commerce platforms I feel like sometimes it's a lot like buying a car. The oils Talia Yeah, you know what this platform it has everything you need all in one don't go anywhere else turnkey one payment. But there's the undercoating you know, but you're gonna need you know, the the accessory pack and the roof rack and this that and the other thing and I find that a lot of these platforms, not all of them but there's definitely a lot of these platforms where suddenly Oh, that's not actually included, that's a monthly subscription from this partner

Darin Newbold  3:28  
will or or the common Well, once you have this many customers, suddenly you're gonna need to upgrade to the the high performance tires for your vehicle kind of thing. In that kind of situation. Well, alright, so hey, we used to build it from scratch. Now we've got platforms for everything. In a previous episode, we even talked about some really cool technology where we can kind of almost get rid of, in a way the platform and have a whole bunch of little things. So tell us Josh, what's a good way to approach this or what? How do we want to look at this

Joshua Warren  4:01  
little things, you know, I'm gonna I'm gonna officially put forth to the software development community. We no longer call them microservices, we call them the little thing. Exactly. I love it. So yeah, we had an episode we talked some about MOQ and microservices and composable commerce. And honestly, that got me thinking I was talking to a merchant recently that was trying to decide do they do they need to build an order management platform or buy an order management platform and kind of looking at that I realized the kind of the future here is either building kind of those micro services or buying those micro services and taking kind of that composable commerce approach. And what I mean by that is looking at it and realizing you don't have to necessarily build a full ecommerce are full LMS platform if all you need is part of it. And so that's a big advantage of building versus buying because you buy a platform, say for order management system, and you're gonna get every feature and function analogy that they think anybody might ever need for the Microsoft Word of exactly the commerce by pulling out your gray stops. Example from Microsoft Word, forget about that one love it. Yeah, so you get all of those features, when you that's, that's a lot of weight basically, that's a lot to support a lot to learn, you might only need half of it. And that is where I feel like building and kind of building a bespoke system for your business. That's going to make a comeback. I feel like in the nearest future, because I think especially with approaches like composable commerce, you couldn't go and you couldn't build just the pieces you need. So now your team's not having to learn, like, like, the best example I have is we had a situation where rolling out a big order management platform, but there's a couple of screens that the stores just didn't need. But the platform didn't have a way you could turn those off. So we found a browser add on called tampermonkey, that we still joke about all the time. And tampermonkey allows you to basically inject code into your own browser. So we deployed that out to all the stores to where anytime they would load this order management system, our extra little code was injected there that just hid those two tabs because we didn't want the stores clicking those tabs. They didn't know those tabs. So merchant was having to pay for those tabs pay for that functionality, we were having to do additional work to hide it. And it wasn't anything they even needed. But it was because in that case, they had bought this platform off the shelf, and thinking and this has been true for a number of years. And they were thinking, hey, it's cheaper to buy something off the shelf than to build it from scratch.

Darin Newbold  6:40  
Alright, so you almost have me convinced, however, comma, as I'm looking at this, and given the fact that I've got a couple extra days ahead of you in life and experience here as we go. When I when I think about all these little pieces, while it sounds great. And you're getting in a way you're getting something that's as you said, lighter, hopefully more nimble, able to do exactly what you need it to do. How well and the challenge that I often see is is okay, you end up with those situations, but then they don't talk to each other or one speaks English, the other one speaks Spanish or they mean something like that. And, and you run into compatibility challenges, or you then have to build the other little thing, widget, whatever, that connects them all together. And then you end up with a complexity that somebody then says, Well, why didn't you just buy Microsoft Word?

Joshua Warren  7:48  
Are you getting commissioned from Microsoft? Just I need to double check that. You know, it's funny, as you were talking, I just made me realize that as an industry, we try so hard to never use the word middleware. Like that is such a bad word that so many companies have tried to move away from but in one way or another, sometimes it all comes back to middleware. And even with the Mock approach, your micro services in some situations are basically micro middleware. And so yeah, they're definitely you got to be careful, because anytime you start talking about needing to build systems to help systems talk to other systems, your complexity in your cost is going up. But that's where again, I think that if you're very strategic about what you're building, and what you're buying, and how it all ties together, you can limit that cost, you can limit the number of things that need to tie together, sometimes you end up, you know, if you can build one thing, whether you build it as one big monolithic thing, or as a set of microservices are composable commerce, you can build that one thing that does what you need, instead of having to go out and buy three different things. In the end, that can be a lot cheaper on the integration side, because you have one thing you built that needs to talk to your other technology stack versus three different things you bought that maybe all three of those need to talk to each other and all of your existing technology.

Darin Newbold  9:10  
So all right, when you're building these things, let me ask you this, Josh, is a way to maybe make them work better together. You mentioned the mark and I know we talked about in another episode as well as composable commerce, but is there is there then a common language and I don't want to get into the you know, bits bytes bots, particles that have programming here, but is there a common set so that as long as I'm coding, or I'm putting together these these micro services, and I'm doing it under the same platform or the same language, and I'm using that same kind of language each and every time does that then make it by default work better together?

Joshua Warren  9:55  
Yeah, you know, a lot of it is the A and Mark stands for a API first, that you're focusing on your API first. And I'm trying not to, I can already see your eyes. But I'm going to try not to get too technical here, API application programming interface. It's a way that different systems can talk to each other. And there's kind of some standard API's now, or API protocols. And really Graph QL, being the one that, for the past few years has been kind of the darling of the developer world. So I think if you can buy or build things that take that API first approach that have full API coverage that use that graph, QL technology, it doesn't guarantee that it's plug and play. Again, that's one of those statements that they love to put in the brochures, just like it's all in one turn key, and you don't have to buy anything else. I don't ever trust it. But it's as close to turn keys, you're going to be able to get with these integrations. So it's, it's almost like saying they speak the same language, they just might need a common glossary that you put together for them.

Darin Newbold  11:00  
Okay, well, we got a little bit into the weeds here on on the pieces. But I'm glad we did, because it helps helps me understand what we're looking at. So for our listeners, and for those merchants out there that are thinking about this, what might be the decision making criteria that they might go through where they're deciding, okay, do I buy off the shelf? Or do I either in house? Or do I hire an integration team to build these pieces? For me? What's kind of that look like?

Joshua Warren  11:29  
Yeah, I think that, really the the first thing I would encourage, even before thinking about that criteria is to realize that this, the situation has changed a lot in the past two to three years. So I would encourage everybody to consider the bildet option, not just the buyout option, I think, in cases where it used to seem cost prohibitive, the costs are coming down, and it's becoming simpler to do. I think that if you're the smallest merchant, that's just getting started, I think there's a lot of safety and security in some ways in buying it versus building it. But really, as you get beyond that, and especially as your projects, if you if your business shares 99% of commonality with the average ecommerce business, go buy it, because you're the target market for these platforms, they've already built everything. Same time, I'd argue if your business has 99% in common with average ecommerce business, you might not have a business like you might not have a competitive advantage. Yeah, for sure.

Darin Newbold  12:34  
And it may be maybe going in and building it could be a become a competitive advantage. Could it be a situation where by building it by maybe maybe that creates the

Unknown Speaker  12:53  
well, the greater profit, because you can do it, maybe do more for less and and be able to increase in and outmaneuver your competition in those kinds of situations? Yeah, definitely. An outmaneuver is a really good point. Because when you're buying a platform, all a competitor has to do to match your features and functionality is go by that platform. When you're building it custom, then you can build in a competitive advantage that, yes, they can also build a custom solution to do that, but it's going to take them a little bit longer going to be a little bit more complicated.

Darin Newbold  13:25  
Yeah, so Alright, we've been talking and I kind of went down the path of kind of what are the negatives, if you will, or the challenges that could come up with this, the benefits are definitely there. But it really gives that that merchant the flexibility, and that's really what you're looking for. But it also goes back to even another episode where we're talking about previously about that MVP or MMP type of situation. And that's minimum viable product or minimum marketable product. And, and so with those things, being able to just plug in certain pieces, and quickly bring that to bear that really fits that model. And you've already told us, Josh, that's winning right there.

Unknown Speaker  14:11  
Oh, yeah, very much so. And kind of an example of that, that I can thought of is early in the pandemic, all the sudden curbside pickup was the hot new thing. And it took some of the platforms out there. They all eventually got there, but it took them a while. And then the companies that had teams building things custom, they were able to get there a lot faster, and they captured really a lot of revenue, when they were the only game in town that offered curbside pickup. Interesting and that goes along with it. That's like along with kind of the bonus if you will buy online pick up in store and being able to provide that because I know during COVID and all of that the

Darin Newbold  14:52  
difference between certain vendors when when I went to go to their curbside where it was they had thought it through well enough to know A, you don't just have to tell me when your car's here, tell me what parking spot you're at. And I will come exactly to that parking spot. And that makes a huge difference. Oh, yeah,

Joshua Warren  15:08  
there's a big difference between the sometimes almost handwritten signs that said, call our store at this number and tell us you're here versus the app giving you a notification saying we see you've parked tell us which parking spot number you're in. We'll be right out.

Darin Newbold  15:22  
Yeah, that's a really, really cool thing. All right. Well, any last thoughts on on buy it or build it in the, in our custom world of E commerce?

Joshua Warren  15:32  
Yeah, I would just say, there's, as with all of these fun things, there's not a one size fits all answer. And I think even if you find things within each company, you're going to find that it makes the most sense to buy in some cases and build another. So don't assume that you have to just do one or the other, I think that maybe your core EECOM platform, you end up buying, but then your surrounding ancillary services could be a good place where you might want to build,

Darin Newbold  15:59  
when you reminded me of one thing here, Josh, in that decision making criteria with some of the complexities here, doesn't this also come into play? If I'm a merchant, if I don't have a a team of developers that I have that have either the skills or or other the skills to do this, that kind of puts me at a place where buying it starts to me potentially make more sense where I can buy it, and then maybe make some adjustments to it. Whereas I guess the other opportunity in this, I want to ask you and get your thoughts on how do we how does it How does a merchant make the best decision around that?

Joshua Warren  16:40  
Yeah, I think you have to look at it as what are your long term commerce plans and kind of compare the costs of building out either an in house team or a relationship with an integrator versus buying everything, because I think that you could reach a point pretty quickly where it makes more sense financially, even to build that team or have a relationship with the team to be able to build things. Because, again, as we talked about back in that MVP episode, you should always be launching new features new functionality for your website, like it's not not a one and done kind of thing. And so if you're always going to be doing that, well, that might actually tip the financial skills towards wanting to build out a team.

Darin Newbold  17:23  
Yeah, that'd be fantastic. All right. Well, gosh, we'll leave you here. Do you buy it? Or do you build it? We've got some ideas for you. And as always, thank you for tuning into commerce today. And definitely like this one, and we would love in your comments. Let us know on the buy it or build it. Let us know what your thoughts are, and how you see things and obviously any questions so with that, as always, take care. Have a great rest of your day.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai