Joshua Warren 0:06 Building your own order management components can be more cost effective than buying. It's one of those few areas like, you don't want to go out and build your own e commerce platform from scratch, even with composable commerce, that's way too expensive. But order management, there's enough existing pieces out there. There are some tools we're going to talk about later, that once you look at all that you look at what a platform like Magento provides, there's not a lot of additional glue or additional pieces you need to add. And so that really changes the the total cost of ownership makes it more cost effective. Darin Newbold 0:42 Good day, and welcome to Commerce Today. My name is Darren Newbold. And as always, with me, my fun loving, awesome sidekick, Josh, Warren, Josh, how you doing today? Joshua Warren 0:52 Pretty good. Why don't I get promoted demoted to sidekick, that's a new one, Darin Newbold 0:56 hey, I got to come up with something fun, it'll, there'll be something fun each and every one going forward, I'm sure. So if you could have only been here for about 30 seconds to 90 seconds prior to going live, you would have really loved the conversation. But with that teaser in mind, we're going to talk about composable commerce for Magento order management. So there's a lot involved there. But this is an opportunity for you as the merchant to really take a look at and uncover that transformative world of the composable commerce in and how it relates. And we want to really tie this into order management and specifically Magento order management. So with that kind of lead in maybe a little primer or review for those that may have missed an earlier episode, because we did talk about composable commerce. So from that, Josh, kind of what are the implications of composable commerce kind of as it looked like, and then the implications around order management? Joshua Warren 1:54 You mean, people don't just start with Episode One and watch every episode of our podcast. And this Darin Newbold 1:59 is where we tell you stop now. If you haven't, and go back and listen, go hell, please don't please. Joshua Warren 2:05 So composable commerce, it's almost like building blocks is the way I like to look at it. If you think about what are the children's building blocks, that we can put them together in different combinations, even think of Legos, you put them together different different pieces can do kind of different things, depending on how you're using them and building them together. So it allows you to construct deconstruct rearrange your entire eCommerce technology stack. And where it really comes in for order management is, I feel like there's a lot of especially mid market companies out there that aren't well served by the existing off the shelf order management systems, that if they take a composable approach, they can actually build out a much better order management experience. Darin Newbold 2:47 Hmm. So can you maybe help contrast a little bit the traditional approach of an order management system to what this might look like. Joshua Warren 2:57 So in traditional order management systems, least the many, many I've had the chance to work with, they really treat every business the same, they kind of assume that you know, orders come in packages go out, and that there's only a few combinations of how you might want to do that. But when you when you drill down into them, you know, some of them will have rules based engines to try to help map how orders should be fulfilled. But, you know, as we've learned on our projects, when you start trying to make something infinitely flexible, it just gets too complex, it gets too expensive, too time consuming. So there's a lot of rules and restrictions, kind of inherent in traditional order management platforms, there's assumptions of you'll never want to split an order more than this many times. Or you'll always want to source orders in this certain way that are kind of baked into those platforms. Darin Newbold 3:47 Okay. And then, so obviously, composable bring some advantages to that whole process. Besides maybe, you know, greater control over that experience, what else would merchants find? That would provide them that better control and advantages, if you will? Joshua Warren 4:07 Yeah. So they, I think the the control over the customer experience is probably the biggest and best thing if you look back at our last few episodes, or some of the things on our blog, like being able to create that kind of bespoke custom customer experience. That's the real competitive advantage in E commerce these days. And the kind of building off of that, though, is actually think that we use composable technologies, building your own order management components can be more cost effective than buying. It's one of those few areas like you don't want to go out and build your own ecommerce platform from scratch, even with composable commerce. That's way too expensive. But order management. There's enough existing pieces out there through some tools we're going to talk about later, that once you look at all that you look at what a platform like Magento provides. There's not a lot of additional glue or additional pieces you need to add and so that really He changes the the total cost of ownership and makes it more cost effective. And then also, it's just so much easier to customize. And again, going back to what I was saying earlier about the traditional platforms that kind of lock you into certain assumptions when you're building your own kind of component for order management, you know, obviously build it to match exactly what your brand wants to do. Darin Newbold 5:21 How would we implement this? How would we bring this bring this forward? And how does that look different than a traditional order management kind of solution? Joshua Warren 5:29 Yeah, so with a traditional order management solution, you're selecting a solution, buying it integrating into your E commerce platform, training our people and how it works. Darin Newbold 5:39 So it doesn't just come packaged with the E commerce platform that you select No, Joshua Warren 5:43 no, typically, it's going to be definitely gonna be something separate. So it's always an add on is always an add on. So but it really was composable commerce, the way you're gonna build it out is you're going to look at what your ecommerce platform already provides. So look at what Magento or Adobe commerce, what they're already providing, and then look at what other pieces you need and decide which of those pieces do you want to buy, which of those pieces do you want to build. And so kind of the, the example I wanted to give today of one tool that I've seen that works really well, service called shipper HQ, which I need to add that into our show notes to link out to shipper HQ, they have done all the heavy lifting as far as integrating in with Magento. integrating it with UPS, USPS, I mean all the major carriers, a lot of the carriers you've never heard of as well. And so you can use that as a tool to where basically shipper HQ plus Magento. Now you're just having to build a little bit of that order management that you need. And we've actually seen, yeah, we've done that for a client, it was a very interesting approach. So wow, that Darin Newbold 6:47 sounds awesome. And I was going to you started to answer in a way, my question that I was going to bring up of what this would ultimately look like, and I think you're gonna get there, as we as we walk through this. So is there any special steps of the integration that would need to take place that would be part of this that would differ or wildly different or make it harder in some way? Joshua Warren 7:09 I think the the biggest difference is, when you're building this out through composable commerce, you're building the order management piece yourself, the Pro and the con, is you're also going to build the interface for your employees. So you get to decide, do you want to build it with a Magento admin panel? Do you want to build it separately, we actually use headless and Graph QL on one of our projects where we could build this out separately, and custom tailor the experience to where it was just as easy as possible for the stores, were able to basically make it look and work just like the retailers other tools to lower the the training burden as well. That's huge. Darin Newbold 7:45 That is huge. And that's, I can see obviously potential improvements and advantages that are all part of that. So and you You teased on there the Graph QL and how that comes to comes together. Is there anything else that is is critical to how that interface plays together? To build these out? Joshua Warren 8:06 I think the main thing to know is that if you're going to try to do this yourself, if you have an in house technical team development team, they definitely need to look at the Graph QL functionality in Magento and Adobe commerce that that is the the right way to go about building this. It's made for composable commerce. And it just makes it so much easier to build a solution like this. Darin Newbold 8:29 Okay. So you keep saying easy, efficient, lots of flexibility. So it must be pretty, relatively easy to put something like this together, right? Joshua Warren 8:38 I think honestly, the hardest part of this is getting the business rules documented, basically getting your stakeholders all in a room together on a zoom together and deciding so you just made it impossible. Exactly. Now this is the role so often that I end up playing in these projects is almost like a counselor of saying okay, yes, as Director of E commerce, I know that you want everyone to receive their packages next day. But CFO, I know that you don't want to pay for that. And kind of mapping out between those different departments. But things like if you're gonna allow orders to be split. So thinking about omni channel order management, you might be shipping from a warehouse, you might be shipping from a store, you might be shipping from third party. There's a lot of different options there. And you have to decide if someone builds out a cart and they place an order. And that order has to come from four different locations. Do you want to pay for that? Do you want to pay for the shipping from four different locations? Or do you want to cancel it? Do you want to cancel just the part that is going to cost you extra to ship? Just different things like that. And I think the biggest decision really to make in omni channel order management is do you prioritize cost or do you prioritize experience? So do you fulfill things that cheapest way, or do you fulfill them? The fastest was the Darin Newbold 10:02 the proverbial triangle? Yeah, Joshua Warren 10:04 you Darin Newbold 10:05 can have, you can only have two of them you so you have to pick two out of the three. Yeah, that's gotta be a challenge. Well, and this is this is why kind of making fun of myself, which we always like to do on the shows, and pretty much all the time. This is why you send me the notes in advance, and I ought to read all of the notes, because my question ultimately gets answered in the last, or next to last section here that we're talking about. But I wanted to really dive in what does this look like, because I'm a, I don't have to see it, per se. But if you can tell me the story about it, and I can visualize, it'll, it'll become a little bit more real. So what are maybe some case study some experience that that you have, that you might be able to share? Where this really worked, and what it looked like, yeah, in Joshua Warren 10:45 the show notes, we're going to link out to our website that will take you under the case study to go into more details. But I can say, you know, I've done this most recent project I'm thinking about was for a major pharma home retailer. And it was a, it was in part to eliminate kind of some vendor lock in on their platform. So they had an order management platform they were using were they were beholden to the creator of that platform. And it didn't always do what they wanted it to do, the platform didn't always make the decisions that they wanted them to make. And so by building out this custom solution, you know, pulling Graph QL and, and the solid foundation of Magento into it, we're able to eliminate that. So now they are totally in control of their order management system and have that kind of omni channel fulfillment process. Darin Newbold 11:33 What have they seen? That really shows them? Wow, this was a great decision to do it really glad we did it. How can we do more and make it better? Joshua Warren 11:42 I think the biggest thing, and it's not the most technically exciting thing, biggest thing has been that lowered training costs. Basically, when a new employee comes in, this doesn't look like you know, some cool new ecommerce platform, this looks like the same system the store is using for everything else. So Darin Newbold 11:59 I can't tell you how key that is. It's amazing. When you bring on a new hire, and being able and you're going through the list a everything looks, here's this look and feel and then all of a sudden, well. And we also use this other weird system and everything's backwards, upside down or something different. Yeah, eliminating those things are, are so key. Have they seen any, from the overall customer experience, not just internal, but maybe even out to their customers? Has there been things that they've seen there that have helped, Joshua Warren 12:28 it's allowed them to more quickly look at basically responding to customer demand. So if customers in a certain area are starting to want more of a specific product, or even they're starting to want more of the ship from store experience, that sort of thing? It's, it's still in the works. But there's some experiments that we're able to do now that we have this composable approach to order management where we can say, okay, let's just turn on this one store and say, 50 miles around the store, we're going to allow ship from store just to see how customers react to it. See if rolling that out kind of chain wide makes sense or not. Darin Newbold 13:05 And you'd have that ability, that flexibility to control it to that. That's awesome. That is awesome. Wow, well, hey, if you didn't learn anything from this episode, I sure did. So composable, what a great option in the order management area, something that seems like it could be a fit all the way around. And for a Magento site. This is a great solution. So I guess kind of wrapping this up or putting the bow on it? What's your what's your advice to the E commerce directors out there? Joshua Warren 13:36 I think that there's a lot of platforms talking about composable commerce. Everyone likes using the words omni channel and composable commerce. I'm excited because you know, I've seen with my own my own eyes and seeing the code and seeing it work, where Magento can be used in this composable way and to solve this specific need. And I think a lot of the platforms out there talking about composable commerce, they don't have a lot of actual use cases, or they don't have the most practical use cases. And to see this and see this project be successful. See how you can have such a core critical experience built pretty quick and relatively inexpensively was really encouraging. So definitely, of course, I always love Magento and Adobe commerce, but if you're using them look more at Graph QL and using that in a composable way for things like order management. If you're not then if you're not on Magento or Adobe commerce, I think it's a good chance to say hey, what sort of commerce composable commerce capabilities does my current platform have? Exactly? Do they allow this sort of flexibility? How can I you know, deploy something like this using that platform? Darin Newbold 14:47 Yes. And the other thing was good to kind of bring back up was you had spoken a little bit about shipper HQ I was gonna say IQ is shipper HQ, and how great of a solution that is what a great first step to bring full Word and their integration and ability to do kind of be that one stop shop. If you need to ship it, they got it handled. That is a great way to get this started. Well, if there's any last things Joshua Warren 15:11 I just say with shipper HQ, and they're not paying me to say this, I need to ask them to pay. Yes. Darin Newbold 15:18 I should go invoice on the way. Yeah, no but Joshua Warren 15:21 shipper HQ, what I love about it is it allows the merchants I work with to control the shipping experience without having to pay a developer to modify some code. So you want to change how the shipping quotes appear. You want to put delivery dates, you know, receive this by x date onto your product pages, things like that. You're able to control all that with shipper HQ without needing a developer without needing to make deployments. It is a really good first step, if you're not going to go full composable omni channel order management, I think it's a good place to start. Darin Newbold 15:53 So quick question on that before we close up. Is there a size or a threshold of of a merchant or a type of merchant where that would be a great solution? Because I could see where that shipper HQ could be overkill? Maybe for, hey, I've got, you know, a smaller subset of products and it's easy, and it's not real complicated. What might that is there something Joshua Warren 16:16 honestly, the times I've worked with them, I have found that shipper HQ kind of scales, any size, really even smallest, especially if you're on an E commerce platform, or using a shipping carrier where you can't out of the box, provide the delivery date of saying you'll receive this on Tuesday, which there's not a lot of platforms that do that by default. That feature alone is worth it on your conversion rate to use your breach queue even as a small simple merchant. Darin Newbold 16:45 Wow. Okay. Well, if you haven't heard it before, you heard it here first. And with Commerce Today, we want to always be bringing you the best and brightest of what's happening in the world of commerce, and composable commerce for your Magento order management is a great way to go. We appreciate you listening, as always, and until next time, take care Transcribed by https://otter.ai