Watch: Ask Me Anything Webinar With Travis Mariea, Flxpoint CEO

Travis Mariea:

Okay. Cool. So it looks like we are live, I just got confirmation there. Awesome. Well, thanks everyone for joining. Today is our first go around to ask me anything. My name is Travis, I am the CEO of Flxpoint. I’ve got one of these questions that ‘s perfectly put at the top of what we do, so I’ll dive into more about Flxpoint and what we do. But today really is about basically asking any question that you have on your mind around the company, around me personally, around our software. I’m not going to do a full screen share or anything like that today, but happy to talk through anything, point you in the right direction if it’s a more technical question, and then yeah, just give you the opportunity to kind of meet me more personally and then just talk through these kinds of questions. It looks like we had 13 or 14 questions submitted prior to this webinar, but we are going to be taking live ones. I will address all the live ones that come through here. I’ll try to address as many that we have already here from what you submitted when you registered. So happy to do that.

Travis Mariea:

All right, cool. With that said, I’m going to go ahead and get started here and start reading off the questions that were submitted and answering. Awesome. So the first one, super simple, super easy, kind of a layup here, but it looks like Karen from right here in St. Augustine, she says, “I would like to know what your company does, I am an eBay and Amazon seller located in St. Augustine.” So Karen, to answer that, really Flxpoint is a dropship automation platform. We do a lot of different things, we do more than just dropship, but we’re really focused on the dropshipper, the retailer that is reselling products, who uses an order management system, inventory management system, a general e-commerce operations platform we’ve been described as, as well.

Travis Mariea:

But basically we’re going to help you manage your inventory and your orders across multiple sources of inventory whether it’s from your dropship suppliers, your own warehouse, and then selling and listing them on multiple channels, whether it’s eBay and Amazon like yourself, or your own Shopify store, whatever it might be. So we’re that central hub that makes sure that all of the data, all the orders, the inventory’s in sync, everything’s kind of flowing back and forth and keeping your business running.

Travis Mariea:

We have a couple other businesses under the umbrella of what’s called Inventory Source. Inventory Source is another company of ours with a product which is a directory of online dropship suppliers, or dropship suppliers I should say in general, where we have this pre built integrated directory and you can automatically connect into this directory of dropship suppliers, sync inventory and orders, that’s one of our companies. US Direct is another sister company of ours where we give you access to, I believe it’s over 100,000 product SKUs, that are dropship ready from the top distributors in the US. We make it really easy where you are actually buying through us, we’re buying from the dropshipper, we’re facilitating all the technology through Inventory Source, and it’s basically instant access, instant approval to 100,000 plus products that you want to sell and dropship.

Travis Mariea:

So a couple different companies there, but really our main focus today and in general is Flxpoint. It’s more of that order management system, e-commerce operations platform that allows you to just run your business, your own warehouse inventory, your dropship inventory, multiple channels, everything gets synced up in one central platform.

Travis Mariea:

All right. Cool. Next one is, hi Travis, I’m new at this, I currently sell on Shopify. Shopify has their own CSV template to upload products, so they have their own template that you upload products to Shopify, I have five suppliers, all of them I have used CSVs to upload their products to my store. Okay. So this sounds like a retailer, a reseller of goods to Shopify store, he or she, or she I guess, has five suppliers that they have their own CSVs that they’re going to upload to her store to be able to sync inventory or add new products directly to the store, and then she says, “What is the best way and cost effective way to automate this?”

Travis Mariea:

So to answer this question there’s a couple different things, and I’m going to be as unbiased and impartial as possible. There’s some really cheap options out there in the Shopify app store that you can simply just take a CSV and sync it to your store. If you just search in Shopify app store, there’s little simple syncing apps that will do just that. You can probably even use Zapier. If you’re not familiar with Zapier, Z-A-P-I-E-R, that’s a great platform that we use for a couple things here, you could probably do it pretty cost effectively, even free in some cases. Our main value proposition at Flxpoint and Inventory Source in a lot of cases is sync [inaudible 00:05:14] inventory, but we’re really for that more experienced reseller that has got a lot more problems than just syncing inventory, whether it’s syncing up invoices, routing orders, automatically making decisions on where to send the order, things like that. Syncing full product data and bringing that into your system and modifying it, we’re a little more enterprise than a simple sync app.

Travis Mariea:

But you may run into certain sync apps that you might find that just sync a CSV to your website. The biggest issue you might run into is if you’ve got the same product from multiple suppliers, or you carry that product and your supplier also carries that product. So I sell Logitech mice because I have an electronics store, and I buy those in bulk and I keep those in my own warehouse, and I also have an agreement with Logitech to dropship the exact same mouse when I run out of my stock, they’ll dropship orders for me.

Travis Mariea:

If that’s the case, you’re going to run into issues when you’re trying to directly sync a supplier CSV. That’s where a Flxpoint product might come in and help automatically merge those products together, create one listing, aggregate the quantity, average the cost, whatever it might be. But if it’s simply just getting products into your store, there’s no overlap in product, there’s no inventory quantity kind of aggregation or anything like that, then you can… I think Syncio is one to look at, like I said Zapier is another system that might be able to pull files.

Travis Mariea:

Those files, the big thing to think about is a lot of times they might be… If they’re emailed to you automatically, you’re going to have to set up some kind of automation to get those down off an email. If your vendors just simply provide them to you ad hoc in another way, it could be a Dropbox link or whatever, you have to look around and see what makes the most sense. But like I said, Syncio is a real cheap option, Zapier, another option to look at. So the best way, the most cost effective way, the best way to answer that is it depends on your use case. If it’s a separate file, very simple file, I would go to the Shopify app store and that’s going to be the most cost effective way as well. If you have more complex needs, Flxpoint is obviously something that you could look at.

Travis Mariea:

All right. Cool. I’m just checking to see if we’ve got any questions in here yet. I’m not sure, I’m going to pull up and make sure that I can see the questions when they come through. Melanie, if you could ping me those, if you see one come through let me know, I’ve got the two screens going here. Yep. Okay, I can see your message, [Ahmed 00:07:56]. So yeah, anything you post in there I can see. All right. So the third question here is, do you collaborate and observe many companies operating in the e-commerce sales market? Have you noticed any interesting novelty recently, a new business model, anything that came as a surprise? I’m going to try to pronounce the name, hopefully I don’t butcher it, if you’re on, [Tadais 00:08:18], I think is the best way to pronounce that.

Travis Mariea:

So Tadais, I really like this question. I was hoping to kind of answer some of these outside of the typical product technical questions that we get. I would say the first thing that jumped out of my mind was the marketplace model is picking up significantly. We’ve seen some really large traditional brands roll out the marketplace model. We did not end up working with them, this is about two years ago, but we’ve worked with a couple others and we’ve seen this happen, but it’s worth mentioning because it’s a fairly large name, Brooklinen is a brand that we saw that has rolled out a marketplace model that is super interesting to see, and a trend that we have seen.

Travis Mariea:

We’ve rolled out other ones for other customers, I don’t want to bring up their name just for confidentiality perspective, but we’ve rolled out this as well where marketplace models and being a brand who wants to bring on other brands essentially that offer complementary products that are going to allow you to draw more people into your platform, give more of a unique offering, like in Brooklinen’s case, it’s all linen and sheets and pillowcases, that they can kind of do a shop the look approach with a lamp and a desk and things like that. They’re obviously not going to go and start procuring and bringing in a bunch of desks and lamps to their warehouse, they want to leverage the marketplace and the dropship model for that. So we see that more and more… we see that being a big piece of the marketplace being the marketplace model going forward.

Travis Mariea:

So I think that’s a big one that popped up. We’ve seen the social selling and the live selling is getting larger. We’ve had a couple customers come through, really pushing the live selling. Almost like the home shopping network type vibe, but kind of reinvented. So that’s been interesting too. Yeah, I’d say that’s been the two primary ones that really jump out at me that I’ve seen as of late.

Travis Mariea:

All righty, Andrew, so what is the process for onboarding suppliers that aren’t set up initially with live inventory, digital order receiving, etc. So Andrew asked basically if you want to onboard a supplier, they don’t have live inventory, they don’t receive orders digitally or basically automatically, how do you onboard them? Well, it has to start with the conversation, it’s a business partnership, you have to start with a conversation with your supplier on a couple things. This is one that we try to help our customers with and help drive this conversation where we can, but basically you’re asking, here’s our options, we want to send you orders automatically, we want to sync inventory, our options are to send these… Well, let’s start with inventory, to pull inventory from some system that you have and make things as easy as possible for you and less friction to you setting up anything on your side. Me as a retailer, reseller, talking to a brand, a supplier or wholesaler.

Travis Mariea:

When I say that, they’re going to say, “Well, we’re on Shopify,” or, “We’re on NetSuite,” or, “We’re on this system, X, Y, and Z system, how do I pull… What do you mean you want to pull my inventory?” Well, basically you need to say, “One, do you provide a feed to anyone already?” And if they say, “No, we’ve never done this before, we want to work with you but we don’t know how to do it,” then you start going down the path of talking about their systems. If they have done it, ask how they’ve done it the past. A lot of times they have provided a feed into export in some way.

Travis Mariea:

But if they don’t have that inventory today, as Andrew you asked, you could say, “Well, if you’re using something like Flxpoint…” You can basically say, “If you’re on Shopify, if you’re on big commerce, if you’re on a couple of these other platforms we integrate with, just give me an API key, we’ll be able to pull inventory directly out of your system, you don’t have to set anything up on your side.” And then from there you can provide them a portal, which Flxpoint’s got a vendor portal, there’s other systems that have vendor portals, where they can kind of dictate what products they want you to sell and not sell.

Travis Mariea:

So it makes it really easy for them, if they want to be extremely hands off and just say, “I don’t want to have to do anything, I can’t get approval from my boss, whatever, on setting up any more, I don’t have any budget,” basically you can just say, “Let us connect. If you’re one of these four, five different supported platforms, we can pull the inventory directly out and we’ll sync inventory and we’ll be able to feel good about the orders we send you that are actually in stock.” That’s step one.

Travis Mariea:

Step two, maybe they’re not on a supported platform, they don’t feel comfortable with you integrating directly into their system, you can talk through, “Okay, are you willing to update inventory into our system manually?” And that’s where the vendor portal comes in. Basically, we can’t integrate your system so we need to know what you have in stock and if you can do an export, if you can manually check and then manually update.” It’s going to be a lot tougher depending on what scenario you’re in, we do have many, many customers that their brands and their suppliers want their orders, they have a big enough name or audience to allow the vendors to… or at least to persuade the vendors to manually go and update inventory as well as receive orders to be a vendor portal, but that’s typically the way that you would onboard a supplier who does not have any automation is through a vendor portal.

Travis Mariea:

The biggest hurdle is convincing the vendor to do it. A lot of these brands and suppliers, they already do it for the large names out there, they don’t have automation set up, it’s not easy to do it, whatever, so they might even have a team that logs into four different portals every single morning and updates tracking information and inventory, so it might not be that big of a deal, but that is typically how you start the conversation. [inaudible 00:14:17] they don’t want to do that, [inaudible 00:14:19] if they’re not a big commerce store, we can easily just integrate with them with little need for them to do much.

Travis Mariea:

All righty. Okay, so next one we have here, what is the process for onboarding suppliers… Sorry, we just did that one. How do you handle media transferred over API on a granular level? Do customers get the option to select whether or not they can resize those images in transit and/or select specific product images so as to not overload their servers?

Travis Mariea:

So this is one where I will attempt to answer it. I might speak out of my level, my pay grade essentially, I might want to get my CTO on exactly how this works. I know there’s a [inaudible 00:15:10] store down images, we will bring down images into our system. So we can pull an API, let’s say in an API there’s a link to an image hosted somewhere, or even in some cases we will integrate with a zip file on a Dropbox location or individual files on a Dropbox folder.

Travis Mariea:

Either way we’re getting images into our system. We will actually cache them down and store those images in our system. I believe we store them in the original, the sizing part is where I’m not completely sure. I believe we store them in the original sizing. We may do some translation within the app to get the sizing in a more centralized format, and then when it comes to listing them, I do believe we have some channel specific image dimension kind of integrations that we do to basically optimize the images that we’re sending over to the systems, like the channels, Shopify, eBay, things like that.

Travis Mariea:

Also, with that said, a lot of those systems have their own optimization and dimension resizing as well. So with that said, we don’t see image, dimension, sizing, etc., as an issue very often. So I know we’ve put some work into certain scenarios. I know when I first joined on the Inventory Source side six years ago, there were more image questions and support issues we saw around images that I do remember several tasks that we’ve put into kind of address those. So I know there’s some stuff going on in the back end. I can’t speak specifics around that, but it seems to not be an issue and I know there’s some resizing going across both our product and the channels algorithms as well at work. And that was Justin.

Travis Mariea:

Is there an API key that allows us to connect to our IS account from our dropship company to manage VS CSV? I have so many products not on site now that we need an overhaul, thank you, [Jeanine 00:17:13]. So we do have the ability, Flxpoint specifically, where we can connect to your Inventory Source account. So if you have Inventory Source and you want to move over to Flxpoint and pull over all the products from Inventory Source, and then start. Well one, I’m not sure if I’m fully understanding the question, but you can definitely do that if that’s the case, you want to connect your Inventory Source account and start managing it in Flxpoint, the two managed items, VS CSV, I’m not really sure. If you want to move over and say you’re managing items in Inventory Source and you want to move over to managing a VS CSV file, you can certainly do that.

Travis Mariea:

We are a data management platform and you can switch over the input or output of that data. So I don’t see an issue there, but if you are a current Flxpoint user, certainly enter a support ticket or you can obviously go to Flxpoint and just hit contact us if you’re not a user yet, we can talk you through how that would work.

Travis Mariea:

So a couple questions slash things to talk about from Ahmed. I believe Ahmed’s on today. So awesome, happy to answer your question here live, and let me know in the chat here if I don’t fully answer it or if I can clarify anything. So listing in bulk and knowing listing status from Flxpoint rather than the marketplace. I’m trying to think about what we mean here. So listing in bulk and knowing listing status from Flxpoint rather than the marketplace.

Travis Mariea:

There is the concept of listing status in Flxpoint and showing that you’re either listed or linked up, whatever it might be. Really when you’re talking about listing status, it does coincide directly with the channel. So if it’s hidden on the channel and you look at your listing in Flxpoint, we’re going to show it as hidden because that’s really what we thought of when we rolled out Flxpoint was we want to show you what’s going on on your channel and that direct linkage there and that direct status connection in Flxpoint. So you have this one platform to view everything across multiple channels. You can look this channel listing is listed on Shopify, but it’s hidden on eBay and it’s out of sync on Amazon.

Travis Mariea:

So those are one-to-one kind of connections and syncs there. Mid max pricing, so you can account for mid max pricing with the pricing rules. This is going to be based on certain data that we have in our system or that you input directly. You can say, “Set to…” When you create a workflow for pricing, and you have different rules within that workflow, you could basically say, “If it’s in category T-shirts and it goes over $30, set it to $30.” Put that as a rule at the very bottom I believe, and it says it there in the workflow screen, but I think it’s the last… the very bottom is the last one it checks. If not it will say it’s the very top one. But I’m fairly certain it’s the very bottom one.

Travis Mariea:

You can do all products at 20% off cost, for T-shirts, mark up 40%, if the T-shirt’s black, and then at the very last, say, “If the T-shirt price is over $50, set to $45.” That would be kind of how you can do max pricing. It’s not really going to do anything when it comes to ceilings and floors when it comes to a repricing, so just to confirm that that’s not what I’m talking about, right? We do integrate with repricers like XSellco and Informed.co and things like that to be able to help set min and max pricing there, if you’re repricing on Amazon. But those are just two examples of how we can kind of support that.

Travis Mariea:

Reports on inventory management. I’d love to know more about the needs here on what. I think there’s one report we’re looking at here in kind of a stock replenishment report, what products are under zero quantity or under the quantity of five, are under internal source that you want to replenish them, today you can do that, essentially, by going to your inventory screen, going to manage filters, creating a new save filter, and just putting together a filter, and it’s essentially report within your inventory. If it’s more about what’s the most profitable item or what has sold the most, like a sales report, you certainly can see that in our profit… I believe it’s in the sales report, product performance report that’s in there as well. So that’s one.

Travis Mariea:

I would say any requests you have around inventory management reports, I would love to hear from… Either post them here as a suggestion in the chat. You can email me as well travis@flxpoint.com if you have any requests around inventory management reports that we can help you out with. A few questions from [Ransford 00:22:30]. How do I find what products the consumers are buying, not just searching for? Let me step back. So if you’re asking about data that we have, your sales, right, which I’m not sure if you are, I can clarify, but if you’re talking about your sales, orders that you’re getting, then we obviously have order reports that you can run and you can do filters in the order screen to kind of get an idea of certain products that are selling more. Probably a performance report. Honestly, if you’re talking about products, it’s probably the best.

Travis Mariea:

Other software out there that would take all data and data from Amazon and different places like that. I think Keepa is one of the top ones that you can look at trends. Jungle Scout, as well, gives you an estimated sales volume based on bestseller rank and things like that. So those are other software platforms out there that help you kind of look at Amazon data, is what they’re typically using, because that’s really the only data you’re going to have. That’s just something to look at.

Travis Mariea:

All right, let me look at [inaudible 00:23:45]. Do you recommend [inaudible 00:23:46]? This is actually a good one. Also, from Ransford here, do you recommend an e-commerce site for product sales and a WordPress site for your blog? And is a blog necessary for success? Love that question, it’s a great question because five years ago, I bet you’d get different answers from different people and maybe obviously still today. But I would say you can have, and I would recommend having a both on one, given you feel good about the SEO capabilities, plugins, there’s no major issue holding you back on [inaudible 00:24:19] store. That’s kind of a loaded answer.

Travis Mariea:

What are the SEO implications and issues? You want to create engaging content, most platforms allow you to create pretty good engaging content, [inaudible 00:24:32] just means really well formatted, laid out, proper title tags and then obviously, it’s up to you to create good content that’s better than the next, embed a video, embed a podcast, link to the proper relevant articles and then get backlinks. That’s how you win SEO is creating great content better than the next person and making sure that it’s structured in a way that the keywords you’re trying to rank for are prevalent in the actual blog post and in the H1 titles, tags and titles, meta descriptions written well and you’re getting clicks, people are staying on it. That’s number one.

Travis Mariea:

Where you might run into hiccups or why this might in the past have been an issue is whether the way that the handle or the permalink is generated and managed from a certain store, might not be SEO friendly. It might be that, in general, your site loads slow, which page speed is a big thing. The content, because you can’t create… There might not be really good content creation tools, and that might not appear gray or the markup language and the meta descriptions and things like that in the back don’t really kind of add up. I’d say today, most of these platforms, I know Shopify has made huge strides, and they’re actually adding a lot more. Just in their recent unite conference, they mentioned a lot more focus on the blogging and content creation side.

Travis Mariea:

So I’d say Shopify, WordPress, WooCommerce is a good combination, obviously, too, but Shopify is catching up pretty quickly to where it’s negligible on what you can do from a blogging perspective, with Shopify versus WooCommerce, and WordPress combo, that I don’t think it’s worth just the management headache, the domain redirects and just the fact of using two different platforms. I could be wrong, there could be a huge advantage, but it’s honestly all relative. And each person will be a little bit different. You create good content, and you’ve got just the standard boxes checked, as far as technical on-page SEO, which most of these platforms should have all these boxes checked by now. BigCommerce and Shopify at least. Then I think you’ll be fine. I would say one is fine.

Travis Mariea:

Then is a blog surface access? No, it’s not. I think the value is if you do make SEO a big part of your strategy, creating good content, a blog is one of the best ways to do that and get ranked for certain keywords. I think blogging, in general, adds more personality to your website, it adds more value, and it can help increase conversions, but that’s debatable. And, yeah, if it’s part of your strategy, then it’s obviously going to be part of your success. But if it’s not, and you have a completely different strategy… I mean, there’s tons of people in Oberlo that make a ton of money and flip Shopify websites, and you never even look at their blog, you just look at one product page, and that’s it. They were successful in their own right. So it’s all relative when it comes to how you envision your success.

Travis Mariea:

All right. Couple others here. Let me check in and see. Here’s one coming through. [inaudible 00:27:57] store [inaudible 00:27:59]. Yep. So this question is mostly about the difference between Inventory Source and Flxpoint, and if Inventory Source is different from Flxpoint. Specifically around Amazon, and how to match to certain ASINs, and can you match to multiple ASINs and things like that? So the way that this works, and I think this is the genesis of this question, the way that we, both Inventory Source and Flxpoint works, is that we will send up a UPC or an ASIN to Amazon at our request, in our integration. We’ll say, “We want to list this item on this user seller central.”

Travis Mariea:

When we do that, Amazon will say, “That’s great. Here’s a unique ID, we’ve found this.” And if it’s a UPC, it’ll look at multiple ASINs that are associated with that UPC. It’s unfortunate that there will be multiple ASINs, but there are, because that’s how Amazon works. It allows anyone to create an ASIN, anyone can add a UPC, it’s not a one-to-one relationship. So in some cases, you may get a UPC that we send Amazon, Amazon decides to pick the wrong ASIN. So to avoid that, you can send the ASIN and then that is a one-to-one. I know this ASIN, I want to list this product on that ASIN. So you can do that in both Inventory Source and Flxpoint. Neither tool can list one product to multiple ASINS, I don’t believe today in Flxpoint. If you could do it anywhere, it would be Flxpoint. So that that part is also the same.

Travis Mariea:

I will say, and to the point of Matt, linking up to gated categories and stuff like that, we’re going to list these products, we’re going to bring back error messages when we try to link or send an item to something that you don’t have approval to list on. So Flxpoint has a little bit more error messaging, I believe. As far as differences, if we were to say, “List this grocery item,” and I believe grocery is a gated category, and Amazon has determined that UPC, that ASIN we sent is in the grocery category, we’re going to get a little bit more error messaging back. But Flxpoint, Inventory Source, neither one’s going to be able to list a product that you don’t have privileges to list. So just something to think about there.

Travis Mariea:

Then the error reports, we’re kind of at the mercy of Amazon to bring back what the error is. Inventory Source does lack the error reporting of what that is, and usually it’s kind of viewed by this support team. Flxpoint got a little bit more robust error messaging on, “Here’s what the actual error was,” gated versus non gated, or restricted item or brand restriction or whatever it might be. So hopefully that answers that.

Travis Mariea:

All right. Next one, is EDI always better than FTP integrations, from [Nicolas 00:30:58]? Yeah, so we say better, it typically takes longer and it’s typically more expensive to set up. But if we’re talking about better as in more reliable, more timely, more accurate inventory, those two specifically, from the order side, sending orders that we know, in most cases, the supplier is going to have an automated process to handle tracking, same thing. Yes, it is better because if you think about EDI and API integrations typically require a developer to help configure and build those. FTP is a flat file, typically on a FTP server. And so these are a little bit more kind of like a poor man’s EDI, if you will. Where that really means that you can essentially send a file over an FTP, no developer needs to do anything, it’s fairly easy to just upload a file to an FTP and then now this supplier can take this FTP down, do something with it.

Travis Mariea:

Maybe you’re lucky enough that they have an automated process to pull down that file from FTP, automatically add it to your system. But typically, if it’s FTP, and not API or EDI, an FTP can mean that there’s a manual process behind the scenes from the supplier. So it can be open to manual issues, which is like duplicate entry, or just miss entry, or just being slower than the EDI API orders coming in. So it is always better to do API and EDI, but with that said, you’re going to have to pay for it, and it’s going to take a lot more time and effort upfront. So it’s worth starting with a more simple method, and then going from there if you can, and then implement it.

Travis Mariea:

So [inaudible 00:32:50], here we go. Flxpoint has a lot of overlapping functionality with my ERP. How can your team help me figure out what I should be doing? And I guess it says ERP versus Flxpoint. Yeah, what I should be doing in the ERP verse Flxpoint, that’s from [Ashley 00:33:06]. So actually, I would outline what you’re looking for, like, why are we looking at Flxpoint today? What does your ERP do today? I will say that Flxpoint is typically going to be better than your ERP in the vendor management, the inventory management of multiple vendors and products across multiple vendors, the listing of inventory to sales channels and marketplaces. We’re going to be better than that order management, inventory management flow.

Travis Mariea:

When it comes to accounting, and a little bit more kind of like reporting, I think ERPs are going to do a little bit more there. A lot of ERPs are focused around accounting, and some inventory management. But there might be some more reports and accounting kind of functioning on an ERP that, a lot of times, we’re going to look to sync with an ERP. When I say sync, we have an exposed API, you can easily just integrate your ERP to our API, and then bring the data over that you would need.

Travis Mariea:

We see a lot of cases where NetSuite is a very common ERP in the e-commerce space, where we’ve integrated with NetSuite in cases that they need to use NetSuite, the customer needs to use the [inaudible 00:34:22] one is [inaudible 00:34:25] where they want our dropship integration capabilities, our order routing capabilities, our inventory management, whatever it might be, and so we’ll integrate directly to NetSuite. We’ve seen other cases, much more cases where someone goes, “I bought NetSuite. It’s overkill for what I needed to do. It’s too expensive or too clunky or just too much, it does everything but it’s just too much for me.” We’ve seen people completely replace it with Flxpoint. Not saying that works for everyone, so we are open and flexible enough to work with NetSuite and integrate with them, or if you don’t see the need in NetSuite, we can certainly fill that gap.

Travis Mariea:

That’s the kind of way to think about it, if you see the need to keep your ERP, which is usually the case, we have an open API to take the data that you get in our system, and move it to the ERP. That’s one way of looking at it. Also, looking at it as an extension of keep bringing everything into your ERP, all your sales channel information, sales orders, inventory information, all that. And then when it gets to a integrated vendor, or integrated warehouse or dropship supplier, when it gets to that, we pick up a purchase order, or the full order, whatever you decide to configure from NetSuite and we will be that extension to your vendor network. We’ve seen people implement NetSuite or other ERPs in that way, as well, in addition to just mirroring the data.

Travis Mariea:

A new question or a few questions from Jason, have you always been in the e-commerce software market? So, personally, I’ve been in the e-commerce software market for, well, about eight years. I ran a marketing agency where we did consulting around e-commerce software, we didn’t have a platform, we didn’t have a product, we kind of had a service platform in my past company, so about nine years, actually, I should say. I did that for about three years, and then I’ve been with Inventory Source and now Flxpoint for six years. So it’s been about a decade. Then did some cloud migration, Google Apps, Google workplace, or what they call it now? Google Workspace, migration stuff prior to that.

Travis Mariea:

What do you think the future of SaaS will be in the next 10 to 20 years? Well, I mean, who is it? Marc Andreessen, the whole software eating world. I mean, basically, SaaS software, interchangeable, it’s basically… it’s just going to be pervasive, and everything we do, it’s going to replace a lot of things that we do manually today. A lot of SaaS apps, you’ve heard people say, it’s a UI on top of a spreadsheet. I think that’s a funny way to look at it is that anything you’re using for a spreadsheet now today, there’s probably going to be a specialized domain specific app around that.

Travis Mariea:

Spreadsheets are super flexible, and really easy to get going, everyone knows them. But there’s a lot missing in that wide breadth and flexibility of a spreadsheet, that a more dedicated SaaS app on top of it is going to be there. So honestly, I don’t know if spreadsheets will ever go away, but when I talk about the future of the SaaS market in next 10 to 20 years is think about everything you’re doing first with a spreadsheet, and all these little micro use cases sitting on top of it, that will be a bunch of… SaaS apps will replace all those use cases that you’re using a spreadsheet for today. And you’ll still have spreadsheets, I’m sure for years on end just to have that flexibility of spinning up something new that hasn’t or doesn’t make sense to have a dedicated purpose for. Then you’re even seeing spreadsheets blurring the line with SaaS apps, Airtable is a great example. There’s other ones out there as well. So it’ll be interesting.

Travis Mariea:

SaaS in general, software as a service in general, next 10, 20 years, it’s just going to continue to explode. The revenue model in general has been why we really defined SaaS, it’s no longer this kind of hosted on-premise side of things. We’re already pretty mature in that model and the SaaS ecosystem. But seeing how that grows, it’s just going to grow exponentially. I think it will be the de facto way to buy software, and it essentially is now, but I have to look at the numbers. Honestly, if it’s not in the high majority of software that’s out there, and it might not be, I expect it to be in the next 10 or 20 years. I don’t know how many people are still buying massive servers on five-year contracts. Maybe they are, maybe they’re not, I don’t know.

Travis Mariea:

How can online sellers improve their fulfillment operations with automation? Yeah, so this one, they’re filling operations with automation. So basically, like anything else, like I was just talking about, SaaS will help you, and our software specifically, will help you take the manual process that really isn’t efficient. And when it comes to fulfillment, that means sending purchase orders to dropship suppliers, it means fulfilling your own orders in house, it means splitting up an order and deciding where it should go, whether it goes to you, a different supplier, or both, automating those processes.

Travis Mariea:

So how to improve their fulfillment operations? It’s really reducing errors when it comes to these manual processes, like sending Pos, copy and pasting and tracking, updating inventory, stuff like that. It’s really around that, it’s taking more time. Several people have come to us and said, “I’m spending six hours a day doing these, these and these,” basically things that we can help automate. So it’s giving you time back, reducing the errors in the manual process, and allowing you to just kind of gain a competitive advantage to fill quicker, improve customer experience because of that, and reduce errors along the way as well.

Travis Mariea:

Okay, the last one is… It’s a little off topic, but it was a question, so I might as well answer it here. I mean, maybe I’m thinking about it in a different way. But Edith asked, “Talk about the benefits of migrating to AWS.” We did migrate to AWS, I’m not sure if that’s public knowledge, or how Edith, you might have known about that. But we did go to AWS, if that’s what you’re referencing here. The benefits in general, what most customers of AWS and most companies see is that now we’re on this highly redundant, elastic cloud with data centers all over the world run by data center experts. So Flxpoint was in the cloud, it was on Oracle Cloud, we had that kind of side of things.

Travis Mariea:

But now the ecosystem and the infrastructure that AWS has rolled out really allows us to say… We have a customer now that’s got 16 million products that we sync, and that’s not affecting any other customer’s bandwidth, or ability to sync inventory, or how quickly their page refreshes, or whatever it might be. It’s multi-tenant infrastructure, and it’s elastic, and it can expand to however many jobs and processes we need. So we can constantly bring on more customers, infinite amount of customers, infinite amount of product data and inventory, and it won’t bog down one person versus the other. So that’s kind of a benefit of being able to migrate to AWS and really have the options that AWS has to set up this kind of elastic infrastructure.

Travis Mariea:

All righty. Cool. So yeah, I mean, that was really all the questions we had come through today. I really appreciate this. I wanted to open up to you guys and really answer anything that you might have had in the past or if you have now, you have something in the future, let me know. Happy to answer questions via email. From a support perspective and deep technical knowledge, our team members here are really better suited for that, but feel free to shoot me an email, I’ll get you in touch with the right person, travis@flxpoint.com. Yeah, besides that, that’s all I had today. So have a great day. Thanks for joining.