CHRIS: But usually, the other big piece is the end-user themselves may not be willing to make a large purchase without going through a quoting process on the group buying platform, and they may need to deal with a very complicated logistics issue. A lot of times that drives quotes. So they may actually need to deal with a complicated delivery or a complex, very detailed engineering diagram or something of that nature that's going to prevent them from immediately ordering on the site.
A quote process, generally speaking, needs to be thought of as an opportunity to make as much of it as self-service as possible. And where it's not possible to make it self-service, we want to automate everything, and in particular, manage the expectations—and I probably can't say that enough—we want to say how long we think it's going to take. What kind of lead time is there between each step? And then also, what are all of the steps? What are the steps, typically, to complete this process? Is there anything that the quote recipient can do to move it along quickly?
Email is usually going to be a primary form of communication to just verify that the quote was received. Depending on the availability of the team within the buying group—or even if we want to open it up to the sellers or the suppliers to be able to communicate with the buyers, with the members—they're going to have to be available to participate in a chat if we want to turn that on.
A lot of times we'll turn on a chat, but it has a hybrid capability where, if someone isn't available on either end, whether it's the buyer or the supplier or the buyers group, it will just accumulate into a message via email or whatever the preferred mechanism is for notifications. So that could be text, it could be email or some other format.
Ultimately, the means of communication would be through that chat tool, which would then accumulate itself into an inbox within the platform itself, as well as an email notification that would go out with relevant information. And then typically what we see is someone requests items. It may be part of a standard checkout, so they may have a standard set of items that they would just be able to purchase right away. A few of those items would be part of a quote, and then we can go ahead and process their traditional order without any delay.
Then the quote itself goes through a separate workflow. And for many of our clients, this will be a check on the shipping. They may not have their logistics fully automated. Again, just kind of as a hint for the listeners, this is absolutely something that can be heavily automated. So, if you're not aware of that, feel free to reach out to us. We're going to, of course, continue to be doing buying group webinars and we'll get into more detail on this.
But it's usually around logistics shipping. It may be related to large orders, quantities, or maybe even a customization that needs to occur. And there needs to be a verification of that before a large quantity of items are produced with possibly a detail that's off.
Those are some of the big things, Ron, that I see that folks are using quotes for. There are a lot more, of course, I'd love to hear any other examples that you're thinking of and kind of some of the nuances that might apply to.
RON: You said something about opening it up to suppliers. And I don't think many businesses fully understand the power of that feature in quality. So, for example, we did one company that didn't store or warehouse any products at all. They had 281 suppliers. Those 281 suppliers had seller dashboards within our platform. Our client was the one that owned the buying group website, and then the 281 vendors that they had relationships with could come in and upload their products, set their own price, set their own hard and soft stops—which is very customized for buying groups.
We'll probably have a chapter that will need to cover in a webinar, just strictly talking about hard and soft stops. Like when I go to Costco and I try to buy ketchup, they've got a hard stop. I have to buy in a pack of 12, right, because I’m buying in bulk. And so I can't go there and just pull it apart and say, “Well, I only need one.” You have to literally buy in bulk. And that's a hard stop.
A soft stop would be something like, hey, we normally sell this by the case. If you want to buy it separate, you have to pay a $50 fee for us to crack open the case and sell you singularly. That would be a soft stop.