CHRIS: Of course, depending on where you're shipping to and you're fulfilling to, you may have customs duties and taxes. Really the list goes on, the B2B payment gateway payment processor as well. So there are a lot of systems you're going to be integrating with. So the bottom line for these systems is, if you think about your workflow and you think about what a customer is experience is going to be, especially with a buying group, they're going to be looking to get sophisticated information that's very precise about the large-quantity purchase and possibly the complex order fulfillment where they may have multiple locations, they may have a split-payment model that they need to implement.
They may have to have complex billing where it's possibly purchasing on account based on an account balance that they already have. Maybe they're going to be splitting out all the invoices across multiple locations, and those have to get integrated into there. Maybe a punchout catalog. The list the list of different variations really, truly does go on. Maybe they have a multi-step approval process that we need to know about and be able to keep in sync with the different roles and users within the organization.
Well, how in the world are you going to do all these things and scale your organization? We really leverage an integration platform to do that. And the idea behind the integration platform is going to be a two-way data sync. They can run in real time, it can run periodically, they can do both. And it's going to need to be persistent so that if, for example, your buying group software is running and taking orders, but for whatever reason, there's maintenance on the ERP or possibly the payment gateway B2B solution isn't working properly, we still want to be able to process things and maybe complete parts of the steps and persist the data depending on what other dependent system is offline. Then be able to persist that data through to the offline system whenever it comes back online.
You don't want to have a situation where someone can't place an order on your website as a member because your ERP is undergoing maintenance and patching. And so the integration platform is key to be able to handle those type of scenarios with the persistence.
The other big factors with an integration platform is it allows you to not just have spaghetti code where you're setting everything up and you're intermingling it. Think of like two different colors of Play-Doh that you're mixing together. Whenever you set up a buying group platform, depending on what vendor you work with, they may actually set everything up manually within the buying group software for the integrations. And this lack of normalization or lack of separation between the buying group software and the other line of business applications—ERP, CRM, customer support, etc.—that basically makes it so that it's like mixing two colors of Play-Doh. Whenever you go to upgrade your buying group software or upgrade your ERP or upgrade your CRM, it's very expensive and it's traumatic. It can create a lot of overhead for your customers. This is just from a principle perspective, some of the key things.
Now we can put a list on the screen to show some of the different ERPs, CRMs, line of business applications, and show you some of the logos of some of the different platforms we work with and different payment gateways, different shipping and logistics resources, as well as the standards. What we want you to take from this is essentially we can work with anyone that has essentially an API or a desire or an ability to be integrated to. We've pretty much done it for any of the most popular platforms out there and for quite a few of the very industry specific platforms as well.
Now, the next thing that a lot of folks will want to know is, what are some of the common things that make sense to integrate with? Well, we also have a list of those, and so we can show those on the screen as well. But obviously we need the base data and we need to be able to integrate the base information.
So this is going to be your customers, the customer address information, all of the customer's order history, if that makes sense to bring in. Their contact info, the different users or contacts within the organization, what their roles are, what access they should have. The pricing list and the pricing groups for the customer, the ability to get all of the orders, invoices, quotes, and all of the detail line items for those. Any discounts, any tracking, any detailed information about returns, return requests. This will all be a part of the buying group platform.