S4E9: Brent Peterson

Welcome to Commerce Famous, a podcast that celebrates the celebrities of our industry. Join us for a conversation with the tastemakers in ecommerce. In their daily lives, these are just normal everyday people like you and me. But to us, they are commerce famous. Welcome to Commerce Famous, episode number nine on season four.

Joining me is Brent Peterson, the world famous Brent Peterson. Brent, welcome. Yeah. Thanks, Jason. Thanks for having me.

Pleasure being here. Where's this podcast find you today? In Hawaii? In Minnesota? Where are you?

I'm in sunny and warm Minnesota, trying to get the best of both worlds. You follow the sun, just like a just like a delivery. Okay. Well, let's bust into it. Brent, the reason you're on the podcast today, obviously, we we know you well.

You're a great guy. You've been in our ecosystem for four years. But the reason we're interviewing you today is because you just, along with your business partner, Isaac, released a really compelling report. Can you tell us about what that report is? Yeah.

We wrote a report on this the state of b to b or better I think the the it's better about opportunities that are in b to b today. And b to b is use the AI term ever changing. It's an ever changing world of b to b. I just made that up. That's I'm not an avatar.

But it's called, b two b commerce trends and opportunities, and it's a report by, on the state of b two b, but also what's happening in B 2 B. And it's not just from myself doing research. It's actually from the people that are doing it on the ground. So Isaac and I interviewed seven different partners, nine different people, and really got a good, I call it, a a really three sixty view of what's happening in certain segments. Well, let's let's break it down a little bit.

Talk a little bit about well, first of all, this is not an AI generated report. Maybe let's start there. How did the process go? Talk us a little bit about, that journey. Yeah.

I mean, that thank you for that because, it is human and I have hundreds I hate to tell you hundreds of hours into this, as does Isaac. So we did we did actual physical interviews with our folks here, and we did do we did a lot of research. Don't I I I shouldn't say we didn't do a lot of, background research, but, we we did the interviews. Isaac put it together as a story. So it doesn't read like a technical document.

It reads like a mixture of of news and tech and tech and and a story. And we dove into some areas that we think are relevant in today's, market. And then we talked to the partners that are really working hard in those areas, and are implementing solutions across a lot of different brands in those specific areas. So we talked about data readiness and your ERP. And what does that mean?

How does it mean to get your e your data data for right ERP? You know, in my past too, I've I've worked as a as a a fractional CTO, and getting data ready for NetSuite or going even trying to put two NetSuites together, wow. That's just a ton of work, and your data is the most important thing you can have. And I know that, we we just we talked to Matt Harris about that. He's got some great insights on how to get your data ready for your for your systems, right, even before you move.

We talked to, about legacy and PE and modernizing, and and modernizing your your systems for per perhaps private equity or venture capital if you're a founder owner. We did talk about, the distribution. We talked about modernization, the regulated business, and the regulated is even more, is even more at in our in our minds right now because some of the bands that have come out. Of course, we talked about a agentic, and I remember two years ago, I think it was at, etail spring, when Agentic was just coming on and it's like, I don't know, is this really gonna take off? And then suddenly everybody and their brother is talking about Agentic, and that's such an important part.

Of course, manufacturing, distribution, and then what what does the buying experience look like in the future for b two b? There it it's very there's a lot of information in here, and you could read it all at once or, you know, read it by chapter. It's definitely worth a good read, though. Commerce famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open source e commerce platform for mid market and lower enterprise merchants. More than 50,000 clients already process over $25,000,000,000 in annual GMB through Shopware.

Find out more about Shopware and the best value in ecommerce at shopware.com. What when you reflect on the people that you engaged with, were there certain stories or things that really stood out to you? And I'd love for you to kind of go. You you talked a little bit about Matt Harris and his expertise around kind of data management and and integrations into ERPs, but, like, were there other things that stuck out from those conversations? And if so, who were they and what did they say?

Yeah. Shay Inglis Inglis from Acro was really interesting, and he has you know, on his even on his website, he's got such a great approach to finding out what your solution is before you even start. Acro has a, you know, kind of a finder tool that helps you understand, do I fit or not? And, you know, there are there's there the the key here is that not every platform is the right fit for every business. And the goal here is to help your business find the right platform.

And so I I I thought Shay has a great approach to that. It was really fun talking to Justin Scott about his how the buyer experience is changing and what's gonna look like in the future. The whole team at Impacts, and then Bob Lewis was, you know, such a a leader in his in his thought leader in his industry, and just learning about, how you can be very specific and niche in what you're doing and not venturing off into we can do everything for everybody all the time, which I think a lot of, a lot of platforms try to do that. And I can say from my early days that Magento or Wegento that Magento at the time, everybody in 2009 said it works great for everybody, and it did for a number of years. Right?

But it soon got eclipsed by somebody else. So I think that having those conversations about those types of topics, not only, did we did I learn a lot, but I think that, we can we're able to help other people understand some of these more complicated things that not everybody would wanna read about or could read about. We we feel like we put this into a human readable format that would that people could look at. Yeah. Absolutely.

Well, talk a little bit about Isaac's role and your role. Obviously, he's your business partner. How did you guys divide up the the research, and how did you kinda create the narrative that that the document does a great job with? Yeah. So we we came up with a set of questions that we're would ask each of the interviewees.

We we, we made it. We we targeted to the to the chapter it's gonna be in. So, you know, for example, we talked to Ryan Blooms about regulated commerce, and that wasn't that you know, we we could regulated commerce think people think about guns and and and and, tobacco, but it's also health care and fintech and all kinds of other things. It was it was interesting and and eye opening to know that there's so much more to it. So we came up with the questions.

I I did all the technical research on that. I then, and then Isaac did the interviews or we did the interviews together, and then he wrote up those those topics. I then went back and made sure that they're factually correct, and if we had to make corrections, of course, we we cleared them with the contributors. But we also then added in things that related to that. So there's there's things called a Brent's take, in there that help people understand where where I come from on there.

We also added in a lot of subjects where Shopware connects in each of these areas. So each of the seven, focus areas, we we tied in a Shopware piece that helps you understand how that would relate. So, you know, rules and and the flows engine within Shopware are such a fantastic thing. Even the live shopping for, for, Justin Scott. We we tried to come back and help all and help people understand not only this is, is this, you know, a a report on what on on trends in b two b, but how can, the platform help them.

Yep. And we appreciate that. I mean, ultimately though, just to be honest with you, the goal of the report was to really be a a guide for merchants. It's funded by Shopware. Obviously, that's true.

But we really wanted to be more of an, a little bit more of an honest view that isn't really driven by a platform. It's driven by agency expertise and you and your expertise. The connection to Shopware is simply an optional feedback, so any merchant using any platform should get value from this. That marketing stuff around Shopware is true, but it should not prevent you from downloading the report and using it because, honestly, there's some tremendous stuff in there. How how do you feel about that?

Yeah. And I I don't I I don't wanna make it sound salesy either. I you know, for me, it's more interesting for me to learn how that those pieces connect together. And when I learned it, I'm like, we should just put a little snippet in. And it's not any there's no, like, full page pieces.

It's a literally a little call out box that tells somebody how they can do something. And there's call out boxes for all kinds of things. So we we did glean questions that partners were asking of their customers knowing that you as a merchant or you as a client or a merchant would want to know what questions you should ask these, the different partners or your agency. So I took out as many questions that I could to put in some content that people could ask their partner if they're wanting to move into this space. If you if you have a regulated business and you need to ask some questions or you're getting bought by a PE or you're on you're you're a PE agency or company and you need to, replatform, there's questions in there that you can use to ask your partner some hints in there.

Yeah. I love that. You know, as I'm kinda scrolling through this, as we're talking, I there's a section on here that talks about SaaS versus on prem. I mean, there could be a middle one for PaaS if you really wanted to. You know, Shopware for the majority of our clients, I'd say 75, 80% are using a SaaS or a pass version of Shopware.

But there is still customers that buy the on premise version, and it's for a lot of good reasons. Can you talk a little bit about kinda your expertise and what you've seen in history and what this report talks about? Yeah. You know, I think well, I'm gonna say first that on prem is has gotten so seamless and you and there's some much so many great hosting partners out there that make it seamless for you. And when you're working with an agency and a partner that that's hosting, that they don't point fingers, that you don't know that you're on SaaS, and you don't know that you're on PaaS, and you don't know you're on on a on prem.

It doesn't matter to you as a merchant. What you do what you get for a on prem or even PaaS is you own that. That's your thing that that nobody can take away and that, you can you can bring it somewhere else if you need to. So if your hosting partner doesn't agree with what you're selling or you you don't agree with your hosting partner for whatever reason, you can pick that up and go somewhere else. And today's world of containers and all these ways of doing things, you could literally replatform.

You could not replatform, but you could re you could move your hosting partner in a day and and redeploy and have everything up and running, and it it is literally painless. It is so much less painless than moving from a SaaS platform to another SaaS platform. There's no, like, migrations or anything. It's just moving everything from one place to another. So, you know, I can say that that the risk is is well, let's just say that most really large enterprises have a mixture of on prem.

They they host a lot of their own data, but they also go to other out out providers to get their data. And if you wanna really own your data, the the best way to do it is to own your data, not to have your data with somebody else being mixed in with all those people and then potentially having your data help your competitor make their product better. And I think in the b two b space, because of the volume going through b two b, if your ecommerce platform is is is making that data and and just anonymizing it. Right? But they're using that anonymous to make everybody else better theoretically.

Your really good idea is now getting pushed downstream to the next person. Yeah. We'll unpack that a little bit more because I think in the world of kinda AI well, in apps and with the world of AI and Adjentic, the sharing of that of your proprietary information is accelerated probably 10 x, maybe more. Unpack that for us a little further. Yeah.

I mean, so there's there's two parts of this puzzle. Right? There's the part where you're hosting your you're at a SaaS platform, and they're hosting your website, and they they hold your data. And then there's the part where you're developing and you're pushing your data to chat GPT or whatever. Right?

There's two sides to this. There's a risk everywhere, and I and I I heard a I heard a a study that, at when Accenture was and this is completely, this is just, you know, word-of-mouth, but there was people experiencing larger companies' data solutions within ChatGPT because the engineers were using just open open codex or whatever to get solutions and that's a great way to get solutions like you said earlier. So that's one risk that you have in in using some of these things and pushing your data back and forth. But the bigger risk is if you're using a SaaS platform and that data is there to to for somebody else to use. And, again, it's anonymous, but they're using it to make their platform better because of somebody else, then you have a risk of your unique solution.

Maybe you've figured out a solution to make it better and more efficient. Well, that's gonna get sucked in and pushed downstream just like if you're selling on Amazon and you've got some product that's not patented and and everybody else and that pretty soon all of a sudden your your product's getting sold as Amazon's Basics product. That's exactly right. You know, and if you're an SMB, the risk is relatively small. The volume will be small and you benefit from a lot of those kind of best practices being applied to your brand.

Let's just say you were a serial company as a startup. Well, the real IP and real, things you don't want to sneak out the back door are in the largest providers, the General Mills, the Post, those kinds of companies. So it'll be really interesting to see what happens with data sovereignty and privacy and control in this new era. I think you're gonna see a little bit of a regression back to, on prem is actually a differentiator, the fact that you can control your data. So in a way, it'll be the rise of the CIO, and their importance in keeping the company safe and keeping your IP safe.

Yeah. You know, I wanna give a shout out to open source because open source is a is is similar in what you were saying, but it's it's democratized. Right? So somebody has a great solution. And if you're in the open source community, your first reaction is, I'm gonna push this little plug in or or extension to GitHub, and I'm gonna try to get all my buddies to help work on it.

And, traditionally, even in open source, you'd have hackathons where you're coming up with a solution that works for people. And you suddenly, instead of just having a siloed system or you have a whole bunch of apps that are private or even obfuscated as as what maybe would happen in some of the open source apps. You have a bunch of apps that are public to anybody. You have code you can see and use, and you have then code that you can use for your own store. And you can use that to help you get better in the in exactly this mid market space and this medium business space that we're talking about.

So, you know, in terms of being able to leverage a lot of those things that that you might have, from the bigger players. Imagine a thousand people coming up with a solution and and 50 of them actually publishing them to GitHub. And now with ChatGPT or Claude, all those solutions are coming down, and and you can plug it in, and it'll make a solution for you. Right? You can you can expand off of that, and you extend it, and you can there's all kinds of options that you have that to help you with that.

And from open source, the other advantage open source does have is your code base has been exposed to all the different engines through all this time. There's no black box. It is what it is. When you run Shopware open source or Magento open source or, PrestaShop or what whatever the the thing you wanna do, you download it. You get to see the source code.

Right? You can make it your own if you want. You can fork it and, and and get make that yourself. So you have now the leverage of all these big LLMs to help you make a great solution. Yeah.

And, you know, for those folks who listen to the All In podcast, which is one of the most popular podcasts in the world, they talk a lot about these frontier models in AI. And the big ask is why is there not an open source provider that could disrupt this market and change it? And they talk about data sovereignty and control. They talk about open source. They talk about all these things.

So we're at this really interesting moment. And what I love about it, going back to your report, is it kind of connects to the report because this is the moment in 2026 that we're all living through. How do you deal with private equity? How do you deal with agentic commerce? All these things are in that report.

So I think what I like the most about it, Brent, is it's a real snapshot as to where merchants are in this moment. Yeah. I mean, I think it it with especially with b two b, and I can I can share experiences of we launched the first b two b commerce, Magento Commerce in in in The US before it was even live? So we we are first on the ground and and really living this experience. And at the time, this is way back in 2015, I'm gonna say, at the time, the salespeople were worried about getting cut out.

They were worried about their their customers just buying without them. Right? But what they've soon realized is that, no. This just enabled the customers to order more because now they could see the whole catalog. They didn't have to wait till Wednesday in their phone call.

They could then they could go on on Saturday and order things, and and we could even we, you know, we even did things where they could go out on in the field and have an iPad and be able to help clients firsthand to order things. So there's so many solutions. And that this was that was ten years ago. We've come so far now, that the the salespeople are no longer I mean, it is what it is. Right?

Nobody's making phone calls and and putting their orders into NetSuite or or a Microsoft Dynamics directly. We want a we want a front end that works for the customer. We don't wanna have to call somebody and have them enter hand enter it into some crazy platform. Well, where can folks get their hands on this report? You go to contentcucumber.com.

There's a, right on the homepage is a button to download the report, and, I would encourage you to download it, read it, give me some feedback. You can find me on LinkedIn, Brent w Peterson. And, we'd love you we'd love to have you read it. Give us some feedback. I tell you, this is true.

Brent loves a spirited debate in the public square. He does not shy away from negative feedback, from challenges, from questions. He embraces it. He comments, and he he's up for a good spar. So I really, really recommend you reading it and engaging with Brent directly, and challenge some of the things in that report if you if you feel like you want to.

Yep. Thanks. Thanks, Jason. Absolutely. Yeah.

Well, Brent, thanks for being a great partner of ours. Thanks for writing this great report and for including a whole bunch of our really important agencies in the process as well as Justin from Donald. Yep. Thanks, Jason. Alright.

Have a great day.