Episode 17: Behind the Scenes Sneak Peek at B2B eCommerce with Trellis CEO Isaiah Bollinger

Links from the Show Trellis How To Make B2B eCommerce Work With Your Sales Reps Isaiah Bollinger Sponsored by Spark Shipping - eCommerce Automation Transcript Charles:            In this episode of The Business of eCommerce, I talk with Isaiah Bollinger the founder of Trellis. This is The Business of eCommerce, Episode 17. Welcome to The Business of eCommerce, the Podcast that helps eCommerce entrepreneurs start, launch, and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host Charles Palleschi. I'm here today with Isaiah Bollinger, one of the founders of Trellis. Trellis is one of the top full-service eCommerce development agencies right here in Boston. I recently saw a post by Isaiah, or on the Trellis blog actually, that was about the rapid growth of B2B eCommerce. That's one of those topics that you don't see many folks talking about B2B eCommerce, so I wanted to bring Isaiah on the show here today and chat a little more about it. So, hey Isaiah, how are you doing? Isaiah:              Good, good, thank you for inviting me to the show. You know, we've been connected for a while now, so it's great to be on the show and talk about eCommerce. Something that we've both been doing for a while now. Charles:            Yeah, it's great to have you, it's unusual actually to have someone from here in Boston, someone I've actually met in real life. Isaiah:              Yeah, it's funny how you mentioned we're one of the top eCommerce, we just actually got rated as the top eCommerce agency in Boston by a firm called Clutch. They organize agencies and help people find the top agencies locally for different things. Boston, surprisingly, it's not as robust for lots of eCommerce firms, compared to New York. Locally, most of our competitors are mostly in New York. There's so many of them there, but Boston's not quite as many here. Charles:            I feel like it's a big eCommerce city though. There's a lot of start ups in a small ... on the software side. A few different products went out of the city. Isaiah:              I think New York is just also an agency hub. Charles:            Yeah. Isaiah:              It's a hub for agencies and funny enough, one of our bigger eCommerce competitors moved their headquarters now to New York, and then one of the other ones, their headquarters is now in California, and they both just disappeared from Boston, so it's good for us. Charles:            That's a good thing. Isaiah:              Yeah. Charles:            Awesome, so, we were talking about the blog post on B2B eCommerce, and the rapid growth and it's not something that a lot of folks talk about so I figured you guys have, it sounds like, some significant experience with that. So, wanted to chat a little bit more you know, what is it, what are people doing, and what you kind of see now. Isaiah:              Yeah, absolutely. We started doing B2B eCommerce back when the company started in 2012. We kind of fell into it. Started with a mid-sized distributor, and it was a Magento project, and I think we quickly realized hey, there's some potential here for not only the customers but also the agency size so it felt like a good synergy of an area for us to focus. We've just kind of grown up from there. B2B eCommerce has been a pretty large industry for a while. It's just not talked about a lot because I don't think it's very sexy in the sense that it's a lot of behind the scenes. A lot of the sites are actually password protected sites, or you need to log in to see pricing, or you basically have to be a customer to get the true experience. From that sense you might not even know about these sites, or be able to get to these sites that are doing millions and millions or even billions of dollars online. I think that's kind of a big reason for why B2B eCommerce is so kind of behind the scenes even though it's actually more than double B2C eCommerce in terms of total sales volume.