Platform vs Best of Breed integration — Eric Jan C. van Putten // Dynamicweb

Quotes

• “When you’re a startup, you’re not going to grow crazy in the first month. I would certainly say, go with simple integrations. Start with a Shopify environment then adapt to a WordPress thereon and just add a payment solution, and you can get going.” - Eric Jan“When you’re starting off Shopify has a tremendous amount of market share and becomes a ubiquitous Amazon competitor but they are truly meant for every man or woman to be able to set up a store quickly. You might need your own website if you’re really starting to scale and building content but Shopify’s got some product pages enough to keep you busy. But then you get to the point of scale and different levels of complexity when you’re talking about translation and internationalization.” - Ben “That moment of outgrowing a Shopify platform comes relatively quickly or you need to start integrating with an ERP system where you can actually have customer-specific pricing so B2B environments. If you keep it simple, Shopify is a good solution but the moment you’re going to require a little bit more, there are other solutions that are out there and better suited.” - Eric Jan“An ERP is an Enterprise Resource Planning solution that often holds quite a lot of information about what you have in stock, about the specific customer pricing, a lot of product data. But it’s not meant as a real e-commerce solution and it’s also not meant as a product information management solution. Sometimes it is used like that but oftentimes that doesn’t end very well.” - Eric Jan“It seems like there is a need for some CDP or CRM around here where you’re understanding what the customer profile is at well. And when you get into this need for larger systems, you have enough product information, enough complexity that you just don’t want to manage it in an all-in-one platform. You got complex enough relationships where you need to be a little more precise with how you’re presenting the information. That seems to be the turning point where you sort of move away from these all in one platform and start to build out a stack in e-commerce yourself.” - Ben “The big differentiator is either B2B or B2C. There is a real significance because when you’re going B2B, you can actually go with specific customers and have customer-specific pricing, even personalized shops for certain accounts.” - Eric Jan