From PO to Portal with Joe Twer from BlueSnap – EP023

Hey everyone. Welcome back to E Commerce Masters, the show where we unpack what's driving growth for modern manufacturers, distributors and e commerce brands. I'm your host, Ethan Giffen, founder and CEO of GrooveCommerce, where we help mid market companies modernize how they sell online. Today's episode hits a pain point many B2B teams feel every day, and that's payments. The old purchase order workflow wasn't built for today's digital buyer and it shows up as friction, failed collections and lost revenue. My guest today is Joe Twer, VP of global sales at BlueSnap, a payment platform focused on helping businesses accept and optimize payments around the world. Joe's led high velocity sales teams through complex partner ecosystems, trade shows and, and product launches. And he's got a front row seat to help B2B payments are changing. Joe, it's great to have you on the show today. Welcome. Thanks so much, Ethan. It's great to be here. Appreciate you having me. Yeah, I did my best radio voice, by the way, to, to go through that, to go through that introduction. So it was fantastic. I thought I was on with like a news newscaster, you know, one of my, you know, I've always dreamed of, I've always dreamed of being a newscaster, but. But I also dreamed of being the person that's on the daily lottery that pulls the little thing for the ball to come up and the daily numbers to show. Those are my two kind of aspirations. If anybody listening has a connection with the Maryland lottery, I'd love to come down and be that person. I don't think that one's very high paying though. It's usually a volunteer. Interestingly, I did reach out and they said they only use volunteers now from like certain charitable groups and stuff. So enough on me. You know, it's we, we see each other, you know, multiple times throughout the years, you know, over the year at all the e commerce events. And so, you know, tell us a little bit about how you got into E commerce and you know, what your origin story is to get into this great industry. Hmm. All right, so it's in a classic fashion, a bunch of zigs and zags. So I was originally headed down the path of working in the business of sports and had my sights set on that market. But after a few failures there and falling back on being a tennis pro on Cape Cod, I eventually did get into the banking and financial space. And I was involved at a time where there was this transformation that happened back then with banking tech. Actually, I'm dating myself. But it was a transformation where two things were really happening. One, the technology was evolving from the original DOS based and even on prem Windows based solution into potentially this new web option. Then the other thing that was happening was more not the really big banks and big softwares were looking at ways to streamline the solutions that they wanted for their customers in what was called this back then, an outsourced type of a solution which is today's modern cloud infrastructure, aws, that type of thing. I got involved in a lot of that stuff Ethan and then that took me from working on complex bank payment systems and solutions and running software development life cycles into this really cool Israeli tech company that provided global payments for e commerce companies. And now big focus of ours is B2B and providing solutions for mid market manufacturers and up. That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, it's interesting to see that kind of, that the progression of the industry. Right. And kind of payments is like often you know, not really discussed. It's not the sexiest thing in the world unless you're the CFO trying to get your, you know and unless you're trying to get your rates down, your credit card processing rates down and then but it's needed, it's, you know, you know literally almost every transaction that uses a credit card, you know or ACH or other things like goes through, goes through that. And so it's, it's, it's just such a table stakes thing that doesn't get discussed enough quite frankly. No doubt about it. The exciting thing about my job and why I love to and after doing it for over 13 years now is still jumping out of bed because every, I can have a conversation with every company about payments because every company is driving revenue and looking to accept payments, even non profits trying to grow there we just went through giving Tuesday. They're trying to grow the amount that is given for the associated charitable organizations that are involved. So I'm able to have conversations about payments transaction flows and this optimization strategy with everybody. And then the neat thing about what bluesnap has architected is the flexibility to do it in this global B2B solution that supports so many different use cases. And I think one of the neat things that we've done for these multi entity mid market companies is provide this orchestration layer, this ecosystem that supports all of these different use cases. Ethan. Whether it's classic digital transformation to set up a new estore or a better way to handle their manual invoicing and billing that they're tackling Each and every week. Each and every month. Yeah. So kind of give me like, you know, not to name a competitor but like I would say everybody in this space has probably heard of authorize.net at a point in time with all of this. Right. But you're, you're coming in from a different, different, different place. And so tell me a little bit like deeper about who bluesnap is and, and, and who you best serve in the marketplace. Yep. So we are a global payment orchestration platform that has built in card acquiring in 50 countries around the world and allows customers to accept payments in over 200 regions around the world. And as part of our orchestration logic, we have a brand promise to drive higher payment success rates and lower costs on a global scale for any use case. That's really who we are. That's our strength and our motto. And you mentioned Authorize. Net. I think of authorize.net as one of the original, call it 25 year old, 30 year old payment gateway solutions that connected up a single merchant account for a single currency US Dollars as part of their offering. You have a more modern player that we compete head to head with called Stripe that allows companies and platforms and businesses to use Stripe for invoicing or online payments or any of these or monetization of their payments on their platform. And that's really where Blue Snap sits. Similar to Stripe, we are more of a boutique, highly focused white glove solution that is a team filled with payment experts that are really leaning into the company's pain points, their transformation and strategy for optimizing payments. When you say boutique, is that short for. When you say boutique is that kind of short code for you can get somebody on the phone when you need them. That's an excellent point. Yeah, I mean Stripe has, you know, millions of, of customers and a different type of a support model than what Blue Snap offers. Bluesnap is much more of a white glove. You've seen this as part of the projects that we've done together and we've talked about a lot when we get together and that's, that's just who we are. That's part of our, part our solution. Every single project has a built in positive ROI and has a dedicated customer success team. Yeah, it's awesome. Like that's why we love working with you guys. And it's like if we, if we have questions, like we get answers right? There's no like run around and I think in these times like that's a big deal, you know, like I hear story after story of not in your industry, but I have, you know, I have multiple people in my social network who have millions of dollars of business annually with Amazon, you know, 10, 20 million with Amazon and can't even get anybody on the phone, you know, and I think that personal touch aspect is amazing. Right. I think that level of service and the level of just thought leadership and you know, that you guys provide with helping people through the process is fantastic. Thank you. Yeah, it's important, I think, you know, you talked about every company relies on payments and a payment solution or payment vendor to help them, you know, drive revenue for their, their company each and every day. And without having that human touch to be able to explain things or solve things is kind of scary when it comes to payments because it gets complicated as you start to peel back the onion and as you get into the weeds of global card processing or global payment processing. It's complicated. Yeah. You talk about failed transactions. Is that a thing that people underestimate the cost of failed transactions within their organization? It is, I would say as businesses are shifting and maybe they're going through a digital or financial transformation on their own, they may look at an existing provider who's not going to be good at that net new commerce channel that they're rolling out and they may not be able to support it well and experience something like 20, 25% declines because of either currency mismatches or use case mismatches or dollar threshold mismatches or just other fraud declines. And that's where bluesnap's really able to shine is each and every one of our projects has that built in roi and that ROI typically has a large component of higher payment success rates as part of our brand promise. Yeah, I think, I just think people like don't realize how much they lose. People will try once or twice and then they just kind of might move on in terms of those failed payments. But that is where tech is helping. And what we've embraced related to, we've had for a long time as part of this orchestration layer, this concept of intelligent payment routing and least cost routing. And now we can really double down on that brand promise and the success using AI and LLMs to drive even better rule sets and intelligence around higher payment authorization rates and lower costs. And so that's a great example of where in the background we've got awesome tech, but you're still able to talk to a human about, hey, what's going on in this particular case, any kind of, particular revenue size or kind of what's your target Ideal customer in terms of who you work best with. Yeah, our sweet spot is definitely mid market multinational organizations. That's where we really are able to shine and drive that roi. And typically the reason for that, Ethan, is because those companies have, as you've had this evolution, I believe we're in now the Gen 3 of payments and payment gateways and payment solution providers. And as these companies have grown their business either through acquisition or just setting up new entities around the globe based on where their customers are, their target markets are, they typically have added vendors and created this complexity in their payment acceptance environment. And our strategy is to eliminate that complexity and eliminate that technical debt that has been built up for their different use cases, entities, currencies, what have you to be able to do all of that with one BlueSnap account? Okay, what's kind of the general scope? Are people just kind of authorizing and capturing, you know, card transactions with you or is there a broader scope of how you engage with them? You know, from a transaction standpoint, it's usually a broader scope. We typically start with we have a new e commerce platform that we're migrating to. BlueSnap has a great reputation working with this commerce platform. We'd like to understand how we can use you, what it costs, that type of thing, but where that's usually just the starting point. What we typically get into with that business is how else are you accepting payments from your customers? How much is being manually billed out of the ERP system on a weekly and monthly basis? What tools are you using to drive automation to help you with that? Would it be helpful to have a customer facing portal that could see the history of all of their outstanding invoices and to be able to take action to make payments on any open invoices or to autopay them in the future. So we typically start out with one maybe near term project of a new platform or a new partner ecosystem that we're heavily involved in. And then we look at the full picture of how the company drives revenue and accepts payments on a global scale. So is it, you know, are you able to handle recurring payments or ACH or other alternative, you know, payments outside of just, you know, a credit card, you know, a standard credit card number? Yes, all of the above. That's critical and really table stakes. We've got multiple payment methods built into the platform so we can support bank transfers all over the world. So ACH in Europe is completely different than ACH in the US and different in Canada and Australia. For example, recurring billing, subscription engines and Capabilities like that, ar, automation, all of these things are really critical to what we provide. We have a global surcharging model. More and more businesses are looking to offset the cost of credit card acceptance and we've got all of the rules and capabilities to do that on a global scale, which I think is extremely powerful. Now. What else is in there? Fraud, dynamic fraud protection, things like that are all built in as part of the overall solution. So, you know, last time we, we were chatting, I think you were about to head out to Sweet World in, in Vegas. And for those that don't know, it isn't a candy convention. It is the netsuite, you know, annual user convention out in Las Vegas. And so, you know, I know you're deeply ingrained in that ecosystem. Are there other ERPs where you're, you know, where you're a strong player and you're active in those ecosystems? Yeah. So we won Partner of the Year SDN Partner of the Year for NetSuite this year, which we're super excited about. And the other. Thank you. The other strategic ecosystems are Microsoft Dynamics. Done a lot and we've got a lot of momentum within business. Central Sage Intact is another important one for us. Who else is? There's a variety of them. You put me on the spot. The new one that we're excited about that's just getting certified now is SAP. So SAP has, they're pushing their portfolio, their customer base over to the cloud and shifting off of the kind of legacy on prem ECC solution into a cloud based S4 HANA option. And that's a new certification that we have in an ecosystem we're very excited about. That's cool. And then on the E Comm platform side, I know you work with BigCommerce, I know you've got a partnership with Shopware. Any other platforms there that you really are dialed in with and make a great fit with? Yep. So Adobe Commerce also on the e Commerce side, WooCommerce on the E Commerce side, Salesforce Commerce Cloud. And then a lot of the ERPs, like for example NetSuite, they've got suite Commerce that can roll out as well. So we definitely have. Nobody wants to use that, by the way. You don't have to, I mean you don't have to agree to that, but I can. Yeah, it's a choice, a unique choice, but yep, we support it. So how does that kind of relationship work, like between, let's just say the platform integration and the ERP integration. How are you kind of handing that off from. From One side to the other are people, you know, authorizing on the front end and capturing in the erp like, like talk me through that, that process a little bit. One of the big concepts that did, you know, we really have been diving into lately around B2B. Is this kind of cost of friction? Right. Making it completely easy for your customers to buy from you? Right. So how does that kind of handoff work from the E commerce platform over to the ERP side? Yep. The important thing that we've tackled related to this, Ethan, is making sure that, and we did this particularly with BigCommerce. B2B is making sure that not only are you handling the net new orders that are coming through the e. Com channel, which might be a subset of SKUs or services that the manufacturer is offering, but also if possible, driving from the ERP back into the commerce platform, which hopefully has the capabilities to act more like a customer facing portal and to see invoices and make payments against those invoices. That's the big thing that we're tackling. So for example, you asked, is it just an authorization online and then a capture once fulfillment occurs or delivery occurs, that type of thing? Yes, that's pretty typical. Especially if it's a manufacturer that's creating more custom, longer build out products and solutions for, for their customers. For example, we just signed a very cool company that drives in the sports world the custom covers for fields all over the world, whether it's baseball fields, football fields, soccer fields, you name it. And obviously those are unique. And so there's a unique order flow associated with how they're doing things and their netsuite instance. So the authorization takes place, the order's captured, the token is created and that information is passed through to the erp. So that ultimately within the customer record that stored token, stored payment, underlying payment information can be used as part of the capture on fulfillment. So that is one of the typical use cases that we're supporting. And then like I said, in a lot of cases there's maybe not an E Commerce order that takes place, but an invoice that needs to be paid and we're able to jump in and help out with that as well. Fantastic. So, you know, are there other good use cases or examples of friction, you know, in the B2B checkout process that you commonly come across and help your customers to solve? I think it's a combination of things like making sure that you have the right dynamic fraud protection rules in place. So as you're looking to expose and encourage more and More online, true online sales. Making sure that you're not running into unnecessarily unnecessary false positives, but also protect the business related to anybody who might be out there who actually is a bad actor and looking to take advantage of maybe a note properly deployed platform with the right kind of dynamic fraud protection built into it. I also think a big piece of it is the reporting aspect. Making sure that from a real time events standpoint and any, most of these transactions there's multiple systems that need to be alerted related to that order occurring and having a good flexible platform that can handle those real time notifications and alerts across multiple, either different divisions at the company or other systems. How does payments again? I think at times people think about payments like they think about a lawyer, right? They hate them, you know, like payment providers. So you know, it's like, hey, I'm getting charged, you know, these, this percentage off every order and it's a huge amount of my annual expense. But how do we kind of shift that thought process from where, you know, payments are pulling down the ship to where it's a strategic kind of advantage? Is it the international piece? Is it the fraud protection? Like where do you, how do you begin to leverage the right payment provider as a strategic advantage for your business? Well, I think that, I think the world is shifting now, Ethan, to make it less of a drag around the cost of credit card acceptance. And with the fact that especially in B2B world, so much of it is shifting now to support the offsetting credit card charges and passing through the cost, you know, using the surcharge capabilities that exist out there. I mean most cases, even you and I in our, you know, personal lives, we're going out to you, we're whatever it is, we're renting a bicycle, whatever it is, we're paying the offsetting credit card processing fees so that the merchant is not having to take on all of the financial burden of that. That is a significant shift and I think an opportunity to allow for really this more preferred mechanism of payment because of all of the benefits that you get with a credit card payment on a global scale, whether it's the individual customer that's getting some type of benefit through an automated AP solution or virtual card that they've got built out as part of their solution. So I think that it's, we're seeing a lot more excitement and this frustration level go down because of that global surcharge capability that we have. So let me give you just a funny scenario, right? Like, just say like we're a 60 year old $150 million manufacturer. We've had, you know, we're still print and paper invoices. We're still, you know, going to the mailbox and pulling checks and taking them to the bank. And you know, we're doing some, you know, we're into ACH and other things, but, you know, we're nervous about, you know, going into something, going down the path of E commerce transformation. Right. We're nervous about putting our invoices online in a buyer portal. You know, what's the first two or three steps, you know, for me to take as somebody that's not very digitally mature to start moving in that direction and start kind of building some alignment with my team, you know, internally, how do I sell that to the cfo? Right. I think that type of a company is pretty resistant to change and working with new technology and a new payment processor and all of that. So I think first off, you have to recognize your audience and find folks within the organization that are willing to listen and consider. And the best way that I found these projects to get off the ground is they likely have a lot of feedback and customer maybe dissatisfaction around the fact that things are manually done and still less modern and their customers, and there's probably not all of their customers, but there's gonna be a subset of their customers that wanna be able to pay online using their preferred payment method. And I would get this project off the ground by targeting a proof of concept with say those 25 customers of theirs that are really hot to trot to get a more modern solution and to make it really easy to get that deployed, to test it out, to gather feedback and then to adjust and start to roll it out to the wider customer base and for becoming the standard of the organization. That's the approach I would take with somebody like that. Yeah. I love it. I love it. You've got to definitely pilot these kind of scenarios to get feedback on it. And I would also say that, you know, even if you think your customers are not going to use it, I bet you a lot more than you expect will by the time you open that up. Yeah. Can you imagine the happiness factor that a portion of their customer base would get when they send out a communication that says, good news, we're upgrading our billing or our website or what, however they want to describe it, to be a more modern, secure, automated solution to help you guys review and pay your bills with us? I think that that's a pretty fun and compelling communication strategy out to their customer. Base? Yeah, I mean, as part of our overall, we kind of think about digital transformation, E commerce transformation in almost a three year cycle for a manufacturer, distributor and you know, we call the pilot phase where you're getting, you know, a dozen or two dozen of your clients that aren't gonna, you know, kick you to the curb if they, you know, feel a little friction in a, in an alpha test, you know, not even a beta test, an alpha test, gathering feedback. And so you will have people that will want to do that because they want to be able to pay their bills and do it how they want to, how they want to do it. How about kind of building versus buying? I'm sure you, in your journeys, you've come into organizations that maybe have a homegrown platform that they've kind of built, you know, from, you know, from zero lines of code, from scratch, you know, versus looking at platforms like, you know, BigCommerce or Shopware, you know, or, or you know, Salesforce or something else with, with that, you know, what is that kind of build versus Buy, you know, what are they gaining by buying versus building, you know, when they're going down that path? I think there's so much less of that that happens now because more and more C suite execs are having to balance out achieving growth and initiatives with less resources to do that. It's just the nature of what's happening. And so this idea of outsourcing those solutions that can be multi use, case and flexible is more typical for what I'm seeing in this day and age. And in fact, we're rolling out a new, I don't know if my marketing team's calling it a white paper, but we're calling it the B2B business edge. That is getting into a lot of these myths versus facts and other discussion points around global payments, whether it's an AR automation, an embedded payment offering, or a global merchant offering to really help look at their business and figure some of these things out. Like, hey, am I building too much on my own? Which is not sustainable versus outsourcing, some of it. So that's a new exciting paper that we're going to roll out in January called B2B Business Edge. That's awesome. That's awesome. What's one of those myths that you'd like to see retired and kind of kick to the curb about payments? All payment gateways are the same. Yeah. Yep. All right, what's, what's one thing that you'd like to see changed in the payment industry? What's what's like one of those things that stuck around forever that you'd like to see evolve and get watched? I think, I think we've gotten such a bad rap because there's all of, you know, there's still these cases before Congress and these other like legal pending items, you know, directly with Visa and other card schemes around the distrust of the underlying interchange and the underlying costs. And I think surcharging helps alleviate a lot of that pain and distrust. And so I'm excited about the evolution around that global surcharging capability that we're really seeing a lot of uptick on. Yeah, I mean, it's not 1999 anymore. Right. It is a much different world for organizations like Blue Snap and just like, like technically what you provide and you know, the level of, you know, the feature set and functionalities and the, you know, the international capabilities, I mean it is like night and day different than when I started thinking about payment gateways back in 1997, you know, like kind of thing. So it's, it's been cool to see that, that evolution. If you had one tip for a manufacturer, distributor who was thinking about moving into digital transformation in 2026, what would that tip be? I go back to the opportunity to find a partner that one is going to give you the human touch and two, is going to provide that flexibility to support your multiple different business entities, currencies and payment methods for that digital transformation that you're going through. Because most of the time they end up picking maybe one provider and then realize, wait a minute, that provider can't support us in Europe or in Australia and that's a big thorn in their side when they have to scramble to, you know, find another provider that can do all of it. Yeah, yeah. The world is becoming a much smaller place, you know, in terms of, in terms of transactions. And I also just think, you know, one of the things like on, on, on my side, thinking about that, that same kind of track, it's like, think about who you're going to work with, who you're going to have help you on this journey to be able to introduce partners like yourself. Are they a development firm that just like writes ones and zeros, or are they a real consulting firm that can help introduce strategic, you know, opportunities like, you know, looking at Blue Snap maybe versus the Korean in house payment gateway and, and how that can, you know, move the business forward? Even if you don't have global needs, it's still a fantastic platform for B2B organizations that are looking to begin selling online. So. All right, so for anybody wanting to learn more about Bluesnap or find you, where would they find you? Bluesnap.com is a great way to talk with our team of experts. We've put a lot of information out there about our product and easy to talk to a payment expert, which ultimately will find its way to me. And then also LinkedIn is a good spot to find me and connect with me and network. That's awesome. That's awesome. And if you're interested in taking a look at bluesnap and you'd like an introduction, feel free to hit me on LinkedIn. I'm very active there and I'm happy to make an introduction over to Joe's team and lead you on that path. And so we love introducing folks to the guests on the podcast. So Joe, I really just appreciate your your time today. It's been a great depth of information about payments. For those of you listening, if you've enjoyed today's episode, please go on up to our YouTube channel and like, comment, subscribe. All of that helps us reach more folks in the e commerce community. So closing out today's episode, I'm Ethan Giffen, founder and CEO of Groove Commerce. Thank you for listening to the E Commerce Masters podcast and I'll see you on the next episode. Sa.