Build Connected Commerce or Get Left Behind: Why B2B Integration Is the Future with Beth Segovia

In B2B commerce, we often focus on building the perfect storefront, clean UX, robust search, optimized checkout. But that’s not where the real friction lies.

In a recent conversation, Beth, CEO of TradeCentric, put it bluntly:

“Creating commerce is not a destination.”

It’s what happens after someone adds a product to their cart that determines whether or not your eCommerce strategy actually scales.

Why Integration Is No Longer Optional

Today’s largest buyers don’t want to visit your site at all. They want to shop inside their own procurement system, Coupa, SAP Ariba, JAGGAER, you name it. That’s not convenience. That’s how they manage spend, control budgets, and keep compliance tight.

And when your commerce platform can’t connect to their workflows?

You’re either adding cost to their process, or losing the business entirely.

“A year ago, integration was listed on 1 in 10 RFPs,” Beth said.
“Now it’s on 90%. And companies that can’t check that box are getting disqualified.”

PunchOut Is the Front Door to Strategic Growth

Let’s be clear: this isn’t about a tech spec. It’s about positioning.

Suppliers that integrate with buyer systems via PunchOut aren’t just easier to do business with. They become the default.

Why?

Because every time a buyer clicks that PunchOut tile in their procurement platform, it leads straight to your website. They shop with your pricing, your assortment, and your rules. The cart flows back into their system, generates an approved PO, and syncs automatically with your order system. No retyping. No errors. No missed invoices.

That’s not a digital convenience. That’s an operational advantage.

Strategic eCommerce Isn’t Just About the Frontend

The most mature B2B companies, like Keysight Technologies, Beth noted, treat eCommerce as just another channel. It’s on every department’s scorecard. There are goals tied to integrations. And the results are measurable.

• Faster order-to-cash cycles
  
• Lower invoice disputes
  
• Higher buyer retention
  
• And less cost per transaction
  

They’ve gone beyond “we built it, now what?” to “we built it, we integrated it, and now it performs.”

Why This Matters Right Now

In the middle of shifting tariffs, unstable sourcing, and compressed margins, integration offers two powerful advantages:

1. Real-time adaptability – When tariffs change, integrated systems can reflect that immediately in pricing and POs.
   
2. Resilience under pressure – Fewer manual processes mean fewer people scrambling to fix errors when supply chain chaos hits.
   

“If you’re integrated, you’re better equipped to deal with the storm,” Beth said.

The Bottom Line

eCommerce in B2B doesn’t scale because of a great UI.
It scales when you eliminate friction from the buying process, especially after the click.

Integration is no longer a differentiator. It’s the minimum expectation.
And the suppliers that recognize that shift early won’t just win more bids.
They’ll own the relationship.

Contact Beth | TradeCentric

TradeCentric

Beth Segovia

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Transcript

Beth Segovia:
If you’re not on Amazon and your customer is shopping on Amazon, then your customer is buying somebody else’s product. Now it’s very compelling, right, with Amazon business and Walmart business and, you know, all of these big marketplaces kind of coming up. If it becomes where newer people into the workforce are entering into procurement roles, if they’re used to shopping in these places and they, that they can continue to shop in these places and they’re looking for your product in those places, then you need to be there. And so you have to think about how you’re, how you meet your customer demand. At the end of the day, it all comes down to what does your customer need, what do they want and how do you help them achieve those goals, right, While obviously offering the product that they need. But it’s more than product. It’s about purchase experience, it’s about spend control and it’s about efficiency.

Beth Segovia:
And so I think sometimes a supplier is thinking too narrowly if they’re only thinking about am I offering the best product and do I have a great website. Right. It’s just not enough.

Justin King:
I’d love to start, Beth, with just kind of talking about what was your, what was your path into this world of manufacturers, distributors, Trade Centric, E commerce, connected commerce as you guys talk about it at Trade Centric, both. What was your path here as CEO of Trade Centric?

Beth Segovia:
Well, thanks for having me, Justin. My path is, I don’t know, I guess my own. So I spent 25 years in a hardware manufacturer, right? So very large Company, provider of PCs between IBM and Lenovo. And so all my formative engineering years were spent in being a manufacturer and trying to solve all those problems. And then I moved into software and spent six years in B2C E commerce with a company called Channel Advisor. So powering marketplaces and solving the problems of content and reaching your customer. And that led me to Trade Centric. So after exiting Channel Advisor and looking for the next thing, Trade Centric presented itself.

Beth Segovia:
And I love the problems that we’re trying to solve. So intimately aware of the challenges of trying to change how things are done as a manufacturer, how to reach customers, how to, you know, meet them where they want to be met, enable them to purchase the way they want to purchase, to, you know, create an experience that matters for them, to try to improve retention, to try to grow with your customers. You know, all those things I did as a manufacturer and so Trade Centric and really sitting in this B2B commerce space brings all of that together. And so it’s been exciting for me just two years now with the company and taking on a company with a rich history in the space. So that’s how I got here.

Justin King:
Did you go to school for engineering?

Beth Segovia:
I did. I did industrial engineering undergrad at Northwestern and then I have a master’s in manufacturing systems from Lehigh.

Justin King:
So you went from manufacturing to B2C E commerce with channel Advisors and then back to. To broadly the B2B commerce space. Well, I’m curious if you have a like what do you think? There’s a lot of people that listen to this that have come from the B2C world trying to learn this B2B world. What’s the kind of largest difference that you see in this industry or maybe the most surprising thing in this industry as you kind of exited the channel advisors B2C world to this B2B integration world that you’re in?

Beth Segovia:
Well, I think it’s a good question. I expected you to ask me this question because I know you have opinions, but I think that in B2C it’s all about where are your customers shopping? Do you have the listing that’s going to attract them and secure the cart? Are you going to be at the right price? Are you promoting in the right way? Are you visible all the things that B2C and then it’s a delivery experience. So it’s is it the right price, how fast can you get it right and of course is it high quality product? I think this space is more interesting, I would say because it’s not about those things necessarily. It’s more about the right products, the prices you committed and negotiated and then an experience that really helps the customer to purchase what they need as fast as possible. Right. So I think it’s so much more about efficiency. So yes, it’s about having the product that the customer needs, but it’s also much more about efficiency and helping them buy the way they want to buy. It’s about helping your customer control spend while also wanting to grow their spend with you.

Beth Segovia:
So it’s really much more about satisfying their needs for how they buy, not just what they buy. And I think that’s fantastic. I think it’s really interesting to see what the space is doing. I’m still astonished every day that there are companies that don’t have an E commerce storefront that’s fully capable as a meets minimum yet I can’t believe how many transactions are still happening manually. And then those that do have effective commerce sites that are not integrating with their largest customers or frankly with all of their customers. I just find it interesting that the space is still so nascent in many ways and that so much more progress is yet in front of us. And I think that’s pretty exciting.

Justin King:
I was talking to a manufacturer about two weeks ago and, and they said they wanted to use our training for their people. And I said that’s interesting. Like for your E Commerce people said, no, I just regular, I said why, why do you want that said? Our people, we work in a manufacturer. Our people don’t understand distribution. And your course explained what distribution is. And then I talked to a distributor a week later and they said we want to do a course because it teaches our people what a manufacturer is. And I use that as a bigger analogy because there’s so like this space that we’re in. There’s just so much complexity.

Justin King:
You know, there’s complexity in the supply chain, there’s complexity in the systems, there’s complexity in our customers, and there’s so much knowledge that still, I mean, that all of us need to be able to be able to gain in this. One of the interesting conversations that you and I have started to have is this idea from executives which is like, how do you, how do you make E Commerce strategic with the executive team? And part of that conversation is just like, how do you, what makes E Commerce more strategic inside of the organization? What’s, what’s your, your unique perspective and kind of trade centrics and unique perspective on that? I, I, I think what’s interesting about you guys is you guys, you’re not just E Commerce, you’re bigger and broader than that. And actually, I think you might actually be closer to the C suite than others than like an E Commerce platform obviously sometimes gets put in its own little corner where I think that your technology maybe, maybe is a little more strategic in that way and you might have a unique perspective on how to actually make it strategic inside the organization or why it is.

Beth Segovia:
Yeah, I think it’s an interesting question. You know, so obviously we sit behind commerce and procurement and we integrate the two. And we integrate not just shopping, but we integrate purchase orders and invoicing and a number of other document transfers. Right. So it’s an automation of the whole procurement process. So, you know, who cares about that? Right? And inside an organization, well, certainly an IT guy with a problem to solve, certainly a sales leader who’s trying to drive stickiness and growth with their customer, but also a supply chain leader that wants a clean order to ship, that certainly the CFO who wants to collect on invoices, who wants, you know, order to cash to be very, very quick, who also wants growth. Right? So when you think about, like, is E Commerce strategic or not, or should it be strategic or not? You know, we work with all kinds of customers on a, on sort of a maturity, sort of spectrum. And some at the very beginning, you know, there’s a customer that’s demanded that they integrate.

Beth Segovia:
And so they’re scrambling because they don’t want to lose the business. So they want to get integrated. Right. To solve a customer’s problem. So they are reacting to demand then all the way. At the other end, we see those that are fully integrated. So we have a great customer. Keysight Technologies, they just see E Commerce as another channel.

Beth Segovia:
So where you might have direct sales, you might go to market through distribution, you might. Right. They have a sales leader who owns a number of channels that they’re executing against. And E Commerce is just another one of those channels. And it’s on all of their different scorecards. It’s fully integrated into the business. And they have a set of ROI metrics around which customers they integrate with, and they have goals around how many they can get integrated with. Right.

Beth Segovia:
So they’re trying to get more and more of their customers integrated because it creates better outcomes, because they have a whole concept of ROI that they. That’s proven to them. Right. So when they invest, when they integrate, they get better outcomes. So that’s kind of at the highest end of this maturity scale, you know, and kind of everything in between. So I think it’s super interesting when you go past making it available. Right. Or accommodating a customer’s need or even standing up a site, you know, if we build it, you know, they will come, right.

Beth Segovia:
Driving adoption of your commerce site is a big problem, right. That you know it’s not a destination. Right? Creating commerce is not a destination. So, you know, if you integrate obviously directly into procurement system, you’re going to drive adoption and it becomes a far more strategic relationship for you as well as for your buyer. So, you know, that’s some of the things that I think about and that we see our customers grappling with. But the most mature, everyone in the C suite is concerned about whether or not the E commerce channel is growing and how effective it is.

Justin King:
So since we started talking about integration, explain. Explain what integration means and why it’s important. Like why, why would someone want to integrate with a customer? Like, or what even are you integrating with? Like, what does that even mean?

Beth Segovia:
Yeah, so, you know, we Use this term, connected commerce. It’s becoming super popular now. So I don’t want to take credit, but I love it that people are talking about it. Because when we say connected commerce or integrated commerce, we literally mean creating a connection between a supplier’s E commerce website and the buyer’s procurement system. So whatever that might be, some of them are going to use ERPs, some are going to use an EPro system. Right. However, that buyer is managing supplier spend and wants to procure product. We’re starting to see service systems used in this way, right? Creating a connection between the two systems so that you can facilitate automation of transactions.

Beth Segovia:
So what does that mean? Right, so one we want to punch out to create a shopping experience. So I start as a buyer in my procurement platform and I hit a tile that says I’m going to buy something from XYZ manufacturer and and that tile leads me straight to the E commerce website. So it’s as if I opened a browser and looked up the website and went through my Chrome browser to that website, but instead they punched out from their procurement system. The advantages of doing that is they shop, they build a cart, they bring that cart back into their procurement system and it automatically goes through a workflow so it can get that cart approved, reviewed, approved, and then it generates an automatic PO that gets sent back to the commerce website to place the order. And then after the order ships, you can do shipping notifications, all the things. Right? And then after it ships, the invoice is automatically sent as well. And the beauty of that is you get a shopping experience that matches the PO that’s been approved, that matches an invoice. So you get what we call three way matching, which eliminates all the manual work that sometimes goes into generating those documents.

Beth Segovia:
Ensuring accuracy, solving problems when there’s mismatches, all the things. So it’s leveraging pre negotiated pricing. A website with an assortment that you can control right around what does the customer want to see. And then it automates all of those transactions so it creates that direct line into their procurement system so that a buyer on the side of your customer can really easily tap into what you’re offering them and purchase it in a much faster way. Right. Like when we think about integration, we’re talking about integration that removes friction, right? We don’t want them to have choices, right. We don’t want them to be looking at your offerings next to somebody else’s, next to somebody else’s. You want to be the integrated provider that’s going to get that business every Time it needs to be purchased.

Justin King:
Why have customers gone to procurement system in general? Let’s create a scenario. So you’re a distributor that sells through your website directly to customers, and you have a customer, maybe a big GM plant that has a procurement system. Why would they have even. Why are procurement systems even important that.

Beth Segovia:
Customers just spend management, right? They’re trying to control the dollars going out. So depending on the size of the customer, they can have many people buying products and they can be buying things from, I don’t know, pencils and paper or a thing anymore, but all the way through, you know, through to products that are going into their products that they’re manufacturing. And so there’s an array of people that are buying things and lots of different things that they’re buying. And if you can’t see those purchases happening, so there’s a number of ways it can happen, right? So you can do PO processes, you can do reimbursement processes through P cards, right? All the different procurement processes. You know, procurement’s job is to manage spend, control spend, right? There’s budgets for these things. They’re trying to make sure that approved products are being purchased at approved prices and they’re trying to manage the tail, right. So to speak. So the biggest, you know, a big problem that heads of procurement have is how much tailspin do you have and is it with, do you even have visibility to it? And if you have visibility to it, can you control it? So they adopt a procurement system to manage all of those things, right? And once you have a procurement system, then you have to have vendors integrated into that procurement system and they prioritize, right? So they normally will start with, where do we spend the most money? Can we onboard those suppliers into the procurement platform and how do we do that? And then they work their way down the list, right? So, you know, we see it from both sides, right? We’ll see the buyer, right.

Beth Segovia:
Prioritizing adding vendors to their procurement system. But we’ll also see suppliers very strategically trying to integrate with as many of their customers as possible, many of which for the same reasons, right. There’s efficiencies to be gained on both sides, but there’s growth to be gained from the supplier side, right. If you’re integrated, it’s easy. They’re going to buy from you more often. And then the buy side just controlling spend, right. And knowing they’re buying approved product at the approved price.

Justin King:
I’m curious on the. This is a, this is probably the biggest question that buyers ask. And they often say I don’t, I don’t want to type it into my system and then have to type it into your system. What they really mean is like I don’t want to type it into my ERP or E procurement system, whichever one they have, or both.

Beth Segovia:
Right.

Justin King:
And then they don’t want to go into your website and type in your system and do the add to cart. Like they see that as double entry and integration is the thing that solves that problem, right?

Beth Segovia:
It does, it does. Because your, your catalog is available on your E commerce site and if we can create that connection and the buyer simply enters your E commerce site through their system. Right. Any typing they’re doing to search. Right. And you know, soon they’ll be doing just agent chatting. Right. They’ll be able to find the product they’re looking for and that cart gets automatically communicated into their procurement system.

Beth Segovia:
So there’s no errors. Right. The right part, the right part number, the right price is automatically translated into their system. And so there’s no ability for somebody to make a mistake. And that’s not only more efficient, right. It’s, it’s going to, you know, less issues happen downstream.

Justin King:
You, you earlier referred to three way matching. I actually think a lot of people don’t understand what that, what that is that you said. But you walk through those three documents. In the e commerce world, we think of it as kind of order and invoice and we don’t realize there’s actually a relatively sophisticated or manual automated whatever that is process behind getting paid for products. I think it’d be interesting for people to kind of hear what that process sounds like.

Beth Segovia:
Yeah. So you’re, you’re making me giggle now because now I’m, I’m wondering if all of my technical folks are going to say, I want to hear Beth explain this. So, you know, because I think about it, you know, it starts with what do you put in the cart and what was approved? Right. So that cart gets reviewed and approved and that generates a po. Right. So one, did what you intend to buy get purchased Right. Through the PO and then did what you purchase get shipped and did what you get shipped get received? And then did you get invoiced correctly for that product and did you get paid for that? Right. So all of those things need to match in order for.

Beth Segovia:
Right. Everything to get reconciled. Right. And for order to cash happen very quickly. Right. And I always think about, you know, from the supplier’s point of view. Right. So did I get an order? Was it accurate? Did I ship the Right thing.

Beth Segovia:
Did I minimize my returns and did I get paid and did I do that as fast as possible? And so having that matching process, all of those documents being automated, help you create that end to end flow that eliminates the opportunity for errors. I’ve had so many customers tell me, especially on invoicing, how many people they have to have to go compare documents to make sure that this was the right thing and it was approved and Right. We’re, you know, with some AI you need humans in the loop. When these processes, you don’t need humans in the loop. Right. If we’re integrating and we’re transferring all of those documents automatically, then we’re going to have an error free process. And that just. I’m all about eliminating efficiency.

Beth Segovia:
I told you I was an industrial engineer. Feels like since birth, but really I guess since college. Right. So time wasted makes me crazy. And you know, processes that involve people for no reason. Right. We need our people for higher level problem solving. Right.

Beth Segovia:
And for creating new things and for innovation, not for processing POS and invoices.

Justin King:
I think so many times I talk about this quite a bit. This idea of consumerization of B2B2B is like B2C. There’s not much difference between commerce is commerce. But this small example of that purchase order and the matching that happens from what was purchased to what was shipped to what was received to what was invoiced to what was paid.

Beth Segovia:
Yes.

Justin King:
That matching process is actually not an insignificant thing that as you point out takes so many different people and everybody listening to this like that. As you want to understand your customer’s buying journey, you have to understand the process they have to go through individually inside their company. And then as an industry often these things are. They’re not standardized but they’re common across and we got to make sure the buying process include those things to make it simpler for our customers versus more complex. That’s why often just an add to cart doesn’t work. You know, it actually causes more pain for customers than it does like example having workflow and a procurement system that solves all these types of problems. I’m curious from your perspective Beth, as the as we have new laws that have been introduced over the last three months as we’re recording this, it’s in May of 2025 and we have a number of new things that are moving targets but how those are affecting customers and how you think about that with integration.

Beth Segovia:
Well, I’m assuming you’re referring to the ever changing who’s being tariffed and how much tariffs and how often are they being adjusted as negotiations occur. I think it’s actually really interesting, we think about why integrate, why now? And this is a fantastic why now? If you’re customers are integrated directly into your E commerce site and if your commerce platform makes clear the pricing to allow you to show that additional tariff that’s being, you know, added now to an invoice, right? Being integrated allows you to reflect it, it allows you to show the latest, right? So it’s real time. So could this be the thing that kills the hosted catalog finally, once and for all? That would be a beautiful thing. But you can change, you can be agile, you can adapt. If you’re integrated with your customer and there’s a new change, you can change pretty quickly. And the customer can see that change. The customer can see right now, today, if the product ships today, what’s that price going to be? And if it ships in two weeks, they can see what it’s going to be in two weeks. And it allows you to, you know, sort of ebb and flow.

Beth Segovia:
So I think those that are integrated are better enabled to deal with the chaos. I also think that all those manual processes, just think about if you’re reissuing a PO and how many times you have to reissue a po, like these are real world problems. So I grew up in the PC industry. I still have a lot of friends in the PC industry and it took several months before them. I think they got a blessing or at least a stay on at least some level of tariffs. But for a while they didn’t know that. And so they were putting things into, you know, shipping as fast as they could to get ahead of the tariffs. And then they were holding orders because they didn’t know what the price was going to be.

Beth Segovia:
And they were waiting to see what competitors were going to do and then they were changing orders over and over and over again. So just think about the chaos of that, right? If you’re integrated, it’s much easier and you’re sending automated transactions. If you have to send an update, it’s running real time. If you update the tariffs in your system, your pricing in the system, it’s giving the real time information. So I think it creates flexibility but it also, because all of that manual stuff doesn’t exist, right? You’ve already taken that cost out. So I think you’re less, what’s the right word? Exposed to incurring additional cost and additional manual effort driven by chaos because you’re integrated, right? So you’re already at A pretty high level of efficiency. So you’ve already taken those costs out of your system. So you’re not incurring that additional cost.

Beth Segovia:
You’re going to incur costs on. Are you going to have to change sourcing? Are you going to have to do. Right. There’s going to be big things that might happen as a result of these things and you’ve already got those dollars saved that can be reallocated for those investments. So I think being integrated gives you the ability to weather the storm and adapt more easily as things around us change. And you know, I don’t think any of us would have anticipated these changes, but those that are integrated are going to be much better, apt to deal with it.

Justin King:
I think a lot of, a lot of companies are asking the question right now about how do you scale E Commerce and make it bigger and repeatable in general? What have you guys seen as kind of common pitfalls of being able to scale E Commerce as you watch your customers?

Beth Segovia:
Well, I think it’s interesting. There’s a couple of things. So one, I would say viewing commerce project as one and done or viewing an integration project as one and done is it’s never one and done. So if you are a supplier and you have 1500 customers and maybe you’ve set a line in the sand that says you have to do a certain amount of business with me before I’ll integrate with you, doesn’t make a lot of sense to me that people do that, but they do, right? There’s a certain amount of work that goes into creating integration and especially if they’re trying to do it themselves, it’s hard. So they’re going to decide how many of their customers they’re going to integrate with and they’ll set up an integration and then they’ll think they’re done. And that’s a problem. Right. Because the integrations are constantly changing.

Beth Segovia:
So your E Commerce site is going to go through upgrades and changes and you’re going to change features and whatever. Right. So the document information you’re sending is going to change the systems on the other side of those integrations are going to change all the time. Right. We see customers change platforms, but even just maintaining changes on both sides so it’s never one and done. And if we, if we see customers sometimes put limiters on, you know, how many of their buyers they’re going to add each year. Right. Or, and, and those limiters prevent them from scaling as quickly as they could be scaling if they made different choices.

Beth Segovia:
I think there’s Also, we were talking about this a little bit. If there isn’t integration across the organization or alignment across the organization, then that can become a limiter to scaling the business. Right. So if the sales team’s not bought in, doesn’t know how to have a conversation with the customer, so they’ve sold through the product, but now they have to talk about how we want to do business together, so how are we going to transact, you know, that’s not as natural a part of the conversation. And so if the sales team isn’t armed to go talk to the customer about onboarding and integrating, then that can be something that impacts the scaling of their commerce business as well. So we sort of think about barriers, but then we think about accelerators. Right. So what we see as accelerators are obviously leveraging a partner that can manage all the complexity of the integrations and maintaining currency with all of those providers, you know, having an ROI thought process across the leadership team.

Beth Segovia:
So everybody’s aligned around. If we do this, what we get back is X. Right. So there’s no friction. And should we do the next one? Does the next one make sense? Enabling the sales team to really have effective conversations so you can identify customers that are ready, that are interested, that want to do this, that under understand the benefits they’re going to see by doing it. Those kinds of things, I think accelerate and scale e commerce programs and the best of the best get super good at this. And they’re laying down 10 new buyers a month, maybe even 10 every two weeks. That’s pretty great pace.

Beth Segovia:
And we see them just reaping significant benefits when they achieve scale.

Justin King:
Do you see this as one of the selling benefits when you’re trying to sell to a customer? Having these digital integration capabilities, does it allow people to actually sell, you know, do better contracts or win a deal? Do you see these capabilities actually being that competitive advantage?

Beth Segovia:
Oh, I, yeah, I think it’s going to become if you don’t have it, you don’t get the contract eventually. Right. We’re already seeing. We had a prospect that we were working with and this was maybe three or four months ago, and the prospect told me that a year prior they saw the requirement for integration, like 1 out of 10 bids that they were getting and that a year later it was in 90%. And so they were looking for a way to say, yes, I can. Right? So yeah, you know, yes, I do it today. And to give time frames on how long it would be before they could be integrated with so they could respond to Bids in a way that was more effective and make them more competitive because they were losing business. So we believe that it’s a differentiator for a supplier to be able to provide that seamless experience and that those that do are not only securing more business, but they’re growing more with their existing customers because they made it easy.

Justin King:
Let’s, let’s talk a little bit about Trade Centric and I like to start with. So Punch Out To Go was a company that many people knew, knew about. What’s, what’s the, what’s the life cycle of kind of Punch Out To Go and now Trade Centric. How is the same? How is it different? How are they one company, two companies? Explain.

Beth Segovia:
Yeah, no, I love telling the origin story because I think it’s pretty awesome. So Punch out to go was founded 13 years ago. Born as a punch out provider in Port Charles, Virginia. Pretty quickly moved to the big city Charlottesville and added capability. So started out as Punch out and then started automating purchase orders and then started automating invoices and then Susquehanna Growth Equity invested in the company in 2021 and really give a significant scaling investment at that time. And in 22, the company rebranded to Trade Centric because at the time they realized that it wasn’t quite me yet, but they realized that people knew the company for Punch out but didn’t realize the breadth of the solutions. And now they’re, there’s, you know, beyond POA and invoice, we’re offering, you know, advanced shipping notifications and equotes and, you know, a number of different documents that can be transacted all around that purchase experience. So Punch out to Go wasn’t doing us any favors because certainly we do punch out, but automating the whole scheme of transactions is actually what gives our customers the biggest roi.

Beth Segovia:
Especially we like to call it the trifecta. If you automate punch out, purchase order and invoice, you get the biggest bang for your buck. Right? And so we’ve actually tried to start our conversations now more about, talk to me about invoicing and how hard it is and how painful it is. And then let’s work back from there because if we can automate invoicing, in order to do that, you really have to automate Punch out and po and that’s when you get all of these benefits of reducing all the manual effort and then the benefits of having matching. So we rebranded to Trade Centric to really capture the fact that we sit at the center of trade. Right. And we are enabling all of those transactions to occur seamlessly. So that happened in 22.

Beth Segovia:
And then, you know, we had a CEO at the time. That was transition between the founders and myself that really put all the scaffolding of the company into place. And I took over in 23 to really significantly scale the business. And so we’re now at a point where we have 5,000 businesses trading on our platform and we’re processing like, I don’t know, $11 billion in order volume a year, which is pretty incredible. So now Trade Centric, very fondly remembered as Punch out to Go. Even as recently as B2B online a couple of weeks ago, we had two customers actually refer to us as part of their IT map and call us out very positively for having enabled their success as Punch out to Go. And we were like, that’s okay. We’ll take the compliment.

Beth Segovia:
That’s still part of our genes.

Justin King:
Does punchouttogo.com still refer back to Trade Century? It does.

Beth Segovia:
It still directs.

Justin King:
I was pretty heavily involved early on in Punch out to Go and the founder team. First of all, I have been educated over the years on the importance of this. I think I wrote my first Punch out article in 2009 about what Punch out was, what round trip like, it was an explanation of it, not any strategic evaluation of it. And then the team has come on and ran multiple sessions for people. I just think it’s. I just think it’s incredibly valuable. How do you kind of break down the services and kind of technology that you have? How do you kind of split that.

Beth Segovia:
Out in terms of just how we talk to new customers?

Justin King:
Yeah. I’m giving you an opportunity to kind of talk about kind of laying out all the different services and technology that you have here.

Beth Segovia:
Yeah, I mean, so we usually start the conversation with what kind of experience do you want to provide to your customer and to what extent do you want to provide that experience? So there’s really six core documents that we. Six. Six core documents that we automate across that experience. And so we always talk to the prospect about, not necessarily just thinking about solving the problem that’s being requested perhaps by your customer. So, you know, integrating automating, Punch out and plug, but really thinking about what is the full experience that you want to be able to offer. And normally, you know, not every supplier’s customer is built equally, so they’re going to want to do different things for different customers. And so we talk to them about the different capabilities and then how they think they’re going to want to support their first set of customers. And it’s usually a combination of solutions.

Beth Segovia:
And then we usually talk to customers about how many, right. How many buyers do you think you’re going to onboard to begin with? And 100% of our customers start with a very manageable number as their first kind of out of the gate conversation with us. So they want to start with 10 or 15 or 20 and they want to get that done in a year. And then they want to start thinking about how do we accelerate growth. And then we have customers that do, obviously many, many more than that. So first we talk about the technology, the experience, what are we going to enable and what kind of different combination do we think your buyers need. We also talk about, you know, how are they set up for success. So we always have to evaluate their system, right? So their commerce platform to see if it’s ready.

Beth Segovia:
So is it ready for us to integrate with? So we’ll do an assessment depending on whether that’s been a homegrown system or whether it’s a relatively recent deployment, or whether it was purpose built for B2B. You know, the answer to that sort of assessment of system ready readiness can be quite different. So we always start with are you ready? And if you’re not ready, here’s the things you have to do to get ready. And then we talk about, you know, there’s two parts to this. We hook you up to us and then we hook up to your customer and that’s how we create the integration. And so, you know, getting both of those pieces put together to create a completed round trip transaction. You know, as we talk about implementation, planning, and then we think about too with the customer kind of what’s going to get in your way. So is your sales team ready to go? Is your sales team ready to talk to customers about this? Have you already engaged with customers? You have customers already asking for this and if you don’t, then we usually do what we call a trading partner analysis.

Beth Segovia:
So we have 5,000 companies already trading on our platform. So almost always, pretty much always, when a customer comes to us and gives us their customer list, we bounce that against our network and we find somebody that’s already connected. And so it’s really easy to get going. If you start with people that are already connected into the ecosystem because we know that we’ve done it before, it’s easy to enable those transactions. So we try to mix as many of those existing into that first batch to get people up and running. But if we identify there’s things that are maybe getting in the way so we can’t identify trading partners to go do business with. Then we’ll do buyer engagement to help as a service. We’ll do sales education to go help identify customers that might be ready so that we, you know, ride alongside the sales team to go out and reach out to customers until they feel like they’ve built the skills to go do that.

Beth Segovia:
So in addition to the technology, we offer not a ton of services, but a handful of very specific services that help a customer kind of advance on that maturity curve, that scale to help them get to a place where their program will scale more quickly. And so that’s really the suite of what we do. We’re super focused. Again, we automate six transactions across the solution set and offer services that enable a customer to integrate with as many buyers as they intend to. And obviously we work with them to try to convince them that the more they integrate with, the more results they’ll see out of their program.

Justin King:
What are the main kind of procurement systems that are out there? What are the. I’m thinking about names for people just to kind of recognize. Okay, when you hear these names, this is the avenue that you’re going down with integration.

Beth Segovia:
Yeah, so there’s 200 or more of them, I think, but ones the big ones. Right. So the Koopas, the Jaggers, the SAP Aribas, you know, we see those guys all the time obviously because they’re big procurement platforms. But then there’s lots and lots of smaller ones, especially as you get into very specific niche industries. So I think Yardley focuses on the construction space. And so there’s a whole bunch of these. There’s also a whole bunch that started off as something but then got customized and had become homegrown or just purely homegrown built. And it, you know, it really doesn’t matter to us as long as they can speak a language and can speak and they have the fields we need that we can go pull the information out of so that we can transact documents.

Justin King:
Is there another method other than punch out that are used? Is it ever direct migration where people are actually looking up product content and product inside of the procurement instead of punch out?

Beth Segovia:
So not, not that we’re facilitating. So we do some EDI stuff and some, you know, there’s some one off things around that we can do because once we get embedded with a customer, if they have a specific solution that needs to be solved and we’re capable of doing that, we’ll do that. Right. That’s part of what we do, we solve all kinds of problems. I bet on our guys any day of being able to solve, solve it. But the primary way that we solve those problems is through Punch Out. But certainly, you know, companies are still doing hosted catalogs, they’re still doing edi, they’re still doing all different, you know, direct through the website. There are other ways to transact.

Beth Segovia:
We think Punch out offers an elegance that the other solutions do not. Because of the ease of the experience, the customer gets to shop on your website. Right. And so all of that intentional experience that you’ve built to enable them to access the products that they’re supposed to access and the pricing and allows you to run promotions, et cetera, around their catalog. Right. By allowing them to punch, you know, Punch out into your commerce experience, you have the ability to control that and influence what gets in that cart. And so we think it’s the most elegant of the solutions.

Justin King:
I think people get confused sometimes when they think through Punch out integration, things like Ariba and Coupa and then marketplaces like how do you, how should people kind of think through those differences between them?

Beth Segovia:
So, you know, I think Marketplaces is really interesting and it’s early, right? I mean, even though there’s Hundreds now of B2B marketplaces, whereas there were not so many hundreds just a couple of years ago, it’s still not where everybody is going. So it’s not B2C. Right. We’re not there yet and we’ve talked to our customers. We try to do customer interviews very intentionally. I’m always involved in that. And we’re doing them kind of every other quarter. And Marketplaces has been on our list of questions for the last couple of rounds and we’re not seeing tons of customers yet.

Beth Segovia:
Thinking about strategically, what marketplaces do I need to be on for visibility and reach and how do I need to do that? Because, you know, if we can enable Punch out into a commerce platform, we can enable listings into a marketplace, right? So there’s, you know, there are other things that we could be doing to help solve those problems. But so I think Punch out enables a supplier to control the buyer experience. So the buyer gets to buy the way they want to. They use their procurement platform, they punch out into your website and you’re in control. You have a one on one relationship with that customer. You control loyalty, you’re controlling the experience and you’re servicing that relationship without anybody, you know, in between. On a marketplace, the marketplace is controlling that purchase experience, so they’re controlling what the customer sees and whether you’re being presented in addition to perhaps competitors in that landscape. So maybe you need to be there because that’s where your customer is shopping.

Beth Segovia:
But then you have to think about effective promotion. Is your product content as good or better and as your competitor and are you winning? Right. All the things you gotta worry about in B2C I think become an issue. Right. Again in B2B marketplaces. So I think it really comes down to what is your business need, right. Where do you need to be visible? Where are your buyers shopping? If they want to shop directly with you, I would advise to integrate directly. Right.

Beth Segovia:
Make that as easy as possible so that they’re not given an opportunity to view your competitors offerings and pressure pricing. So I think it just depends on where your customers are shopping. And if you have to be there, if you have to be there, you have to be there. I mean we used to tell our, in B2C you know, if you’re not on Amazon and your customer is shopping on Amazon, then your customer is buying somebody else’s product.

Justin King:
Yeah, right.

Beth Segovia:
And so I don’t think we’re there yet now. It’s very compelling, right. With Amazon business and Walmart business and you know, all of these big marketplaces kind of coming up. If it becomes where newer people into the workforce who are entering into procurement roles, if they’re used to shopping in these places and they find that they can continue to shop in these places and they’re looking for your product in those places, then you need to be there. And so you have to think about how you’re, how you meet your customer demand. At the end of the day it all comes down to what does your customer need, what do they want and how do you help them achieve those goals. Right. While obviously offering the product that they need.

Beth Segovia:
But it’s more than product. It’s about purchase experience, it’s about spend control and it’s about efficiency. And so I think sometimes a supplier is thinking too narrowly. If they’re only thinking about am I offering the best product and do I have a great website. Right. It’s just not enough.

Justin King:
I think like you said, there’s key that you know right now customers by and large not, not all, of course, but they’re, they’re not, they’re buying directly from the suppliers, the distributors, the suppliers that they want to, they’re not going to marketplaces. And we’re watching some changes. Like you said, we have Amazon business, Walmart, Home Depot is, is doing, you know, a, continues to acquire both technology and you know, businesses in that realm. So that might change over time. So I think, I think in a data, what’s interesting about integration, it’s, it’s so data heavy, so structured data heavy, maybe some unstructured in there too. How do you guys at Trade centric think about AI and the future of AI affecting this business of integration and data exchange and things like that?

Beth Segovia:
Yeah, I think it’s a great question. I think as we’ve been learning along with everybody, right these last couple of years, as AI is accelerating, the obvious thought is how can we be doing things better or differently leveraging new technology. But also, you know, we’re always the paranoid survive, right? So we’re always like how could this be displaced by some, you know, new AI thing? And we have formed a pretty strong point of view, which is what we do requires accuracy. Right. And you know, rule based automation creates accurate outcomes. And when you integrate a system where we just spent all this time talking about removing errors, removing manual effort and transacting seamlessly. Right. So you have to get the right answer every time.

Beth Segovia:
Right. And that’s still rule based automation. And so AI is not going to displace those core transaction of documents. But what it could do is help you build integrations faster. So have you built something that looks like this before? If so, can we get you started with an 85% drafted integration? Right. It can interact with a customer to collect the requirements that go into. Right. So an agentic interaction that creates the input into deciding what integration to go build and then serving up the integration that’s the closest to that.

Beth Segovia:
So that you know, the integration engineer that then goes and completes the job is doing the 15 or 20% of work that’s needed. So we think it can make us go much, much faster by helping to serve up, right. The, the things we’ve done before or the technology that we should go use for this particular use case, we think that has like, we think it has legs of course like crazy in customer service, right. So accessing knowledge base, you know, generating, you know, the right answer to a question or a new configuration or how do you pull this report or whatever, right. All that kind of stuff. It can generate those things very, very quickly. And then you know, our analytics engine we think is one of the things that really sets trade centric apart. You know, we have this portal that gives you all this information that kind of falls through the cracks between E commerce and E procurement systems.

Beth Segovia:
So we can show you all the shopping that happened that turned into abandoned cart, all this different data. We can show you anomalies and spend. So a customer is usually buying this, this, this, this, this, and then it disappeared or it suddenly spiked. Right. So we can give you differences in spend habits. We can help you do vendor management as a result of that or buyer management. So in analytics, we think there’s a lot of potential by leveraging technology that we’re just exploring right now from an AI perspective. So we think that, you know, that’s future, but that’s what we’re thinking about from an AI perspective.

Beth Segovia:
So the hardcore of what we do, where it has to be precise, it has to be accurate, it has to happen the same way every single time. We don’t think that’s going to get disrupted in the near term, at least with, you know, we can’t be having that hallucinate so that we don’t think. But there are lots of other ways we can gain speed and efficiency in how those integrations get created. And through support.

Justin King:
My guess is too that it’ll probably evolve faster of how customers interact with you, meaning how they purchase. So a customer purchasing through punch out could be an agentic operation. That happens that, that I think that will move faster. But at the same time, especially for commodities and things like that are being reordered, I think that, I think that’s going to move pretty fast and over the next couple years.

Beth Segovia:
And it really requires, I mean it requires the E Comm Systems and the EPro systems to also pretty quickly move into that sort of authentic conversations. Right. So that you can just, you know, talk to the procurement system and say, hey, I want to reorder those gloves again from so and so and it automatically. And then that natural language, you know, chat gets sent across through the punch out instead of, you know, a very specific set of instructions. Absolutely. That kind of agentic flow to get it started could possibly change pretty quickly.

Justin King:
I also think that AI readable data is kind of first on that response to where instead of, instead of necessarily presenting a website, you’re presenting packages of data that AI can read and know what to do. So they know, okay, this is the product I want to buy now, how do I buy that now? And so it’s doing more kind of machine language and understanding of that of purchasing that a human’s never involved in. I think that was fast and, and, and not. But people die when the wrong products are picked, right? So the wrong spec, the wrong fluid control flow, you know, pressure, like people die or there’s safety concerns or legal problems. So, so at the Same time I say that, you know, I’m not projecting years on anything because this is, this is a very slow moving industry, right. We were talking in the beginning of this conversation how, how surprised we are that companies still don’t have websites, right, Or e commerce sites in general, let alone this type of stuff. So it’s also slow moving and extra caution is needed because some of these products are, it’s really important they get it right, right. When the product’s purchased, things like that.

Justin King:
So super interesting.

Beth Segovia:
Well, I think it’s also, you know, for companies that do this themselves, right, that have a pretty decent integration program that they’re managing in house, I think the rise of AI has a potential to really leave them vulnerable, right. So if they’re not pretty quickly adapting to how the systems on the other end are going to start talking to them and you know, thinking about agentic interaction with procurement systems, et cetera, I think that could evolve pretty quickly. And so, you know, it would be, I think, comforting to them to have a technology partner that’s really living and breathing. What’s changing, how fast is it and are we working with Jagger to make the adjustments needed to make sure that this all still works tomorrow, but works better and differently? And then how far behind are you going to fall, Right? So I think it’s one of those, right, where, you know, skip over to the mobile, skip over to Apple pay, right. Skip over a bunch of junk to get to what’s coming. I think we’re in one of those times when that’s an opportunity.

Justin King:
This is an amazing conversation. Thanks so much.

Beth Segovia:
Thank you.