2X eCommerce Podcast

Kunle Campbell (00:06.338)
Hey Steve, welcome to the 2X e-commerce podcast. Amazing. So the context or the precursor to this conversation was an introduction from Bobby Morrison from Shopify. And he was like, Steven is an expert in B2B commerce, in the B2B commerce space and has had firsthand experience in Shopify's B2B platform. Steven has been instrumental in helping us think and shape

Steven Duran (00:10.124)
Thanks for having me.

Kunle Campbell (00:35.022)
our B2B offering. Much of our product roadmap has come from working with Carrier, which is your company, and Steven. So you're quite a big deal, Steven.

Steven Duran (00:46.538)
But I appreciate that. That's very kind from Bobby and the Shopify team.

Kunle Campbell (00:51.638)
Okay, so let's get some context, just a bit of a background would be very, very helpful. Your professional background, your your in in carrier, your leading strategy in the B2B e commerce, you know, side of things, but do you want to just give a little bit of a background of yourself, please?

Steven Duran (01:10.454)
Sure, yeah. So I come with about a decade plus of commerce related professional background. In my current role here at Carrier Global, I serve in Carrier's digital organization.

which is a global entity that serves across all of our various business units. So folks understand and know Carrier for being a world's premier like climate solutions company. A lot of folks know them for our HVAC offerings. Some folks I'm sure are very aware of our refrigeration and cooling technology as well. We're a very global

I say that very intentionally because we serve very many regions, about 20 billion a year annually in volume, 40,000 plus folks across the globe. So my role here is I oversee carriers' strategy and delivery across global commerce, MarTech, SaaS selling.

field service and sales enablement. it's a full stack of activities that I'm responsible for. And when I first came to Carrier, my main focus was global commerce and finding ways to build out our capabilities to serve as many folks across the globe as possible.

Kunle Campbell (02:30.156)
Mm-hmm.

Kunle Campbell (02:47.954)
Incredible, incredible, incredible. you're not just in commerce as in your entire tech enablement, you're cutting across the tech strategy for carrier, you know, across the board. That is really, really interesting. So the theme of this month of the 2X Ecommerce podcast really is understanding B2B eCommerce a bit more. Before your tenor, where was carrier from a

B2B from implementing a B2B e-commerce strategy.

Steven Duran (03:21.44)
Sure, think the most important...

thing that I would share with the listeners is that when you think about Carrier, like the organization, it's more like a library than it is a book, meaning that there are lots of different use cases, lots of different selling motions, lots of different business units. And many people may have seen our strategic portfolio transformation with some divestitures and some spins. But what's really important is that there's not just one selling motion at Carrier. There's lots

of different selling motions. So we've got areas where we serve residential folks, areas where we're serving commercial folks, we've got domestic customers, multinational customers, and so the skews and the product line is very sophisticated. So when we talk about what does global commerce look like at Carrier, the question is what part of Carrier are we talking about and what part of Carrier are we...

serving. So we have some parts of our organization where there are very highly complex pieces of equipment or even like selling motions that require a lot of sophistication in that workflow. And then we've got other parts of the organization where let's say an aftermarket in parts where we have pieces of equipment where we need to sell replacement components very quickly. So

What does it look like? Carrier, when I started about three years ago.

Steven Duran (04:55.552)
had anywhere from about 20 to 30 different e-commerce sites or e-commerce selling portals. And these are logged in experiences for the most part, where you have to get an account, log in, and then go through a purchasing workflow. And so we were on a whole host of legacy solutions. some of these are...

very legacy. mean, we've got Lotus Notes situations that have needed to be upgraded. And we've had other legacy platforms that required a lot of ongoing maintenance that were negatively impacting our total cost of ownership and some of the margin targets that we've had. So it's been a really fun transformation journey. I've really, really enjoyed it.

Kunle Campbell (05:24.558)
you

Kunle Campbell (05:49.614)
20 to 30 different properties selling, you know, just catering to different sectors or, you know, different product lines and different sections of the business.

Steven Duran (06:01.642)
Yes, and those are just the ones that are active. So if you think about our team, we have this world-class product development team and the equipment and the things that Carrier is doing in the climate technology space to be innovative is truly remarkable. for me, as I steward over all of our capabilities and all of our business units in every region,

It's not just about what we have today and how can we support it, although that's very important. It's also about where are we headed and how can we open up new opportunities and open up new channels. So what that means is, I shared 20 to 30, but there is possibilities that are unlimited. There's nothing to say that we couldn't open up another 10 in the next several months. It's whatever.

Kunle Campbell (06:53.922)
Mm-hmm.

Steven Duran (06:58.784)
What I like to say is that technology is at the service of our teams and not the other way around. Like I'm a technologist at the end of the day and the folks that are on my team, we build technology. But we don't build technology for the sake of technology. We build it for business results and we're here to serve our teams. So what that looks like is like an interdependence that we have with sales teams, product teams, and then technology teams to say, do you have a good business idea?

Kunle Campbell (07:11.374)
Mm-hmm.

Steven Duran (07:28.246)
great, how can I monetize it in the next 30 days? Not three years, not five years. How can I be the first to market? How can I be very responsible and very rapidly enabling, let's say, a frictionless commerce?

experience. These are the things that are really exciting when we think about like transformation and innovation and all these buzzwords. For us what that means is like how can we take the creativity of everybody at the organization and how can we then go to market and monetize and add value to the folks that we serve for the solutions that are good for people and the planet.

Kunle Campbell (07:47.075)
Hmm.

Kunle Campbell (08:10.809)
So it's really getting tech to serve the organization. That makes sense. So I'm just looking at some figures here in 20. These are the numbers I have because we're recording this in January of 2025. I have your revenue for 2023. was close to $6 billion and net income was close to $500 million.

the context of things, what's the contribution of commerce as a percentage to revenue at this point in time? And is it growing?

Steven Duran (08:46.612)
It's definitely growing. What I can tell you is that we are looking for opportunities to open up new channels as much as we can. I think one of the...

Like I said, it's technology at the service of kind of what we're doing. So a lot of my answers on this topic are going to be in line with what you're going to see with our team, which is, you know, we want to see, let's say, double digit growth in the aftermarket space. Right. So you can begin to do the math and kind of work backwards to say, like, OK, well, if this is where carrier is in this space, like, what does aftermarket growth look like aftermarket as just one example?

Kunle Campbell (09:22.158)
Hmm.

Steven Duran (09:30.252)
I love because there's so much opportunity there, especially as you think about all of the equipment that's in the field. Like Carrier has incredible market penetration, incredible brand value and like top mind awareness, right? And all of that equipment is all coming online. It's all becoming an IOT play, right? And so think about all the things that you can do if you take these huge pieces of industrial equipment.

and you bring them online. And then you can do things like over the air updates. You can do things like anticipate downtime. You can do things like make sure that you're doing preventative maintenance. again, technology at the service of the business. If you have a hospital that has a very critical piece of climate.

technology in it, failure on that piece of equipment has catastrophic implications, right? You've got different things like generators and backups and stuff like that. But what we can do is we can enable things to be very proactive in our relationships with our customers.

Kunle Campbell (10:26.456)
Mm-hmm.

Kunle Campbell (10:38.956)
Mm-hmm.

Steven Duran (10:40.644)
And commerce plays a very critical part of that because the idea that you have to go and call somebody during business hours and sit in a phone queue and wait and then kind of go back and forth, place an order and follow up multiple times on what's the status of it, where is it coming from, all these things.

Which by the way, for those of us that have been building B2C or D2C in our careers, is like, we kind of smirk at it and we laugh and we're kind of like, yeah, it sounds like the stone ages. The reality though is a lot of folks in the B2B space, not just in industrial, but across B2B space, this is their reality. Like this is what they're used to.

Kunle Campbell (11:14.659)
Mm-hmm.

Kunle Campbell (11:26.904)
So, yeah.

Steven Duran (11:28.254)
And so commerce allows us to kind of modernize our relationships with our customers and add a lot of value because we can do things like, aftermarket is a great example because you've got pieces of equipment or machinery that's already there and we can be proactive and we can add a lot of value to these folks. And commerce is just like, it's that connection piece that allows folks to do it in a seamless, touchless environment. So that's kind of how we...

Kunle Campbell (11:46.786)
Mm-hmm.

Kunle Campbell (11:53.006)
Mm-hmm.

Steven Duran (11:57.696)
That's one area where we think about how can we add value with global commerce and what does that mean for us and our customers as we move forward.

Kunle Campbell (12:07.394)
That's very, very smart and strategic. The personal anecdote, we had an appliance, midrall appliance in our home, break down about two months ago. So we used the appliance insurance and they had to go to the manufacturer and they got a technician in to diagnose what the issue was. And the technician came into our house, looked at the appliance, said we'd need three parts and then went on to order it online.

And there was a queue. one of the three appliances could not be sourced. It took him, it was already going to about three weeks and he had to make a call. So everything was online in terms of, that technician who is independent, he's his own business. He's not necessarily working for the insurance company. So he was empowered to make that order himself, give us updates by text.

And although the part was not available, they had to eventually replace the appliance. I could see what you're talking about in terms of after just streamlining that aftermarket, you know, experience. There's so many carriers, the millions, millions and millions and millions of your finished devices all over the world. And they would need maintenance. And it's actually smart because if like your customers can access

specific portals, as soon as, you know, they, their customers, they could almost self serve in a very seamless way that's more DTC, rather than having to go through convoluted vendors and stuff. So does that mean that there's also vertical integration opportunity for for carrier, in terms of having more direct relationships with not just your customers, but also

empowering your partners who are feet on the ground in terms of maintaining all of your devices, your customer sites.

Steven Duran (14:13.93)
Yeah, so the way that we think about it, it kind of goes a little bit like this. What we would describe that antidote, which is part breaks in your home, somebody quickly comes to service it, procures the part, installs the part. So we refer to that as a kitchen table moment. So somebody has come in and sat down at the kitchen table and looked you in the eye and worked through all the details.

What I sometimes and some others will refer to that independent dealer or technician is we'll call him a two truck Chuck. Meaning that, you know, he's got two trucks and that's how he runs his business, right? And the hope is that, you know, he can expand his fleet as he grows. Now, you think about Chuck.

Like Chuck is successful if he's spending less time at the home office and more time in the field. So the thought that we and myself kind of champion among our stakeholders and executives is how do we help Chuck?

Decrease the amount of administration time and more time in the field. How do I keep him in his truck longer? throughout the day so he can do the things that you know, he got in this business to do in the first place and We believe that our commerce capability and our technology can facilitate that so in our space and in our industry there

is a very significant emphasis on legacy ordering channels. And I sound like a broken record, but like what this means is we're talking about hundreds of millions and billions of dollars, not just this brand at Carrier, but just across our industry of fax orders. Like fax orders are a massive component of...

Steven Duran (16:02.54)
like doing business with these OEM brands. I even heard a story recently of one of these OEM brands that took a very large order that came in faxed on a shoe. Like this is, this sounds hilarious, but this is like the reality in 2024, 2025, like of what people are experiencing. So what does that mean? It means that commerce has an incredible opportunity to disrupt and it's not just commerce, it's everything on that customer experience.

kind of funnel, right? So from the consideration to the buying, to the checkout, to the post purchase fee. A lot of folks have a lot of emphasis right now on artificial intelligence, AI, and kind of how does that impact that workflow? Well, like anything, if I can help somebody using AI to very quickly identify what part, let's say,

needs to be added to a piece of equipment, that's gonna add a lot of value to Chuck. That's gonna help him serve more customers. That's gonna add more value to carrier the OEM. A lot of these brands have two and three step distribution. Either they're going through dealers or technicians, or they're going through distributors who are going to dealers, technicians who are ending at that kitchen table moment.

and this is particularly for the residential space, let's say. What we can do as far as commerce is we can expose and really lean into that top mind awareness piece. So you mentioned, what does it look like for a carrier to have a relationship with the end user? Well, it's allow, to expose, to provide more visibility to how we can fix a problem, how we can upgrade a home.

how we can help a builder make a purchasing decision across a fleet of industrial buildings. There's a lot of opportunity there where commerce actually interacts with all three of those channels. So you can help expose things where distributors, let's say, can... You can pass leads over to distributors.

Steven Duran (18:24.14)
You can help things where dealers are buying things from the OEM, picking it up in distributors. There's lots of business models that are available when you have this three-step distribution, and it's really like an emerging area. If you can hear it in my voice, it's really exciting because parts of these workflows are just so broken, and it gets me really excited because there's so much opportunity to make everybody's life better across the value chain, across the purchasing funnel.

Kunle Campbell (18:41.068)
Thank

Steven Duran (18:54.11)
and all the different persona types that you serve.

Kunle Campbell (18:57.71)
It's about time and convenience really, speed, efficiency, time. then you're able to carry out more deals. You spoke about IoT. Does it mean that the devices, first of all, are connected to the internet from what I understand, but can also self-diagnose when things break down?

Steven Duran (19:19.83)
So a lot of this technology is continuing to evolve and some of the things that are coming out in this space are really, really exciting. It's really going to positively impact end users' lives. So whether you're homeowners or small business owners, as just an example.

A lot of these technologies out there can do self-diagnosis. A lot of these technologies can do over-the-air updates. It's a really, really exciting point in our space. Carrier has a very visible IoT offering called Abound that I would encourage folks to go and check out.

And yeah, I mean, we're kind of one of the pioneers in climate technology and our links capabilities as well and connected cold chain are really, really exciting, particularly in monitoring. you know, when I say cold chain, it's like cold chain transport. So if somebody is transporting, let's say fresh produce from one country to another country and there's long distances, you know, typically a lot of that fresh produce goes bad.

And so there's a lot of food release. So having proper connected cold chain and cold chain transportation and monitoring services that ensure that we stay at the right temperature so that when the food arrives, you're not seeing spoiled food or ruined food. That has incredible like.

global and humanitarian impacts, right? And that's just a food example. Think about what that looks like with vaccines or with medical, you know, things that need to be at a temperature. the amount of ways that like our, not just carrier, but like our industry at large, like the way that we can use IOT to like truly add more value to folks' lives.

Steven Duran (21:17.674)
to do some things that are pretty special. It's kind of one of those reasons that makes you wake up and want to go to work every day, because you say like, listen, I can solve, I can help be a part of the solution in many of these areas.

Kunle Campbell (21:24.835)
Mm-hmm.

Kunle Campbell (21:31.118)
So one of the reasons I wanted to catch up with you and one of the themes of this month's focus on B2B is to inspire operators of e-commerce businesses. Now they're not at the scale of where you guys are, but they're all kind of like small medium type businesses. They're doing anything from 50 to a hundred million dollars in revenue.

to get them thinking, some of them are in their journey of their wholesale journey right now. You some of them are quite established wholesalers, hence the reason why they're breaking certain revenue barriers and others are just starting. You mentioned something around technology, you know, being the servant to, you know, your organization to workflows. What should these, do you have any advice to these listeners, you know, these operators as to how to

utilize tech to increase their wholesale offering. just to efficiently sort of get things going so they're not essentially stuck in a rock because a lot of them have seen DTC success and they're trying to replicate it from a B2B model. So how would you, do you have any mental model for them to approach this?

Steven Duran (22:49.13)
Yeah, think a couple of things come to mind. I think the first thing is that if you have experience in

We have experience, especially in the D to C space, like getting into the wholesale or getting into the B to B space is something that I just like strongly encourage. So if folks are sitting on the sideline, they have an idea or they're looking to open this other part of their business, I would strongly encourage you to do so. I think my personal opinion is that our B to B space is still just a green field. It's so open and there's so much opportunity.

And I don't think it's gonna be like that forever. I think that in the next like three to five years, we will have like closed that gap and you know, we might hit a saturation point because the technology that's available today is so accessible. So this is the other point. I would encourage folks like the technology available to start a B2B offering or to expand and open a B2B channel is so very accessible.

It's nowhere near as early as five years ago. So as an anecdotal example, there's a case study out there with the work that my team did with Shopify where historically when I started three years ago, it was very, very expensive to build a B2B channel at Carrier.

So just on the technology side. So a carrier, if you wanted to build a net new soup to nuts, fully mature B2B selling motion, it would cost you about a million to a million and a half bucks and it would take about nine to 12 months to do so.

Steven Duran (24:43.852)
That is a very significant investment, even for the enterprise space. And I just mentioned that there are 20 to 30 of these selling motions on a whole host of different platforms and solutions. So I think you can do the math of what kind of investment we're kind of talking about.

very quickly I looked at that and said, that's not sustainable. I don't know about you guys, but I'm not getting $20 million investments, greenlit, very often to build net new commerce websites. But what I can tell you is in the last 10 years of my experience building e-commerce websites, we would throw up Shopify sites over a weekend with a case of beer and a pack of cigarettes.

Right? Like it was so affordable to try new ideas and to go and start selling and then learn and then iterate and then perfect and then scale. Right? That's the journey of the every entrepreneur ever. So what we did is we took that concept and said, let's go and figure out how we can take that ease of technology and apply it to an enterprise B2B selling motion.

So we went and we spoke to all the different major commerce platforms out there and we landed on Shopify largely because of their capabilities in the B2C space. And so we looked at them and said, well, you're so good in the B2C space, what do you have in the B2B? So when we looked at them, we said, wow, you really have a lot of the power of B2B.

of B2C, excuse me, is there in the B2B. So the ability to use that technology, the speed of the checkout, like all of the pre-built capabilities that come with Shopify out of the box, like all of these things, right? We could take that and leverage it for our B2B selling motion. So what we did, my team is, I had spent three years talking to almost every single

Steven Duran (26:51.308)
like a leadership team at Carrier that had a commerce selling motion. And what I found was all of them had about 80 % of their business requirements were all shared. It was all the same thing. And so for me, that 80 % of shared business requirements was, that's a product, like that's a centralized product. The remaining 20 to 15%, they were all local.

requirements or like industry or special, right? Selling filters in Singapore looks a lot different than selling IoT sensors in Boston, Massachusetts, right? So that's like the context that I'm playing with. So taking that 80 % of our requirements, we went out and pre-built those components using Shopify components, and we built ourselves an accelerator.

Kunle Campbell (27:30.062)
Got it.

Steven Duran (27:40.108)
So essentially, we built Carrier's special sauce of Shopify. Our accelerator is called One Commerce. I think it's a clever way to essentially sharply decrease the overhead needed to build commerce capabilities. So with this accelerator, we went from building brand new...

B2B commerce experiences for a million bucks in nine to 12 months, we can build that same experience more sophisticated with more technology. We can build it for like a hundred grand in like 30 to 60 days. like, and these are all ranges, right? These are not exact numbers, but what I'm trying to communicate is that you can take a business idea at Carrier and you can monetize that.

Kunle Campbell (28:20.654)
Mm.

Steven Duran (28:34.64)
in five to six weeks. You can monetize your business idea for at 10 % of the cost of what it was taking us two to three years ago. Like that kind of innovation, that kind of like speed and just obsession with adding value with customers. Like that is what I want to communicate to those that are.

growing a wholesale business or have been successful in the commerce or drop shipping or whatever it is and are like flirting with the idea of like how do I open up a B2B channel or what does that even look like? What I'm saying is like don't let the technology scare you away. The technology is very, very accessible right now.

And you can turn, if I can do it in my huge organization with all of the overhead that comes with a $20 billion annual industrial brand, you can do it for a 50 to $100 million wholesale online business. It is very capable and the technology is so accessible right now. So you don't need.

team of two to three hundred developers to build these things you don't need millions and millions of capital to go and to unlock a wholesale channel I would encourage you to go and to do your research into the space to see who could serve your use case listen we spoke to a lot of folks in the

Kunle Campbell (29:54.67)
Mm-hmm.

Steven Duran (30:06.656)
the commerce platform and we landed on Shopify because of the use cases that we had. There are other good and valuable platforms out there for our purposes and the accelerator One Commerce that we've built, we ended up going with Shopify.

Kunle Campbell (30:22.83)
Okay, makes sense. Makes sense. Thanks for the very elaborate answer to my question. Looking at Shopify B2B, what kind of support you have in the app ecosystem? I know you have resources, lots of resources and carrier. Hence the reason why you've essentially adapted Shopify to your one commerce platform.

What does it look like? I don't have any sort of insights or experience in B2B e-commerce. Is it on the Shopify Plus platform or is there an entire offering, different offering for B2B? How did you, how do you navigate all of that?

Steven Duran (31:06.122)
So that, it's a little bit of a, if you're familiar with Shopify, it is a little different than what we have experienced on the D to C side. So we think of Shopify as this.

composable solution that essentially allows us to take different components. So if I just want to use the checkout for an experience because I have some elaborate like CMS content management system, then I can do that, right? I don't have to go with it. But what it affords me is the ability to use these technology building blocks to implement some part of Shopify's capabilities within my tech stack. So.

Kunle Campbell (31:21.41)
Okay.

Kunle Campbell (31:32.38)
Mm-hmm.

Steven Duran (31:48.554)
I think the most important thing to keep in mind for like an industrial company is that you're always going to have multiple enterprise technology solutions that are in the environment that have to, what we would say, play nice with Shopify, right? A lot of folks got to play nice. What is a little different, and this is a point of view that I have that's not necessarily shared by everybody, is that the app ecosystem within

Kunle Campbell (32:04.372)
Mm-hmm.

Steven Duran (32:17.108)
Shopify is very, very valuable. And for especially folks in that 50 to 100 million and even lower that are growing, like that is a strategic advantage for folks to go and to plug into that app marketplace and to provision different capabilities that they need. For us at Carrier, we maintain our own technology, like integration teams.

So if there is some sort of capability that we need to turn on, we're going to maintain a relationship directly with that provider. if it's, let's say, a popular one in the carrier ecosystem or in the Shopify ecosystem would be like a Yoppo, right? Or maybe, I'm trying to think of another one.

The point is this, if there is a capability that we want to turn on, we're going to go and source that directly with the software provider and we're going to build out a roadmap based on everything that that provider is capable of. And then we're going to integrate it ourselves into our selling channels, into our selling motions. So most likely it's going to be Shopify. So.

In that sense, we are going to control our own destiny as far as the technology solutions and how the integrations work. Whereas when you plug into a marketplace, the value is that you turn on an app and you pay the monthly fee and somebody else is maintaining the connection. That's the whole value prop.

of a marketplace. When you're hundreds of millions and billions of dollars of volume, I'm of the opinion that you would want to control your own destiny and you'd want to own those connection points. Because if there is a failure with an integration, let's say it goes into Shopify and then you push it into an ERP, whatever is in the environment, I'm of the opinion that we as the OEM should own that integration layer.

Steven Duran (34:26.526)
And so if something breaks, we go and fix it immediately. And we're going to obviously maintain our own relationship with an ERP, but we want to have that kind of closed loop approach to our tech stack.

Kunle Campbell (34:40.428)
It makes sense. all about ownership. It's all about ownership, ground up and the flexibility of moving things around and integrating. Speaking of a composable experience with Shopify, which of the components in the Shopify offering have been mission critical to yourselves? You did mention payments. Are there any other?

components in their stack and their commerce stack that are just essential across your one commerce offering.

Steven Duran (35:15.016)
It's really, the answer is really unsexy, but the answer is just gonna be like the core catalog-based ordering experience. So again, it sounds very unsophisticated, but just the ability to have product catalogs and product detail pages and the ability to have specs that are tied to, you know.

product details. If you think about the buying workflow and how folks are making decisions for equipment, parts, et cetera, it's different from buying a pair of sneakers. You go for a pair of sneakers, you're flipping through a whole bunch of them. Whereas if you need to buy something that replaces...

a spring, a coil, something like that, you need to very quickly get to the part that is compatible with your equipment, and then you're gonna make a couple considerations before you select. So that whole browsing or shopping experience is a little different because you need to very quickly get somebody to the SKUs that are valuable to them or are compatible for whoever the customer is. So like...

Shopify's AI-based search capabilities are really, really impactful in our environment. And you mentioned the gateway, the payment gateway. Payments and checkout and whatnot is critical to us. What some folks may...

Kunle Campbell (36:45.624)
Mm-hmm.

Steven Duran (36:52.306)
not put two and two together. I know it was hard for me when I started on this journey is that not everything is a credit card transaction. very, I would say like it's, some areas of your business is higher and other areas it's gonna be, you know, none. So just making sure that.

Kunle Campbell (37:01.525)
Okay.

Steven Duran (37:12.744)
whoever you go with as far as like your commerce platform that you have the flexibility to adapt that checkout experience because like that is probably the area where we find the most amount of like complexity and sophistication and and that's across our industry not just with carrier but across everybody there are different fields and purchase orders and approval workflows and multi warehouses multi language multi you know cross-border split shipments like everything that you can think

think of.

you're gonna have. And so having this ability to kind of mold the checkout experience to support the needs of your business. Again, the guiding principle is it's technology at the service of the business, not the other way around. Like if you're gonna be doing all this volume, I can't be changing business use cases and like going to product teams and saying, hey, I actually can't do that because the technology doesn't support it. Like that's like a non...

Kunle Campbell (37:58.168)
Mm-hmm.

Steven Duran (38:13.91)
It's a non-starter for us. And so having an enterprise platform that is composable, that is flexible, that is fast, that can do all these things that we expect and are personalized but are adapting it for best in class in the professional sense, a professional workflow, that's what we're looking to build at Carrier.

Kunle Campbell (38:35.414)
Incredible, incredible, incredible. That modularity is super important. you know, just thinking in modules and building blocks is critical to building anything significant. So just wrapping up our conversation, what does 2025 look like for carrier and what is your B2B ecommerce outlook?

Steven Duran (38:57.696)
I think for us 2025 is just being obsessed with customers. That's like, I think you're just gonna see us like all over the place, just kind of getting after it, like just this customer obsession. so commerce at the service of our business, particularly like touchless or frictionless commerce capabilities, which is something that folks will hear me say more and more.

which is like, do I make it as seamless and as easy as possible to do business with Carrier in a place where there is already so much complexity and like razor thin margin for error, like in some of these things, like how can I use commerce to enable those workflows and those capabilities? I'm in this like incredible position where

we can have a good idea on a Tuesday and I can have a rough sketch of what it looks like on a Friday and then I can have it implemented the following month. that is kind of this like you take the you take all the resources in all the the intentionality of a large enterprise OEM.

and you pair that with just like the nimbleness and the speed and the innovation of a startup. Like that's what my team looks like going into next year. And the way I always build my team culture and tell folks like the image that I have of folks that work on my team that are in commerce, that are in field service, digital sales, SaaS, Martech, whatever. We are customer.

We're building customer-facing applications. It's a unique privilege, right? These are not back-end things that only a handful of folks... These are the ways that people have an association with the brand, right? And so when it comes to technology, being obsessed with customers, being obsessed with what they need, helping to truck Chuck's, right? And helping Chuck be better at what he does. And like...

Steven Duran (41:12.938)
When I think of commerce professionals particularly, the vision I give my team is, think of yourself as a pirate with a knife between his teeth. Like you're gonna do whatever it takes in order to add value to these folks. And I always say by hook or by crook, we're gonna make it happen. And when it comes to commerce, we're going to build the things that our folks need to be the best at what they do and to add value to everybody's lives.

Kunle Campbell (41:39.842)
Steven, that's profound. The customer obsession is, is, is, is the mentality behind any, every great commerce organization. And given the fact that you can operate like a startup again, you know, given how complex your operations are is phenomenal. And having Shopify B2B work side by side with all of the other composable, you know, tech providers you have.

to roll out, know, ideas and use cases in, in four weeks is, is phenomenal, you know, given the fact that you've drawn that down from nine months from a nine month horizon down to, to, to, a month. And so for listeners out there, there, there was a, this, this is it. So the technology is there. You just need to come up with the ideas, whether it's drop shipping distribution, you know, how can you essentially extend your B2B offering?

come up with a strategy that tech is there. I just can't thank you enough, Stephen, for coming on the show for people who want to sort of connect with you. Are you active on any socials? Are you active on LinkedIn because we connected by LinkedIn.

Steven Duran (42:51.132)
Yeah, LinkedIn, I'm getting old. So LinkedIn is probably the only socials that I'm active on. just, you know, you can search Stephen Duran on LinkedIn and I love a good LinkedIn chat. So even if it's, you know, public discourse, I am all about kind of doing work in public.

Kunle Campbell (42:54.606)
Okay. Well.

Kunle Campbell (43:05.111)
Okay.

Steven Duran (43:11.316)
and making sure that everybody kind of benefits as a rising tide raises all ships, you know, sort of thing. I know I have benefited from folks that have come before me doing the same and I hope to pay it forward as well.

Kunle Campbell (43:25.656)
Thank you. Expect a few followers and connection request on there after this comes in air. Appreciate it so much. Thank you for coming on the show.

Steven Duran (43:33.708)
Of course. Thank you.

Kunle Campbell (43:37.038)
OK, just going to hit record. OK, I stopped it now.