Under The Hood: Workarea Commerce Cloud

James & Paul:

Good afternoon and welcome to the re:platform podcast. This is episode eight and as always I’m joined by Paul Rogers. Hey Paul, how you doing today? Hi, I’m good. How are you? Yes, not too bad. Thanks very much. Looking forward to today’s episode as well. So very happy to welcome Bill Tarbell and Ben Crouse from Workaera to the podcast – Bill and Ben, how you doing?

Workarea:

It was great. Thanks for having us.

James:

You’re welcome. Thanks for taking the time to come on. So just a quick introduction to people then we’ll hand over to both of you to tell people a little bit more about Workarea and your roles there. So Workarea is an eCommerce platform, with two versions – Workarea commerce cloud and a relatively new open source version. It’s a platform that I’ve not known a massive amount about in the past. I’m really excited to learn more about it today as well. And I think it’s going to be of interest to people in the UK market as well as a lot of our audience from the US because it’s something that’s got a stronger heritage in the US and I know that it’s a platform that more people in the UK starting to get to grips with. So it’d be really interesting if you could just give a quick overview of your roles for Workarea, the background to the platform and really what the platform is and how it’s transitioned in the last few years.

Workarea:

Sure. I’ll start. My name is Bill Tarbell, I’m the VP of marketing here at Workarea. I’ve been with the company for about three years and lead the marketing and go-to-market efforts here. I’m really excited to be here and I have a lot to talk about with Ben. I’ll let Ben do his introduction before we get into the platform.

Workarea:

Sure. Hi, I’m Ben cross. I’ve been at Workarea for about 12 years, which feels like forever. I started primarily on the technical side, doing implementations back when we were still a services company. Then I started writing this iteration of the platform about five or six years ago and have moved into kind of product management as well.

James:

Thank you. Now we know where your roles and what part of the business you represent. it’d be useful to hear from both of you on the platform, and, I know that it’s been going through an evolution, like a lot of the platforms have bee, so what that transition has been and then where are you taking it?

Workarea:

Yeah, sure. So, I’ll get into that by giving a brief history of the company. Ben mentioned he was here for 12 years and in the early days the company was primarily a professional services commerce focused agency. So the company did a lot of very large e-commerce implementations. Both custom build as well as implementing other platforms. In the second phase of the business that Ben got more involved with in the product team and when I joined was after we pivoted. We took that technology expertise as well as the experience and empathy that we had with the retailers and just decided to build Workarea, which is sort of a modern enterprise eCommerce platform. Workarea commerce cloud. I’ll give a high level overview of the main focus of the platform.

Workarea:

It’s a ruby on rails, mongo DB platform. These are very modern, extensible frameworks. We focus on doing commerce across a set of capabilities that we think are crucial to succeed. So number one, we have fantastic, really deep, rich enterprise commerce functionality. This is your cart, your catalog, your checkout, your promotions or pricing. We also have natively in the platform a fantastic content engine. So the ability to manage digital assets etc. The ability to create landing pages, navigation, all in a modern approach and mobile first (that’s PWA supported) and we really feel that content is a big part of how merchants succeed and compete against their competitors. And part of modern selling. Number three we have a native and integrated search.

Workarea:

A lot of other platforms started without search at the core, with Workarea, site search and this concept of natural language processing and the abilities we get from using elastic search embedded in the platform is really powerful for a lot of things. And then we have an insights engine that drives a lot of recommendations and insights back to the business, from a data perspective. So what products you should merchandise, what promotions are working well and providing that feedback loop back into the business. So, with those four things, we have a really, really heavy focus on business productivity. If you go to workarea.com, we have a lot of video demos that share how we focused on making it really easy for high-growth retailers and for merchants to work effectively and work smartly online. I’ll hand over to Ben to talk to some of the technical side of things in terms of how we’ve done things in part of the cloud aspects. There’s another side of view.

Workarea:

Yeah. I would add on the technical side, when we were choosing the technologies for Workarea, a lot of the themes and kind of philosophy behind Ruby on rails really rang true in terms of what we thought would be most effective for the kind of retailers that we were working with. So for Ruby on rails, that’s speed and agility, developer happiness and really being very expressive with the code that you write. And so I think Workarea as a result of that, inherited a lot of those values. And we’re a very technology and developer forward platform. Developers love working on Workarea and this has been a great aspect of working with Workarea.

Paul:

Great. So I have a quick question that’s slightly a slightly different to what we’ve talked about so far – you recently released an open source version of the platform. So what does that look like in terms of the kind of functionality that you’ve talked about so far? The feature set and what’s the plan with the open source version?

Workarea:

Yeah, sure. So just a few months ago we released a major portion of the core platform to the open source community. It’s available on Github now. The difference between the two is really, the Workarea Commerce cloud is a merchant dedicated SaaS, built in the cloud version. It’s provided on a subscription basis and everything is built into it from an infrastructure, security, PCI compliance perspective. And then there’s a cloud expansion pack, which is a small but significant set of additional plugins that are available to merchants who use the cloud version of the platform.

Workarea:

So of the main motivations of doing open source, number one was to reach that developer community and continue to grow the community around the platform. There’s a lot of fantastic network effects that we’ve seen around other platforms doing that. But number two, and maybe more importantly, I think I think is relevant for this podcast is, we’ve seen how challenging and frankly risky and how often poor experience it is for a large enterprise to replatform. And that entire selection process, frankly has a lot of flaws in terms of going through a typical B2B sales cycle. And from a purely transparent perspective, we love it when merchants go and kick the tires of the platform to evaluate it. We’ve seen a lot of success already with larger organizations downloading the platform and doing a small proof of concept before they even reach out to us. Andwe really encourage that level of transparency, especially given that this platform is signing up to do so much for these merchants in terms of their business.

Paul:

That makes sense. What’s the response been to the open source offering so far? So in terms of SI partners and have you had a lot of potential users downloading it and looking at it as a viable alternative to some of the other open source platforms on the market? 

Workarea:

I think the response has been great. We we know of a number of really large merchant teams, that are already reaching out and talking directly to our developers on our community to evaluate it. So what it’s done for us is, it’s switched around our typical sales process. So a developer is not going to want to fill out a demo request and talk to a sales rep and do a qualification call to just see the platform. So it’s been successful from that perspective. 

Workarea:

Yeah, going into the open source world is something we’ve thought of it a lot like a garden and like growing a garden. So while you know it takes a while for everything to grow, we’ve planted those seeds and we’re starting to see them grow. So it feels like there’s a certain element of patience involved where we’re seeing some good uptick and some developer interest and developers even just feeling more comfortable there. Because they’re so familiar with the Github world and with contributing to open source projects. So we’ve been able to step up support and it’s been an interesting shift internally to focus on that as well.

James:

Thanks. I’ve got a question, something that Paul’s mentioned to me earlier is that one of the things that impressed him the most when looking at the Workarea platform is how much functionality is native. And a lot of the processes we go through is looking at how much they want to achieve out of the box versus how happy they are to use third parties into achieve the business functionality. So seeing where the platform is going and its capabilities similar to enterprise platforms like Salesforce, Magento 2, etc, are you planning to continuously build into the platform and make it everything native or are you looking to expand capabilities and functionality through proven integrations and connectors with third parties to build out the ecosystem or both? 

Workarea:

So, in terms of expanding functionality, I think integrations is definitely important, there’s a lot of value to be had there in terms of allowing certain capabilities, particularly around management and managing changes to your site and managing how promotions and content and catalog all relate to each other. In terms of functionality, we absolutely want to expand that in the platform because for the team size and the type of merchants that we’re working with they they need as much agility and power as they can get. They don’t want to be in all these different software packages, sending things up over here and sending things up in that tab and this tab and making sure that they publish at the same time and all that kind of stuff.

Workarea:

So you know, we really feel strongly about the value of integration there. In terms of enabling third parties though, that’s actually a piece of our roadmap for this year. And a primary focus is looking at how Workarea can do better out of the box with third party integrations. So we’re looking at consolidating on the technical side and rearchitecting a bit of the code to make that a little bit easier to manage and allow us to be able to just expand the number of offerings we have out of the box as well as building some out of the box platform as a service integrations to help implement it there. So that is a big part of what we’re looking to do in this year.

James:

Fantastic. Are you envisaging this from an architectural point of view to be similar to how say BigCommerce and Shopify do it – where literally a lot of the apps are, you turn them on and they’re ready to rock except pre-integrated versus some of the other platforms where it’s not just a question of turning it on where you actually have to do quite a bit of configuration and you need development resource in order to enable the capabilities. Where do you see this sitting?

Workarea:

I mean right now it’s, you need a developer install the plugin, which is a single line of code that you drop into a file in your project and you update and you push live. So it’s very straight forward. But you’re right in that it does require developer effort there. So while we’re looking at finding ways that we can maybe either hybridize this or get to a model where it is purely an admin configuration and kind of a deal. So we’re early in the stages of that, but particularly for implementers, we’ve heard a lot of feedback there and we want to respond to that and I think, we’ll be able to do something great.

James:

It certainly sounds like a really good progression on the roadmap for this year and next, in relation to that. I guess actually we talked about capabilities would be really useful to hear some of the key selling points. In terms of what you’ve found has resonated with clients. You’ve chosen Workarea over other platforms. So what are the key features people liked the most and why? And are there a few capabilities in each you can pull out? So things around like site search, content management, you referenced earlier, anything say like personalization, B2B, automation. I would love to hear from you guys what you think the key selling points are.

Workarea:

During the introduction I talked a little bit how we’ve expanded the scope of what we believe an eCommerce platform needs to do really well. I talked about really rich content management as a  native aspect of the platform. I talked about search, I talked about insights. The real special sauce comes together when a business user can sort of orchestrate experiences through our tool called site planner. So we have a tool that is like a calendar where a Workarea merchant can plan and build experiences ahead of time, test those in production and set it and forget it for deployment.

Workarea:

So it’s a really fantastic way for these teams to work and coming from other platforms that require integration between content management and search solutions and all these things, you have to click the button to invalidate the cache and reindex and all these things are all nicely taken care of in a Workarea because we have a purview over all those essential parts of the experience. So I think number one, that’s a big part of it. The usability of the platform as well as the feature richness that’s by having search, content management and merchandising all within one system.

Paul:

So I have a question. I’ve seen you and Matt talking a lot on LinkedIn about Workarea’s API and how they could feasibly be used in a headless manner. It doesn’t feel like this has been as much of a focus for you as some of the other platforms – is this something that you want more people to be using Workarea for? Or is it that you’re so focused on building a good front end framework that’s performant anyway that you don’t feel it’s necessary?

Workarea:

That’s a really good question. I think one of the things that we try to talk about within our team is really just focusing on business problems versus architecture. Headless commerce is something that we fully support and actually have fantastic API coverage, as well as some really great use cases of headless commerce in production. We do support a fully integrated front end that gives some additional functionality in terms of a business user being able to create that. But there’s also the ability to create a completely headless experience on Workarea and hit those API keys to do so. So in terms of eCommerce, I think a merchant would take a look at what we have in terms of the front-end framework and then take a look at our API and make a decision around what path they want to take in terms of the browser-based experience.

Workarea:

We do have customers like, as you mentioned, Reformation and some others that don’t talk about where they’re using our eCommerce full stack front end for eCommerce, but also using our API to drive in-store experiences like kiosks, like store associate apps, point of sale integrations. We see the growth of headless and these new front end technologies and if you want to support a rapidly growing brand with a marketing team that wants to throw together a promotion, a merchandise catalog and a landing page, to push live in the next hour, then you might want to rethink your approach and use some of our tools to do that.

Workarea:

Yeah. I would add at a practical slash philosophical level, the reason that you’re going with Workarea is that you’re making an investment to do some of this customization and you’re creating this great experience websites for your customers. But that effort should be reuse, you shouldn’t waste that when you’re thinking of apps or in store kiosks. 

James:

In terms of the API, because this type of thing is always interesting for people too, when they’re looking at what they want from API and whether people want true headless or just flexibility. Are there any limitations to what the API covers? With some platforms, the API is fully open. So can you do anything with Workarea? Can you fully customize the checkout for example, to create a custom payment flow if you need to?

Workarea:

So with the flexibility of the Ruby programming language, you can customize literally any single part of the platform and that includes any kind of APIs. If you want to add custom endpoints or you want to change the way some of those APIs work, people have done that and absolutely succeeded. A lot of the appeal of Workarea is that you can get in there and change whatever you want and we have a lot of tools to help with managing that change and ensuring that our functionality that we’re delivering out of the box will still work. In terms of test suite and we have some tools to help with upgrading, but that getting in there and being able to change the back office APIs because your old system needs some kind of different responses or whatever. Like that’s bread and butter for Workarea.

James:

And how does it work in terms of making sure that customers don’t have any issues when you upgrade the API, do you ever deprecate or if somebody is using an existing API and then you release new capabilities, do the old version still work or do sometimes clients have to to make changes there and to continue working with your APIs?

Workarea:

Without getting too technical, we follow a very tight versioning constraint to ensure that there’s no surprise. There are no surprises which is something you’ll see sometimes in other platforms where they’ll just be changing. The API is underneath your Workarea platform. We’re very conscious of this and we also, in terms of upgrading, deliver some tools to help developers manage that and it’s kind of almost holding their hand through the upgrade process. So it becomes very simple and it’s not the arduous process that you’re seeing on some other platforms.

Paul:

On that with you being a SaaS platform where does the general kind of responsibility lie when it comes to upgrades and a certain level of maintenance? Obviously you still have outside partners like Bounteous and BVA. Where does the split come in?

Workarea:

So I think generally we like to put the merchants in charge in control. So ultimately the responsibility goes with them and we enable them in every way that we can and we’re communicating and we’re making that tooling available to everyone and it’s highly leveraged throughout the Workarea community. I think it’s important making the merchant in charge because they’re the ones with the business, they’re the clients at the end of the day and they’re the ones that understand appetite for change. They know what features they might be interested in. Bill, do you have any additional thoughts on this one?

Workarea:

Yeah, I think some of our merchants fully train up developers there. Obviously there are business users on the Workarea platform that own and control a lot of those decision makings as well as implementation of the platform. And these are our most innovative customers. They have a roadmap on Workarea and they’re just doing those sprints and moving the ball forward. And that often includes taking on feature upgrades and enhancing the platform. Other merchants choose to go with one of our partners and there’s a number of different packages and systems integrator partners have different levels of support. We’re really putting the control and freedom in the hands of the merchant to kind of align their technology roadmap to their business roadmap and be able to make those decisions, rather than forcing any major releases on our customers. It’s all up to them in terms of when they want to take those upgrades. 

Paul:

What’s next for Workarea in terms of the product? What have you got on your roadmap for 2020?

Workarea:

Yeah, so like we were saying earlier, we’re talking about third-party integrations and we’re kind of improving that experience and lowering the friction there. Along with growing this garden of open source community, I think community is kind of now a first class citizen in terms of our roadmap and where we’re focusing our efforts. We’ve had a lot of great feedback and we’ve improved support that we’ve been doing lately. Stuff like documentation plays a big part of that as well. We’ve been looking at some analytics on our documentation site and thinking about how we’re going to improve that. In terms of merchant facing functionality, there’s a few exciting things coming up. We’re going to be working on a site builder, which is kind of a dynamic ability to spin up new sites to sell certain portions of the catalog with some different visual design and some different configuration options there.

Workarea:

We’ve had a lot of interest on that and we think we can do a pretty great job. So we’re excited to do that. And then one thing I’m particularly excited about is our site planner tool where you can kind of create these releases, these different versions of the site and I think that is a great hook for being able to do A/B testing. So, one part of the eCommerce cloud functionality set that we’re going to be working on is an A/B testing plugin that would let you set up a new version of the site and maybe before you publish that new version of the site, you can run an A/B tests on a group of customers and be able to see how that release performed before you actually publish it. A/B testing is a particularly exciting area to have integrated, all the way down to promotions and pricing and then carried up all the way through content and being able to just have that automatically handled for you in Workarea I think is a particularly exciting proposition.

Workarea:

Yeah, just to add to that – we’ve actually just put out a significant release this quarter that I don’t believe any of our customers are using yet, but it really focuses on personalization and segmentation. It’s actually part of the open source core of the platform, but in a sense, anything that you can do in Workarea, whether it’s a product, a piece of content, anything that you can, enable or disable in the experience can be tied to a segment in Workarea, which open up levels of building contextual experiences that would be a little bit more challenging to do with other platforms. Along with that, our insights engine, which is the data and analytics that actually drive some automatic segmentation of platform, which is pretty fantastic. So we have out of the box a number of prebuilt dynamic segments that business users can start tying content promotions and different experiences towards.

Paul:

That seems to be a big focus for a few of the platform providers at the moment. So another thing I wanted to talk about – so several times in the last kind of 12 months I’ve spoken to people about Reformation and how quickly they’re growing and how everyone’s talking about them generally – how have they grown with Workarea and what do you think made them choose Workarea?

Workarea:

Yeah, so Reformation is one of our best customers in terms of their vision for commerce and what they’re doing to innovate in their space. They are one of the merchants that actually have chosen to build a Workarea team, trained up both technically as well as on the business side. And I talked about their vision for commerce and retail, where they’re using Workarea, not just for e-commerce but they’ve built out and rolled out Workarea powered experiences in all of their retail stores as well. So,  they’re talking about headless commerce. You walk into a reformation store and they have large touchscreens power by Workarea.

Workarea:

They have connected fitting rooms so while you’re trying something on, you can request a new item from your store associate. And then I think they have six or seven different iOS applications for their stores, so associates have everything from point of sale to a fitting room, even back office runners to go get inventory. We love this idea of thinking about retail from a digital perspective because this not only changes the experience for the customer, but they’re creating so much data from these physical interactions that typically haven’t been captured before. So, they’ve had fantastic growth on the platform and are our one of our most innovative customers in terms of what they’re able to do with the system. It’s a great brand to have. 

James:

In relation to that, how has 2019 been in general? How much are you focused on helping existing clients expand versus rapidly acquiring new customers? And do you have any projects either signed or in the works that you can talk about that could be on a similar scale and size as Reformation?

Workarea:

It’s been a great year. There’s been a lot of attention around the open source announcement. Just a couple of merchants that come to mind – one in Australia, a company called Spell and Gypsy Collective who are sort of similar minded as reformation in terms of their strategy on content and their focus on retail. They’re based in Byron Bay, Australia and actually came to us from admiring some of our other clients including reformation. And what they’ve done is they’re running multiple sites globally on the platform. They’re serving two hemispheres with different seasons and they’re also building out a point of sale application for popup stores and retail on the API, which is pretty exciting to see. We also just signed a multibillion-dollar bedding retailer in the United States.

Workarea:

Can’t announce the name yet, but we’re replacing one of the enterprise leaders and really focusing on their digital experience, which is exciting. Loving talking to you guys in the UK, but we signed a company called BSI merge, based in London, recently. They’re a company that serves hundreds of music artists merchandise stores.They love the multisite ability and the flexibility of the platform to do that. So they’re going to be building out their experiences on the Workarea platform – they’re jst another one that comes to mind just to kind of show the sort of diversity of industry that we serve. There’s also a company called a M&M food market, which is a specialty grocer in Canada that is rethinking their experience in their stores as well as digital. Workarea was the best solution to fit that sort of grocery market. So the theme amongst our merchants is really around having a unique and sort of innovative vision for what they’re doing for their customers. These are companies that are investing in digital and when folks have that vision and take the proper time to kick the tires on the platforms, Workarea, shows quite well. 

James:

I assume you have clients across different sectors as well? Like grocery, it’s definitely an interesting one given the unique aspects to how they operate online. A question I had. So you were just talking about some of them being attracted to Workarea because of the multiple storefront management capability. Could you just clarify one thing for, for listeners, when people use multiple storefronts, how easy is it to set up like parent and child? So can you have inheritances so you don’t have to continually sign into a new storefront to publish a page to multiple storefronts etc.

Workarea:

So currently in Workarea you have to basically decide which things you are going to share, whether that’s pricing or inventory levels or products or whatever. You have to decide that the developer configuration, but what I was talking about with the pipe builder is, we’re very focused on finding ways to make that more flexible and allow some of the more parent <> child dynamic kind of sharing across sites that you’re describing. So that’s something on the roadmap. 

James:

Okay. And is that envisioned for 2020?

Workarea:

Yes, that would be like probably first quarter of 2020. 

James:

Amazing. And you also mentioned the UK and UK clients. Do you have plans to rapidly accelerate in the UK? Do you have local teams also linked to that? Are there any other territories globally where you’re planning to push the platform in 2020?

Workarea:

Yeah, it’s definitely an area of growth for us. So, I mentioned we are starting to build a strategy of growth through partners. So we’re talking to other partners in these territories where we currently do not have work or employees on the ground. So we don’t have any employees in the UK, but we are in early stages talking to implementation partners. Another one of our focus areas has been an area of demand that we’ve seen for the platform has been from Australia and I think a large part of that is because Spell & The Gypsy Collective is doing such great work and is admired by their businesses and in Australia. Canada has been strong for us and we’ve also seen some interest in South America. So we’re right in the middle of 2020 budgeting and strategic planning. Our business expansion into those territories will be a large part of what we focus on with the platform.

Paul:

Lastly for me and it’s a bit of a loaded question. So we’ve spoken quite a lot over the last couple of years and we’ve talked about who your competitors are. As of right now, with the product developing and some of the new merchants you’ve up, who do you consider to be your top competitors? Is it some of the platforms you’ve worked with or competed against in the past? Or is it some of the newer entrants? Who do you consider to kind of be your biggest competitors?

Workarea:

Yeah, so we compete quite a bit with Magento. I mean their footprint globally is undisputed in terms of their reach. So we see Magento quite a bit. We do see Salesforce Commerce Cloud, but we are also a similar fit, I can talk through a couple of examples of merchants that we’ve brought on board this year from Salesforce. So a few have come to us from Shopify plus. So Shopify plus has been a fantastic platform for them during a certain phase of their growth, but at a certain point, when they want more ownership over the technology and they want to move a little quicker in terms of the roadmap, Workarea, both from a technology perspective as well as a feature set perspective makes a lot of sense.

Workarea:

We’re also at the higher end of the market, starting to replace some of these, ‘quote unquote’ legacy leaders. So, we’ve replaced a major Hybris implementation and we’re doing a lot of that where Workarea goes toe to toe functionally and architecturally very well with some of these larger, more enterprise focused companies. So, we’re huge value for those companies as well. But to be succinct, we sit sort of in the mid to enterprise market, for companies who either have a strong focus on content and moving quickly in terms of iterating those digital experiences. Or if they have just an innovative idea and a rapid growth idea, we’re a fantastic pick for those companies.

James

Sorry, one last question. The danger of letting us loose on these podcasts. What is the commercial model? I don’t expect you to give all of the in-depth secrets of the business, but do you charge like Salesforce on a GMV percentage? Is it more like an Episerver model where it’s on usage like page views, sessions, etc. What determines the kind of the cost level to a client use and work?

Workarea:

Yeah, so I guess not to be a sort of flippant about it, but anyone can go and get hands on with the platform and the open source platform today and use it in production. So in that sense, people can get started with the core platform. But on the commercial side, we work in a commerce cloud model with revenue tiers that are sort of bands that relate to a monthly subscription. So, in a sense it ties to usage – if it’s an API user, we have bands around API usage there. It’s a model that we’ve created that aligns so that merchants can predict their investment in the platform, but we’re also quite flexible in terms of how that works. At a high level it’s revenue bands.

Paul:

That’s really interesting. Workarea is a very interesting platform and I think we’ll continue to see a lot more of it in the next few years.

James:

Thank you very much for taking the time to come on and answer the questions. It’s been really useful and I’ve certainly learned some new things about Workarea. I’ll definitely take more of a look at the platform as well. I’d just like to say thank you to all the listeners for listening and apologies caused from a bit of static coming through today – it’s the joys of doing recordings online. So hopefully it hasn’t spoiled the enjoyment of that episode. If you have any followup questions as always, get in touch with myself and Paul, we’ll happily connect people to Workarea also. Thanks so much and enjoy the rest of your day.

You can also read Paul’s write-up on Workarea here.