Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Arno Ham, Chief Product Officer at Sana Commerce:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to your company?
A: Sana Commerce is a B2B e-commerce solution that focuses on relationships, not just transactions. Why do we do this? We believe that the relationship you have with your customers is ultimately what will drive new sales, so by building a stronger client relationship, you ultimately end up strengthening and growing your company.
Sana Commerce provides total customer convenience; through our tight integration with your ERP, we provide real-time accurate data on pricing and stock, 360-degree insight into transactions and, up-to-date order information. By making your ERP and your e-commerce work as one, our platform gives you (our business partner) the tools to evolve your business – be it through opening locations in new regions, growing sales, or simply diving deeper into customer insights.
Q: Tell us about your recent announcement, Sana Pay.
A: With any e-commerce platform – be it B2B or D2C – at some point in time, you’ll need to pay. We have seen our customers in the B2B space struggling with online payments – especially when it comes to more complicated payment requirements. Sometimes, when businesses are expanding to new regions, they want to restrict payment to credit cards or ACH as opposed to invoices. Incidentally, we’ve seen B2B buyers increasingly want to pay directly for the products they’re purchasing instead of keeping track of invoices. We noticed all of these trends and customer needs, and realized that providing a secure payment portal for the B2B space would be valuable for B2B businesses and buyers. That’s how Sana Pay was born.
Sana Pay is our native payment system that integrates your customer’s preferred form of payment –be it card or bank payment – into your webstore. Our premium version, Sana Pay Plus, provides back-end automations that reduce manual workload and ensure that payments go through faster without sacrificing security.
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Q: Can you give us some insights into why this is a gamechanger in the market?
A: There are some B2B payment service providers in the market, but we found that they focused on compliance at the expense of customer service. We saw that there was an opportunity to create a solution that made payments and onboarding very easy for B2B businesses and their buyers. Our focus on automation is a key differentiator; many of these large PSPs only provide bespoke or customized automation. With Sana Pay and Sana Pay plus, you get these automations out of the gate.
Q: What can we expect from Sana Commerce in the next 6 months? What are your plans?
A: We will focus on adding more flexibility to our platform, day in and day out. We’ll expose more of our functionality through API so it can be extended. We’re building flexibility into our low code/no code platform to create single page applications with our visual designer – we are constantly evolving. With Sana Pay, we’re constantly looking into optimizations. We’re hoping to add functionality to allow customers to pay with gift card. Additionally, we’re adding automation for catch weight or variable weight pricing, which is used throughout the food industry. With this automation, businesses can charge their customers the exact price for their food once it is weighed without manually re-entering the order and payment information. It’s a very exciting optimization.
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Q: What is the best thing about your company that people might not know about?
A: One of the best things in our company is the culture. We are an international company – very diverse – and we have a lot of fun. That’s definitely something that makes us special.
We are also very knowledgeable about bringing B2B and e-commerce together through ERP integration. We have all this knowledge in house, and we provide an end-to-end experience for our customers – no third parties needed. We’re a one stop shop.
