Mollie’s Agency Meetup: BigCommerce edition

What’s better than an evening spent with cool people and inspirational talks, spiced up with great food and drinks? On September 27th BigCommerce, Klaviyo, Xentral and Mollie hosted an evening for agencies to catch up and share knowledge. If you couldn’t make it or want to relive the stimulating evening, take a look at our key takeaways.

Mollie presents: Capital

Our Head of Product Iryna Agieieva kicked off the meet-up with a sneak preview of Mollie’s product roadmap and a special announcement: the launch of our new flexible financing product Capital in the Netherlands and Belgium. An important milestone in Mollie’s growth trajectory to become a financial services provider. 
We already started supporting our customers, like Glamour Your Hair who said, “Mollie Capital has transformed how we access financing. With repayments automatically repaid, we don’t have to worry about scheduling or missing repayments, so we can focus our priority on growing our business.”

BigCommerce: “Our growing partner ecosystem is critical to our future success.”

Up next was Halie Adams from BigCommerce, who provided the audience with expert insight into the world of Open SaaS. 

Open SaaS combines the flexibility of open source with the benefits of SaaS by exposing powerful APIs and SDKs throughout the platform. In Adams’ terms, “we don’t just give you a box of Legos and say: ‘build it’, we give you a template to build from”.

BigCommerce, a newcomer in the Benelux market, is the open SaaS platform for all stages of ecommerce growth and is recognised by industry analysts all across the world as a leading platform(Gartner, Forrester,...). They were elected Best Ecommerce Platform in the 2022 Emerce 100 and are particularly proud of the TrustRadius 2022 Most Loved award they received based on their customers' reviews who love working with BigCommerce.

According to Adams, what distinguishes BigCommerce from other platforms is the fact that they focus on their partners and want to give clients the freedom to choose who they work with. “We offer them solutions we think are best for their business”. 

For example, BigCommerce works with 52 payment providers including Mollie, 28 partners for Checkout, Fraud & Lending, 30 providers for Marketing Automation, and more. They consider their growing partner ecosystem critical to their success. As one of their customers describes it: “We have this foundational, yet versatile platform, where we don’t have to find all these other partners each time we want to do something new. BigCommerce has done the work for us, vetting hundreds of apps, allowing us to pick and choose what we want and have the confidence of knowing it will work with the platform.”

Finally, let’s zoom in on the main reasons why people choose BigCommerce:

Adams describes BigCommerce’s key value proposition as follows: “We manage the platform, the maintenance, the hosting, we have our apps, so merchants can purely focus on the frontend revenue generating activities.”

Mollie is one of BigCommerce’s top partners you can work with to handle your payments with ease.You can integrate Mollie with your BigCommerce webshop within minutes and watch your conversion rates grow with seamless payment processes.

Klaviyo: Customer-centric growth in a cookieless world

Klaviyo, represented by Céline Dibert, drew attention to consumers’ increasing demand for data privacy and the consequences for marketers. Celine put a lot of emphasis on regulatory changes like the GDPR, CCPA, CTIA, and the Digital Markets Act, since these changes create new challenges for brands in terms of leveraging third party data for targeting and retargeting. 

This forces marketeers to rethink their strategies, shifting the focus away from just acquisition to include retention and optimisation of the overall customer experience, in other words: customer first marketing.

Customer-first marketing is a strategy that puts the customer’s wishes and desires first in every experience you create, aiming to build direct relationships with your audience and cultivate a loyal customer base.

Klaviyo identified 5 steps a brand should take to get started with customer-first marketing:

1. Goal setting: The first step is to determine your goals and define how you want to leverage research. It can be anything from website conversion, increase retention, or work on increasing repeat buyers. 
2. Inspiration and Architecture: In the second phase, you need to learn directly from the people you’re marketing to with surveys, interviews, quizzes, and more, to gain valuable insight on your audience. The key here is to look for patterns within all the data you collect. 
3. Implementation and Data mining: This phase focuses on using your customers’ feedback to create new experiences. You will also identify the data you’ll need to craft these experiences and begin to collect it.
4. Measurement and Automation: This is the fun part, here you can  measure the success of experiences, iterate and then automate with the ultimate goal of creating wide-reaching experiences that still feel individually tailored. Personalised experiences go beyond including someone’s first name in an email. From a customer-first marketing perspective, personalisation is about understanding what someone wants, when they want it, and how they want to receive it.

Repetition: The final phase is where marketers begin the entire process over again, on a regular basis, to continue to improve their marketing effectiveness, retention, and brand loyalty.

Now how can Klaviyo help companies with this? Klaviyo is a unified customer platform that helps brands personalise communication with customers at scale, easily acquire new ones, and use their own data to drive revenue. Head to their website to learn more.

Xentral: “The small SAP”

For the final presentation of the evening Stephanie Richheimer (VP Sales) and Matthias Zrenner (Head of Partnerships) from Xentral took the stage. Xentral is a German company which is mainly active in the DACH region, but currently exploring the Benelux market. Their mission is to build the number one SME business operating platform that makes every business lean, connected, smart and fun.

Xentral helps small and medium-sized companies automate and simplify their day-to-day operations and creates business software dedicated to helping SMEs run faster and smarter. Their goal is to make sure that small businesses can actually focus on the business as such, while taking over their backend and automation. Xentral is an ERP solution for SMEs and refer to themselves as “the small SAP”.

Xentral has a strategic partnership with Mollie and is looking into developing more and more integrations, such as BigCommerce. 
Important for Xentral is that no two businesses are the same: “No matter how you start your business, or how small you are, you can start with Xentral and grow with us”, Zrenner highlights. Features can be configured based on your business’s needs, going from order management, warehouse & fulfilment and accounting, payment & controlling to purchasing and product information management. Xentral offers many interfaces and allows easy integration into your existing tool landscape.

Fair to say, the meet-up was a success and we left with a lot of insight and inspiration. We are looking forward to future meet-ups and seeing new faces in our community. If you're an agency interested in joining us next time and partnering with Mollie, you can contact us by clicking ‘become a partner’.