Who They Are
Sana Commerce was formed in 2007 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, with a goal to help business-to-business (B2B) companies deliver great e-commerce results by connecting their customer-facing online stores to their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems so the two systems work together as one.
Since that time, the company has made a name for itself among manufacturers, wholesalers, and distributors that have complex back-end infrastructure and run Microsoft Dynamics or SAP ERP systems; the company’s e-commerce platform integrates tightly with both systems. Sana’s revenue is split roughly 75 percent/25 percent with the Dynamics customer base making up the lion’s share of revenue.
According to Global COO and Americas CEO Tim Beyer, the company currently employs 550 people globally and has about $40 million in revenue, targeting mostly companies in the $10 million to $1 billion revenue range. Revenue breaks down as roughly 65 percent from this small-to-medium business category, and 35 percent from larger enterprises.
The company is privately owned and privately funded.
Sana, whose U.S. base is New York, is a sponsor and participant in this week’s Community Summit North America (hosted by Acceleration Economy parent Dynamic Communities). This profile details the company’s strategy, its software, and customer successes, as well as the technology innovations that officials will emphasize at Community Summit.
What They Do
The core premise — and value proposition — of the flagship Sana Commerce Cloud product is straightforward: A commerce platform can unlock far better business results if it’s tightly integrated with the same company’s ERP system. A more common, siloed approach can result in errors and frustration as critical data — think product availability, pricing, delivery dates — is out of sync, and the customer doesn’t see the latest information.
“Other commerce platforms are usually built separately; even if they claim to integrate there’s always a piece of middleware that draws from the ERP and syncs with the web store,” Beyer says. “We don’t have middleware. We use ERP as the main engine for the web shop so everything comes directly from the ERP. We understand the strengths of both products, and we leverage those.”
Integration offered by Sana — effectively, all data in a single database — will enable customers to display this information in real time:
- Discounts
- Sales tax calculations
- Customer data
- Inventory levels
- Languages and translations
- Price calculations with units of measure
- All product data including name, description, and variant name
A longtime Sana customer, Koppert Biological Systems, details the significant benefits it realizes through that level of integration (more on Koppert’s perspective below).
Americas CEO of Sana Commerce
One of the more recent advances in Sana’s commerce platform is the cloud version, which offers a number of key benefits to current and prospective customers:
- Enhanced content management and visual designer functionality
- Product updates with new functions, patches, and so on, are released every two weeks. This fairly typical cloud application cadence means customers get access to new functionality much sooner than users of on-premises software.
- Analytics capability that combines commerce-centric clickstream data with business performance data out of the ERP system; this is the much talked about (but infrequently achieved) single source of truth
- The latest version of its payment engine, which is designed to facilitate ease and speed of payment. It’s also intended to overcome reluctance to use e-commerce, as evidenced by the percentage of B2B portals that require bank transfers. “The payments ecosystem is quite immature compared to traditional B2C players,” and Sana aims to address this with its payment engine, which leverages its collaboration with Adyen, Beyer said.
Who They’ve Impacted
Koppert Biological Systems creates natural enemies for pest control: bumblebees for natural pollination. It also uses biostimulants to protect and strengthen crops. The company has been in business for more than 50 years and its products are used in more than 100 countries. It’s been a customer of Sana Commerce for seven-plus years.
Sales often occur when a sales agent is on site with a farmer helping them assess the needs of their crops. Being able to input the order directly at the webstore is important because of short lead times for Koppert’s products and business. Specifically, a sales agent is often ordering insects — which exercise biological control of agricultural pests — that will have a shelf life of three to a maximum of five days.
“Our chain needs to be very short from the moment of ordering up to the moment of delivery, that it influences the quality. It’s basically that quality that this company is very well known for,” says Ernst ter Meulen, operations manager for Koppert. “Therefore, to us, it’s really important to make the chain as short as possible. This has allowed us to do so.”
Data synchronization between ERP and e-commerce is also a big benefit, ter Meulen says. “I really liked the Sana product because it uses the logic from Dynamics. If we were to change something in Dynamics on the calculating of receipt and shippage, it will automatically be transferred to Sana.”
The company reports more than $2 million in weekly revenue coming in through its web store.
ter Meulen says customers have embraced the order history page presented in the Sana-driven store and frequently use it to track their activity — even more so than through their internal systems.
Community Summit Focus
At Community Summit this week, Sana will be emphasizing the cloud version of its software, which is increasingly the choice of customers, including executive-level buyers and those involved in software purchases who are opting for the cloud functionality, Beyer says.
The company will also be emphasizing its payment capabilities and value proposition. Beyer says they have been a “huge commercial success” since their recent launch. “Our natively integrated payment solution that cuts out middlemen and combines portal, payment, and B2C-type experience is something we want to highlight,” he says.
The Future and Closing Thoughts
Beyer noted that the Sana B2B customer base has, since the onset of Covid, increasingly opted to offer web-based sales on a direct-to-consumer (D2C) basis as well as its traditional B2B model. Given the company’s focus on delivering a B2C-caliber experience, it was well positioned to serve those needs. Now, it will be important to monitor whether its customers stay on that track — and demand more D2C functionality or even become more aggressive when it comes to direct sales to end customers.
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