Scott Ohsman and I recorded Matt Christensen at Shoptoberfest in Nashville on September 15, and the tape did not survive the Bavarian Bierhaus, so Matt came back to the studio on October 12 for a Shoptoberfest make-up, a special Shopware edition with no lederhosen and no cowboy hats. Matt is president and co-founder of DDS, Distributor Data Solutions, out of Salt Lake City, and he has spent twelve years moving product data between manufacturers and the distributors who sell their products, which is the least glamorous and most load-bearing job in B2B commerce.
He rated the Free Joke Project an eleven, then asked for the make-up joke and gave the watchmaker joke an eleven and a half.
Sitting Between Manufacturers and Distributors
I asked for the ten thousand foot view, and Matt put DDS in the middle of two groups who want the same data in different shapes.
“We sit in between the manufacturers and distributors and we help expedite the exchange of product data,” he says.
The data is rich, images and descriptions and videos and attributes, and the work is less about moving it than about getting it into the shape a distributor can use the day it arrives.
“The goal is not just access to the data, but help them quickly use it,” he says.
The catalogs are not small.
“The smallest customer is probably 10,000, 20,000 SKUs, largest customer is probably close to 15 million,” he says.
The Problem That Has Not Changed
I took Matt back to the years before ChatGPT, when he launched DDS, and asked what was different about getting a catalog online then. His answer was that the hard part is the same.
“Every manufacturer stores it differently. They call different parts of the data different things, they normalize differently, or don’t normalize,” he says.
What has changed is who is pushing. The recognizable software names, Shopify, BigCommerce, the big PIM companies and Shopware, have shown up in wholesale, electrical, plumbing, HVAC and industrial supply, industries Matt describes as a few years behind retail.
“They’re pushing the industries ahead much faster than we’ve seen in the past,” he says.
AI changed the speed of his own output. Enriching and normalizing to a custom spec used to be code, and a change meant a developer.
“I’d say just the speed of the output is probably a hundred times faster, if not more,” he says.
Everybody Wants Something Different
Manufacturers get a spec from DDS. Distributors are the opposite case, and two distributors the same size selling the same brands will ask for the data two different ways, with different category structures, different taxonomy, different rules for the short description that feeds search.
“So it’s still just we call it Wild West. It’s just everybody wants something different,” he says.
Matt sits on a European standards group where the exchange is standardized and the data moves faster, and he keeps making the same recommendation on both sides of the handoff in North America.
What the Agents Cannot Find
Agentic was the word of Shoptoberfest, and I asked how B2B data has to be presented for an agent to find it. Matt’s answer was a step earlier than I expected. Matt’s example was a large distributor with five million SKUs in the ERP and in the stores, and sixty or seventy percent of them displayed online.
“There’s a good portion of everybody’s catalogs who are not displayed at all, and which means AI can’t find them,” he says.
“And so AI is just flat out not going to find those,” he says.
He sees a rush to close that gap, and DDS is using AI to do it.
Where Shopware Fits
Matt works with Shopware’s US team, and he gave two reasons the platform lands in his industries. The first is the language Shopware uses about itself.
“They like the complicated commerce,” he says.
The second is the bench behind the platform.
“Not only do they have the platform, but they have the partners in order to execute the full solution and then also help them grow afterward,” he says.
A lot of B2B is still on legacy platforms that are barely supported, so the upgrade conversation is as much about getting off something old as about choosing something new.
The Platform Is Not the Thing
I asked about the messy middle of a B2B build, and Matt took a long pause before he answered, because the honest answer is that projects stall on the data, not the platform. Agency partners take on the data work, the spreadsheets pile up, and a launch slips six months or a year.
“They think that the platform is the thing and that they overlook kind of the data piece,” he says.
The first step is deciding what to sell online out of an ERP that has duplicates in it because salespeople create products every day. Then the manufacturer data has to be found, and even a small distributor works with hundreds of manufacturers. So where does the time go?
“Industry average is it takes about five to fifteen minutes per SKU to publish online,” he says.
Multiply that by twenty thousand or a hundred thousand or several million.
“They just don’t have a month to spend for one single manufacturer because sometimes it takes that long,” he says.
Discoverability Is the New Reason to Move
Matt had come from a conference in one of the least mature industries he serves, and the conversations had changed. Competitors like Grainger are taking share from mid-size and small distributors, and discoverability has become a reason to move.
“AI, they know they’ve got to be found, but I think we didn’t hear that a year ago,” he says.
He was at that show with Shopware and an agency partner, with DDS as the data piece, and the pitch was a package rather than a platform.
“This is a package solution. So I like where that’s headed. I think that resonates and takes away the fear,” he says.
The Plug
Matt’s shameless plug was for the gap DDS fills.
“If you need data for your distributor that is struggling with very complex rules or missing information, your PIM’s not complete, your governance is not complete, we can fill in missing data to the PIM,” he says.
Find DDS at distributordatasolutions.com, and Matt on LinkedIn, although he will tell you there are better people at DDS to talk to than him.
The B2B Commerce Trends and Opportunities Report goes deeper on product data and on selling in regulated markets, with nine experts who advise B2B sellers. It was written and researched by Content Cucumber, presented by Shopware, and it is free at contentcucumber.com.
