In B2B, Ordoro Earns Its Stripe And Square

As payments between businesses become ever more automated, invoice management firm Ordoro has crafted a partnership with Stripe that runs the gamut of payment types across B2B, from storefront sales to back-end management of information.

In a conversation with PYMNTS, Sangram Kadam, who cofounded the company and serves as its chief financial officer, said that the linkup with Stripe represents a move toward “going multichannel, which is a natural progression for any online retailer … Stripe released Relay, which is a great way for product developers like Ordoro to build great eCommerce experiences for store owners. So, it was a no-brainer.”

For the immediate goals of the partnership, Ordoro aims to reduce friction tied to what it has termed “nontraditional” forms of transactions. By way of elaboration, Kadam said that “eCommerce retailers are starting to sell on mobile and social venues, such as Twitter and Spring, for example.”

Across such nontraditional avenues, posited Kadam, “setting up individual payment gateways and order fulfilment services causes a lot of overhead and friction for merchants.” The solution, he said, lies within a solution such as Ordoro’s, which has unified offerings, ranging from shipping and inventory management — and now Stripe Relay for payments functionality — that help reduce overhead. And that gives merchants the ability to focus on the day-to-day process of actually selling products.

Kadam noted that his company’s continuing value proposition for customers rests with the fact that it offers what he said represents a “unified console” for managing vendor interactions, which he pointed to as of particular use in activities as far-flung between vendors as dropshift requests, purchase orders and vendor analytics. “Our inventory management app,” he said, “has the flexibility to adapt to different fulfillment strategies and hence different cash flow management strategies.”

With the additional functionality offered by the relationship with Stripe, the solution now faces both the front end, meaning consumers, and the back end, with emphasis on merchant operations. At present, Ordoro users can both initiate and receive purchase orders across the Ordoro platform, with increased functionality. Kadam said that “we have bolstered that capability by opening up our API so that merchants can build better integrations with their suppliers’ and manufacturers’ systems. Our goal is to continue to build on those services to meet the back office needs of online retailers,” he added.

One overarching trend: The movement toward mobile, said Kadam, may not follow the same trajectory in B2B as it saw in the rapid rise within B2C. “I think the key to mobile payments adoption in B2C commerce,” said Kadam, “is that there is a single decision-maker in the transaction — the consumer. That is not the case in a B2B transaction. More often than not there are several decision-makers in a business, and this introduces friction in the adoption of mobile payments in B2B.”

With further integration across channels, Ordoro has, as of last week, announced a partnership with Square. Through that new relationship, Ordoro also has the ability to push into offline sales for those companies looking to sell at brick-and-mortar locations or even physical events, such as festivals or conventions.