Slava Kravchuk on Why B2B Companies Get Lost Choosing Technology and How to Close the Journey Gap

Twenty Years Building B2B Storefronts From the Open Source Side

Kravchuk started as a freelance web developer working in open source eCommerce, back when OS Commerce was still a common platform of choice. Atwix began as a one person shop and grew into a team of more than fifty people across ten countries. Along the way, the company's focus shifted from consumer eCommerce toward B2B, where open source platforms proved better suited to the complexity and customization that off the shelf software could not handle. Atwix now implements and connects B2B storefronts on platforms including Adobe Commerce, Shopware, and Shopify, integrated with ERPs such as Infor, Epicor, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, and NetSuite, and Kravchuk has served on the Magento Association board as one of the platform's top contributors.

The Journey Gap: Why Adoption Stays Low After Launch

Hein opened with a problem he called his pet issue in B2B eCommerce: companies spend heavily on a new website, launch it, and then watch customers pick up the phone and call their sales rep anyway. Kravchuk pointed to a market that has gotten more confusing, not less, since the earlier days when a business had one or two platforms to choose from.

Everybody is now putting AI on the front page, and some of those capabilities that are advertised are just phantom capabilities. They're not there. — Slava Kravchuk, Founder and CEO, Atwix

Private equity consolidation among vendors and agencies has added another layer of noise, he said, along with a subtler problem: companies now use AI to write RFPs and evaluate vendor responses, which means both sides of the buying process are increasingly mediated by AI without either party fully realizing it.

Start With the Customer, Not the Technology

Asked how a distributor should even begin prioritizing among the platforms, PIMs, search tools, and AI pricing engines being pitched to them, Kravchuk's answer started somewhere more basic than any feature list.

It's important to not lose sight of who is your customer, who are you building this for. — Slava Kravchuk

Companies often default to building for whoever has the loudest internal opinion, he said, when the real requirements should come from a fusion of two groups: the external customers who will actually use the platform, and the internal sales and service staff who assist a large share of B2B orders that will never be fully self-service. Only once that vision is clear should a company move to tactical, feature level questions. Underneath both groups sits one non-negotiable system of record.

ERP is central, that's the central system of records. Whatever your experience is, it has to be integrated with ERP. — Slava Kravchuk

For a fuller look at how ERP, PIM, and CRM systems fit together in a B2B tech stack, B2BEA's guide to the systems that power B2B commerce is a useful starting point, and B2BEA's B2B eCommerce customer adoption framework covers the adoption side of the journey gap directly.

Choosing an Implementation Partner Is Its Own Decision

Hein pushed Kravchuk on an obvious tension: an agency is a vendor too, with its own incentive to sell its own services. Kravchuk's answer was that choosing the right partner may matter more than choosing the right platform, since a good platform poorly implemented gets blamed on the platform, while a strong partner relationship can outlast any single project.

He borrowed a framework from the Entrepreneurial Operating System, commonly used by B2B leadership teams, to describe what to evaluate in a partner: GWC, or get it, want it, and capable of.

Get it, want it, and capable of. — Slava Kravchuk

That breaks down into knowing whether a partner understands the business, the industry, and the customer (get it), has the platform expertise and technical capability to deliver (capable of), and genuinely wants to invest in a long term relationship rather than just close the deal (want it). Kravchuk was specific about what to verify before signing: a partner's experience with a company's actual ERP, since back end synchronization is invisible on the surface but determines whether adoption ends up at 2 percent or 20 percent, and a partner's experience across multiple platforms, since a vendor that only knows one platform will always sell that platform regardless of fit. Reference customers, current clients, platform certification counts, and public contributions to open source platforms are all independently verifiable proof points, he added, rather than something buyers have to take on faith. Hein connected this directly to B2BEA's own guidance for evaluating options at the platform level, in its guide to selecting a B2B eCommerce platform.

Why "Don't Touch It" Becomes the Most Expensive Decision

The conversation turned to a familiar B2B instinct: once a platform is working, do not touch it. Kravchuk compared it to a father telling his son not to ask questions about why the sun rises, as long as it keeps working reliably nobody wants to look too closely. But that instinct carries real risk. He pointed to Magento 1 users who delayed migrating and were eventually cut off by PayPal's evolving API, a reminder that vendors backing an aging platform stop absorbing the compliance and maintenance cost eventually, whether or not the merchant is ready.

The earlier you move on from investing into something you know you're going to throw away eventually, and switch to investing into something that will stay with you and keep compounding on that investment, that's a big realization once you put the numbers in. — Slava Kravchuk

Hein compared the accumulation of deferred upgrades to eating an elephant.

It's easier to eat an elephant if you take a lot of small bites than trying to swallow the entire thing all at once. — Jason Hein, B2B eCommerce Association

Recent industry data backs up the underlying case for tighter ERP and eCommerce integration in the first place: companies that connect the two report a 70 percent customer retention rate, compared with 49 percent for those that do not, according to Digital Commerce 360's reporting on B2B ERP integration, and Shopify's own guide to B2B ERP integration frames the same handoff between systems as one of the highest leverage places to invest.

Get the Basics Right Before Chasing AI

Kravchuk was direct about companies that come back from a conference excited about a new capability before their foundation is ready for it.

Messy process plus AI equals messy AI process. Without clean data, you would not help with the AI. — Slava Kravchuk

His advice to distributors is to launch fast, sometimes in as little as two or three months, to demonstrate value and gather real feedback rather than endlessly planning a large build. Before layering on AI or advanced personalization, he named the fundamentals that have to work first: site speed, which he called non-negotiable and measurable; search that handles manufacturer part numbers, internal SKUs, customers' own part numbers, and typos; accurate, fast ERP synchronized inventory and order status; omnichannel visibility so a customer can see an order placed by phone or email reflected online; and a mobile experience built for a buyer standing in a warehouse or a job site, not just someone at a desk with a large monitor. B2BEA's look at closing the product data gap in B2B eCommerce covers the data foundation piece in more depth, and Gartner's own research shows why the sequencing matters: the analyst firm predicts that task specific AI agents will appear in 40 percent of enterprise applications by 2026, up from under 5 percent today, meaning the AI capabilities vendors are pitching now are often still ahead of what is actually deployed.

The Advantage B2B Companies Already Have and Rarely Use

Hein closed by returning to the customer knowledge B2B companies already hold, often scattered across a CRM or, more commonly, in the heads of individual salespeople who visit customers in person in a way no consumer retailer does.

How well do they understand my business? How well do they understand my product? How well do they understand my customer? — Jason Hein

Kravchuk agreed that the real opportunity is connecting that institutional knowledge, wherever it actually lives, to the people building the digital experience, rather than treating the website as a project designed in isolation from what sales already knows. Research from McKinsey backs up why that matters now more than ever: buyer comfort with remote and self-service B2B purchasing has continued to climb, and the firm's 2024 B2B growth research found that companies integrating that kind of customer insight into a connected, AI enabled experience are pulling ahead of competitors who are not.

Those who will be smart enough to actually take that route, not be afraid, experiment, and have the right partner to help them along the way, I think they will get ahead of the competition. — Slava Kravchuk

About the Guest

Slava Kravchuk, Founder and CEO, Atwix

Slava Kravchuk is the founder and CEO of Atwix, a commerce integration agency that builds and connects B2B storefronts on Adobe Commerce, Shopware, and Shopify for manufacturers and distributors running ERPs such as Infor, Epicor, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, and NetSuite. Since founding the company in 2006, he has grown it into an international team across more than 10 countries, made it one of the top contributors to Adobe Commerce and Magento, and served on the Magento Association board. Slava is a vocal advocate for practical AI in commerce, both in Atwix client work and as the founder of TenTenor, an AI meeting coach for leadership teams running EOS, Scaling Up, and other operating frameworks.

About the Host

Jason Hein is Vice President of B2BEA Academy and Global Director of Programming for B2B eCommerce World at the B2B eCommerce Association, where he builds and scales the association's practitioner education offerings and leads the development of conference programming across B2B eCommerce World events in APAC, the Americas, and Europe. He also hosts the B2B eCommerce Show, where he talks with practitioners and technology leaders shaping how manufacturers and distributors sell online. With nearly 30 years of experience in B2B eCommerce, he also runs his own consulting practice, Acumental B2B, helping companies fix underperforming B2B sites.