Why Virto Commerce’s Founders Say Digital Transformation Doesn’t Remove Complexity, It Relocates It

Every B2B manufacturer and distributor hears the same pitch when a new commerce platform comes calling: reduce friction, speed up orders, cut costs. Evgeny Grigul, co-founder and chief operating officer of Virto Commerce, and Sasha Siniouguine, the company’s co-founder and CEO, have spent close to three decades building B2B ecommerce systems between them, and they told Justin King on the B2B eCommerce Show that this pitch rarely matches what actually happens once a company goes live.

Grigul has more than 25 years of experience as a technology entrepreneur. Siniouguine has spent over 20 years building large scale commerce solutions for brands including Bosch, Volvo, and Heineken. Together they lead a company that has taken a distinct position in the eCommerce world: complexity is not a problem to eliminate. It is a reality to manage well.

Complexity Doesn’t Disappear, It Moves

King opened by asking where the standard “reduce friction, speed up orders” narrative tends to break down for manufacturers and distributors moving into digital commerce. Grigul’s answer started somewhere unexpected: uniqueness. He argued that copying a business-to-consumer experience into a business-to-business environment is a common mistake, because B2B buyers are not shopping, they are trying to get their jobs done.

“In B2B, we first of all need to think about B2B as a self-service,” Grigul said.

That self-service mindset only works if a company understands its own customers deeply enough to know what obstacles actually slow them down, whether that is an ordering process, a catalog experience, or something as simple as email updates on order status. It is a point echoed in McKinsey’s 2026 Global B2B Pulse Survey, which found that inconsistent information and a lack of knowledgeable support, not price or product, are now the leading reasons B2B buyers switch suppliers.

King pushed further, noting that Siniouguine has said publicly that digitization does not remove complexity, it simply moves it. Siniouguine confirmed the idea and explained where that complexity tends to resurface: in a company’s intellectual property, its workflows, or scattered across departments in ways that become hard to manage. The goal at Virto, he said, is to introduce technology without adding new layers of complexity on top of what already exists.

Where Complexity Actually Lives: The Edges

Much of the conversation centered on what King called the edges of a commerce platform: custom pricing, partial shipments, credit limits, and the dozens of exceptions that rarely show up in a sales demo. Most commerce platforms, he pointed out, are built for the happy path, the straightforward transaction. Virto has built its reputation on handling what happens when a transaction is not straightforward.

“So many commerce platforms are built for the happy path, right? The straightforward transaction. You guys are built for complexity,” King said.

Grigul described Virto’s answer as “virtual atomic architecture,” a system built so that any piece of the platform, down to the database layer, can be replaced without disrupting the rest of the solution. He offered a real example: a customer with more than 10,000 individual buyers whose sales team had been manually creating custom price lists on the spot for each one. Rather than force that pricing logic into the existing system, Virto’s team built a separate pricing engine for that specific scenario and plugged it in, leaving the catalog, orders, and everything else untouched.

“We are saying that decomposability is more important than composability,” Grigul said.

That distinction has become a live debate across the eCommerce industry, not just at Virto. RETHINK Retail reported that VTEX stepped away from the MACH Alliance in 2025 over concerns that pure composability had introduced its own hidden costs and operational headaches for enterprise retailers, a sign that flexibility alone does not guarantee a lighter technical load.

Siniouguine connected this directly to where unpredictable costs come from in eCommerce projects.

“Edge cases is where the complexity lives, and this is also where the unpredictable costs live,” Siniouguine said.

He explained that these edge cases are where budgets quietly leak, sometimes multiplying costs by ten or a hundred times what a project should have cost, particularly when a platform cannot flex to accommodate a regional regulation, a new business model, or a company acquisition.

Integration Is Where Projects Actually Break

King asked directly what goes wrong when the integration layer between an eCommerce platform, an ERP, a PIM, and a warehouse management system fails. Grigul pointed to multi-regional deployments as a common example, where roughly 90 percent of a solution can be reused across markets, but the remaining share, covering local currency, tax rules, and regulatory requirements, has to be handled with precision rather than a simple copy and paste. For context on how manufacturers and distributors are approaching this kind of system connectivity today, B2BEA’s write-up on 5874 Commerce’s composable architecture work covers similar ground with ERP and PIM decoupling.

Siniouguine added a specific and telling anecdote: a customer who launched on Virto’s platform 13 years earlier had recently come back needing to migrate to the current version. The upgrade took about a week, not because the technology had stood still, but because the platform’s open, documented architecture allowed Virto’s own AI tooling to trace 13 years of changes and modernize the deployment without rebuilding it from scratch.

From Alibaba to Enterprise eCommerce

The founders’ backgrounds explain much of Virto’s philosophy. Siniouguine built his first eCommerce store in 2002 to sell his own company’s products, later turned it into a product, and saw it acquired in 2011, eventually becoming Optimizely’s commerce platform. Grigul’s path ran through Alibaba, where he built and scaled a business adapted from Taobao’s marketplace model for international markets, eventually becoming one of Alibaba’s largest foreign partners.

That combined experience, one technical, one commercial, shaped Virto’s founding thesis: modularity and extensibility from day one, built for companies whose pricing, catalogs, and operations would inevitably change in ways no vendor could predict in advance. B2BEA’s earlier coverage of Novatize’s take on composable commerce and product data and the association’s piece on Luminos Labs’s approach to execution over tooling both circle back to the same idea: the platform matters less than the discipline behind how it is built and run.

Where Virto Is Headed

Looking ahead, both founders pointed to artificial intelligence as the next lever for lowering the cost of flexibility. Grigul said Virto’s open architecture and available source code let the company adopt new AI models quickly and pass that capability to customers, including smaller companies that previously could not afford enterprise-grade flexibility. Siniouguine focused on how AI is helping Virto’s solution integrator partners monitor deployments, catch issues, and ship fixes automatically, freeing their teams to spend more time talking with customers about new capabilities rather than firefighting. That shift lines up with what BigCommerce identified as a top 2026 trend, namely composable architecture paired with agentic AI becoming the default rather than the exception for B2B sellers.

The throughline across the conversation, from pricing engines to 13-year-old platform migrations, is that Virto’s approach treats change itself as the constant a commerce platform has to be built around, not an exception to manage after the fact. For manufacturers and distributors evaluating a platform decision, that framing may matter more than any feature comparison chart.

About the Guests

Evgeny Grigul is co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Virto Commerce. Connect with him on LinkedIn. Sasha Siniouguine is co-founder and CEO of Virto Commerce. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

About the Host

Justin King is the Chief AI Officer of the B2B eCommerce Association and host of the B2B eCommerce Show, where he interviews the practitioners and technology leaders shaping digital transformation for manufacturers and distributors.