Podcast
B2B eCommerce Show
Hosted by Justin King · EN
Welcome to The B2B eCommerce Show – a hub for leaders, innovators, industry experts, and newbies to explore the fast-paced world of digital commerce. Hosted by respected thought leader Justin King, this podcast delves into the strategies, challenges, and successes shaping how manufacturers, distributors, and service providers thrive online.
Each episode features insightful conversations, practical advice, and compelling stories from pioneers driving digital transformation in the B2B eCommerce ecosystem.
Whether you're embarking on your first eCommerce project, scaling a digital strategy, or staying ahead of market shifts, this podcast is your guide to navigating digital successfully.
37episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Why Most B2B AI Fails with Graham Lubie
3w ago00:47:50Tap to summarizeGraham Lubie started his career at Accenture before moving into strategy and marketing leadership roles in technology, and now leads the digital group at THE·TEAM, the parent company behind Cadent Commerce, a B2B-focused practice built to help manufacturers and distributors navigate eCommerce and digital transformation.Justin King sat down with Graham to talk through the AI enablement pyramid, a three-layer framework Graham's team built after watching client after client stall out at the same stage of AI adoption.They get into why most manufacturers and distributors are still treating AI as personal productivity instead of a business enabler, what it actually takes to get clean data and connected systems in place before any AI agent can do useful work, how agentic workflows can become a real differentiator once that foundation is solid, and why board-level pressure to "do something with AI" so often produces bolt-on features instead of a real strategy.Graham also talks about what he calls AI slop, the risk of publishing AI output without review, and the hygiene scorecard his team built to catch it before it reaches a client. He and Justin close out the conversation with a direct answer to the question every service provider is getting asked right now: will AI replace agencies and consultants?Key idea: AI does not replace expertise, it raises the price of not having it.
Transcribe →The Work Behind Executive Alignment with Adrienne Hartman
3w ago00:47:46Tap to summarizeAdrienne Hartman started her career as a COBOL developer, helped Lands' End navigate the earliest days of B2B e-commerce, and has spent the last 19 years building the marketing and digital commerce engine at J. J. Keller & Associates, growing her team from six people to 175 along the way.Justin King sat down with Adrienne to talk career growth, sales alignment, and what it actually takes to run digital commerce at a company built on both physical products and complex compliance services.They get into why J. J. Keller doesn't need to care whether a customer orders by phone or online, how sales reps get full credit for digital orders even when they never touch them, what it took for Adrienne to earn a seat at the executive table after starting as a developer, and why she talks to the head of sales more than once a day just to keep the two functions moving together.Adrienne also talks about what nearly a year of mentorship from her predecessor taught her about succession planning, why events remain one of J. J. Keller's strongest growth tools even in a digital-first world, and what she'd tell anyone trying to build trust between a sales team and a digital channel.Key idea: alignment is not a project you finish, it is a habit you keep.
Transcribe →The Architecture Behind Decomposable Commerce with Sasha Siniouguine and Evgeny Grigul
3w ago00:44:34Tap to summarizeEvgeny Grigul is co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Virto Commerce, and Sasha Siniouguine is the company's co-founder and CEO. Between them they have spent more than two decades building B2B eCommerce platforms. Sasha built his first eCommerce store in 2002. Evgeny spent years running one of Alibaba's largest foreign partner marketplaces. Since founding Virto in 2011, they have built enterprise commerce systems for companies like Heineken, Bosch, and Volvo.Justin King sat down with Evgeny and Sasha to talk about the problem hiding underneath most digital transformation pitches: reducing friction and speeding up orders sounds simple, but for manufacturers and distributors, going digital doesn't remove complexity. It just moves it somewhere else.Evgeny explains why copying a B2C shopping experience into a B2B environment almost always fails, and why the real starting point is treating B2B as self-service built around what actually slows a customer down. Sasha walks through what happens when that complexity resurfaces, whether it lands in a company's workflows, its intellectual property, or scattered across departments, and why the goal isn't removing complexity but keeping the technology from adding more of it.They also get into where complexity actually lives in a commerce platform: the edges. Custom pricing, partial shipments, credit limits, and the exceptions that never show up in a sales demo. Evgeny breaks down Virto's atomic architecture, built so any piece of the platform can be replaced without disrupting the rest, and Sasha explains why unhandled edge cases are where project budgets quietly balloon, sometimes by ten or a hundred times the original cost.Key idea: Digital transformation doesn't eliminate complexity. It relocates it, and the platforms that win are the ones built to absorb wherever it lands next.
Transcribe →Why B2B Loyalty Isn't About Discounts with Dechay Watts
Jul 1600:51:22Tap to summarizeDechay Watts is the VP of Digital Marketing Services at Smith Commerce, a performance commerce agency helping brands scale digital sales and transformation across the customer lifecycle. She began her career in PR before moving into SEO and content strategy, co-founding SPROUT Content, a national content marketing agency later acquired by WPP, and has spent more than 20 years studying how B2B companies actually earn repeat business, and why most of the data and technology they buy to do it never gets used.Justin King sat down with Dechay to talk about the problem hiding underneath every conversation about loyalty, personalization, and customer data: most B2B companies have the tools, but nobody has activated them.Dechay explains why B2B loyalty has almost nothing to do with points or rebates, and everything to do with removing friction from a customer's day to day operations. She walks through why procurement teams stay loyal to suppliers who make their jobs easier rather than ones offering the best discount, why companies keep investing in customer data platforms without a plan for what to do with the data once it's centralized, and the real difference between a CDP and a CRM.They also get into the difference between segmentation and true personalization, how AI agents are starting to take over the pattern recognition that loyalty programs depend on (reorder timing, service windows, inventory alignment), and what it actually looks like to personalize for a buying committee instead of a single buyer.Key idea: Loyalty isn't a program you add on. It's what's left when you've made a customer's job easier than anyone else will.
Transcribe →The Reason Commerce Projects Stay Stuck with Radu Munteanu
Jul 1000:50:14Tap to summarizeRadu Munteanu is the Founder & CEO of Luminos Labs, a B2B commerce systems integrator specializing in the technical complexity of mid-to-large distributors. Born and raised in Romania, he built his delivery team there over 16 years, one engineer at a time, and has spent his career studying why commerce execution gets heavier over time — and what to do about it.Justin King sat down with Radu to talk about the problem hiding underneath every conversation about product data, AI, and platform strategy: nobody is fixing how they execute.Radu explains why system integrators are structurally incentivized to add roles, meetings, and deliverables rather than outcomes, and why most clients never push back. He walks through what it actually looks like when a project team loses sight of why they're doing what they're doing, why the same industry problems keep getting rebranded through new lenses every few years without getting solved, and how Luminos built a model around radical transparency — including weekly reports that break down AI-generated versus manually written code, line by line, per team member.They also get into what clarity actually looks like inside a commerce project, why complexity isn't the enemy but noise is, and what manufacturers and distributors should be demanding from their integration partners right now.Key idea: Every company knows what needs to be done. The ones that win are the ones that actually execute.
Transcribe →Don't Switch Platforms, Fix The Data First with François-Jérôme Gosselin
Jul 800:46:24Tap to summarizeFrançois-Jérôme Gosselin is Co-Founder and CEO of Novatize, a digital commerce consultancy that helps manufacturers, distributors, and retailers build scalable eCommerce ecosystems. Since founding the company in 2014, he has helped organizations navigate digital transformation through commerce strategy, technology, and operational execution.Justin King sat down with François-Jérôme to unpack the 2026 State of B2B eCommerce report, produced by Novatize with WBR and Shopify, and the gap between how much B2B companies are investing in AI and how little of it is going toward the groundwork that actually makes it work.François-J explains why 70% of businesses plan to increase AI spending this year, starting with product data rather than flashier features. He covers why 31% of B2B companies still run on custom platforms, why Shopify has become the second most common platform among companies doing $500 million to $1 billion in revenue, and why composable commerce is becoming realistic again now that AI has lowered the cost of connecting systems together. He also breaks down why customer adoption, not platform choice, is what actually determines whether a digital channel succeeds.They close with who should own eCommerce inside a company, and the four things B2B buyers now expect as standard: self-service, personalization, real-time visibility, and automation.Key idea: The platform was never the hard part. The data underneath it was.
Transcribe →Stop Losing B2B Buyers After Checkout with Piers Gorman
Jul 300:44:48Tap to summarizePiers Gorman is Senior Vice President, APAC and EMEA, at TreviPay, where he helps manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and marketplaces simplify B2B payments, invoicing, and trade credit across global markets. Before payments, he spent eight years in the British Army and helped build a defense consulting business across the Middle East and Africa.Justin King sat down with Piers to talk about the part of B2B eCommerce most leaders never see, the gap between how seamless a buyer expects their experience to be and how clunky it actually feels once they hit checkout, invoicing, or credit approval.Piers explains why finance teams are built to protect a business rather than improve a customer's experience, and why that one organizational habit is responsible for most of the friction buyers actually feel. He walks through what it looks like when a buyer gets "lost in the system" during onboarding, why a delayed payment application can freeze a customer's credit limit even after they've paid, and how TreviPay manages the backend complexity behind a hotel chain that needs invoices broken out by property or a distributor juggling thousands of seller relationships across one franchise network.They also get into how identity fraud is getting more sophisticated alongside AI, why localization has to go far beyond currency conversion, and how the same data infrastructure built to catch fraud can just as easily be pointed at growth instead.Key idea: B2B buyers don't judge you on the storefront. They judge you on everything that happens after they click buy.
Transcribe →The Ownership Advantage in B2B with Colleen Daly and Div Makkar
Jun 3000:48:01Tap to summarizeDivyaanshu Makkar is co-founder of WizCommerce, a B2B e-commerce platform built to give mid-market wholesalers and distributors the same capabilities as enterprise software, without the enterprise price tag or an 18-month implementation. Colleen Daly is VP at Howard Elliott, a home decor manufacturer and importer of mirrors, accent furniture, and decorative accessories, where she owns customer success and just about everything else.Justin King sat down with Colleen and Div to talk about what ownership actually looks like inside a small, fast-moving B2B team, and why it might be the real advantage behind Howard Elliott's AI transformation.Colleen describes running a lean, cross-trained team where "that's not my job" isn't in the vocabulary, and why most of the work of implementing new tools falls on her to drive through the organization. She talks candidly about being the one who "creates problems" so Div's team can solve them, and what it took to migrate Howard Elliott's entire sales and e-commerce stack in three months to make an April trade show deadline. Div explains why ownership matters just as much on the vendor side: the companies that struggle most with implementation are the ones who haven't done the internal work to know what they actually need.They also get into how that same ownership mindset shows up in Howard Elliott's order entry process, which went from three hours of manual work a day to forty-five minutes with the help of an AI agent named Ella, and why Colleen still has someone checking the AI's work by hand.Key idea: AI isn't going to take your job. Someone who knows how to use it will.
Transcribe →How Lorrie Mizuko Built a B2B eCommerce Career by Saying Yes to the Unfamiliar
Jun 2300:33:25Tap to summarizeLorrie Mizuko has launched virtual reality technology in 20 countries, owned North American online sales for mobile at HTC, and helped brands like Sony and Samsung figure out how to sell direct to consumers for the first time. Now she runs digital marketing for ADI Global Distribution, a global B2B powerhouse that won the 2025 B2B eCommerce Industry Award for enterprise distribution.Sarah Falcon sat down with Lorrie to talk career, craft, and what it takes to lead digital at scale in distribution.They get into how Lorrie built her career by saying yes to things she had never done, what it looks like to manage thousands of price books and complex credit structures through eCommerce, why the best digital leaders start with the problem and not the solution, and what ADI is working toward for its customers.Lorrie also talks about networking as an introvert, being a woman in technical B2B leadership, and why AI is changing the conversation on teams that used to be slow to experiment.Key idea: success lives outside of your comfort zone.
Transcribe →Connected Commerce: Where B2B Buyers Actually Buy
May 1400:48:29Tap to summarizeA B2B eCommerce site is not enough if it is disconnected from how enterprise buyers actually work.In this episode, Justin King talks with Beth Segovia, CEO of TradeCentric, and Kevin Kassenmeyer, VP of Customer Experience and Enablement at TradeCentric, about connected commerce and the procurement systems that shape real B2B buying behavior.They discuss why buyers often start inside Coupa, SAP Ariba, Jaggaer, or another spend management platform instead of a supplier website; why non-integrated suppliers can lose routine spend without realizing it; and why purchase orders, invoices, receiving documents, and three-way match matter more than many commerce teams understand.The conversation also covers DIY integration, punchout, analytics, supplier adoption, and the role AI may eventually play in procurement and commerce transactions.Key idea: your buyer is not shopping. They're working.
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