Based on Episode 148 of The Hard Truth About B2B eCommerce Podcast
When Greg Gesswein, President and CEO of Gesswein, joined Episode 148 of The Hard Truth About B2B eCommerce, he brought something most guests in this space can't offer: a century of institutional perspective compressed into a very honest account of what it actually takes to modernize a legacy business.
Gesswein, formally the Paul H. Gesswein Company, founded by Greg's great-grandfather, a German immigrant who arrived in the US at the age of 11, has been supplying precision tools and equipment to jewelers, mold makers, and industrial manufacturers for over 100 years. Today the business carries roughly 15,000 SKUs, serves customers across jewelry manufacturing, plastic injection molding, automotive, aerospace, and medical industries, and runs on a fully modern SaaS stack: Shopify B2B and Acumatica ERP. Getting there was anything but simple.
From Printed Catalogs to Shopify: A Generational Shift
For most of Gesswein's history, commerce meant a printed catalog — several hundred pages, distributed by the thousands every couple of years, driving phone orders and email orders from a loyal professional customer base. Greg was in college around the year 2000 when he saw the company's first website, which at the time was essentially a digital version of that catalog. eCommerce as a transactional channel came later, in the mid-2000s, and remained a small slice of total sales for years.
The real turning point came around 2013, when Gesswein launched what Greg describes as a "properly functioning" eCommerce site. That was a meaningful step forward — but it was also 12 years ago, and the platform had accumulated considerable limitations since then.
What makes Gesswein's story worth paying attention to is not just the destination, but the honesty about the journey. Three replatforms in roughly ten years. A failed simultaneous launch of a new ERP and a new website that Greg describes as one of the most difficult experiences in his career. And ultimately, a methodical rebuild that is now generating 101% transaction growth year-over-year, 225% growth in site traffic, and a 343% increase in site visitors.
"That website launch might be number one — the most traumatic event for me. There was a huge discrepancy between expectations and reality, and it took months to fix."
The Lesson That Shaped Everything: Don't Launch Two Systems at Once
If there is one piece of advice Greg would give any distributor considering a digital transformation, it is this: never launch a new ERP and a new eCommerce platform at the same time.
Gesswein learned this the hard way. Several years ago, the team was transitioning off a legacy system they had been running for 30 years, moving to Acumatica. The logic at the time seemed reasonable — Acumatica has a native connector to BigCommerce, so if the ERP transition went well, the website would follow naturally. The team underestimated both projects individually and dramatically underestimated them in combination.
"If I could go back, I would have done Acumatica first, connected it to our old website, and then worked on the new site the following year."
The replatform to Shopify — this time as a standalone project, with Acumatica already stable — went markedly better. Orders processed on day one. Cleanup was lighter. The team came in with more structure, more experience, and crucially, without the weight of a simultaneous ERP overhaul pulling in the opposite direction.
Why Shopify B2B Was the Right Call for a Complex Distributor
Gesswein had three options when evaluating platforms: stay on BigCommerce and fix it, move to a smaller custom-built solution, or go with Shopify. The decision came down to the wire, and it ultimately hinged on one thing: Shopify's native B2B functionality.
"If Shopify didn't have this B2B capability, we wouldn't have gone to Shopify. It was really that B2B connection that was brought to our attention through working with Zaelab."
For a business like Gesswein — selling to end users, distributors, and international customers, each with their own pricing tiers, account permissions, and order histories — the ability to handle those workflows natively rather than through a patchwork of third-party plugins was decisive. Previous solutions had relied on unstable connectors that frequently broke synchronization, created product mismatches, and generated manual work that consumed staff time without adding value.
Shopify B2B Plus replaced that fragility with native capability:
- Personalized customer portals with negotiated pricing visible on login
- Role-based account permissions for purchasing teams and end users
- Complete order histories accessible directly in the platform
- Multi-shipment tracking and complex pricing models synced seamlessly with Acumatica
The result was a platform that could meet the expectations of professional B2B buyers — people who need to find the right tool quickly, confirm pricing accurately, and place an order without friction — without requiring custom development for every use case.
ERP Integration: The Most Underestimated Part of the Project
If there is a single technical theme that runs through the entire Gesswein story, it is ERP integration. Greg is candid: getting this right is the foundation everything else depends on, and most companies underestimate how hard it is.
Gesswein's advantage in this project was a genuinely native connector between Shopify and Acumatica — managed by Acumatica, kept current, and capable of handling approximately 90% of what the business needed without customization. Inventory, orders, customer data, and pricing all sync in real time, creating a single source of truth across systems.
The team's philosophy going into the launch was disciplined: use the native connector, adjust internal processes where possible before resorting to customization, and treat custom development as a last resort rather than a first instinct. That restraint paid off.
"Our plan was to stay native. And fortunately, for what we're doing, 90% just kind of worked natively through the Shopify connector."
For distributors on legacy ERPs without modern API layers, this is harder — and Greg acknowledges that. The Acumatica-Shopify combination is genuinely rare in its accessibility for mid-market businesses. Most companies in this position face a more expensive and more complex integration path. But the principle holds regardless of platform: the ERP integration is not a secondary concern. It is the core.
Building the Internal Team: The Organizational Change That Made It Work
One of the more practical revelations in Greg's account is how much of the second replatform's success came down to internal structure rather than technology.
The first time around, Gesswein had no formal internal eCommerce team. There was a webmaster, a COO, and occasional cross-functional meetings — but no ownership, no regular cadence, and no clear decision-making structure. This time, the company built a dedicated internal eCommerce team before the project began, drawing on managers from different departments and empowering a few who had relevant prior experience to take strong ownership roles.
The team met monthly, surfaced customer feedback systematically, and had a clear internal champion: Greg himself, who made the Shopify migration his number one organizational priority.
"When you can drive direction from the CEO level and champion the move, it matters for the organization. A lot of companies have this too far down the org chart with no real power."
The internal team is complemented by two external partners — Zaelab on the eCommerce side and a dedicated Acumatica support provider — who meet with the team monthly. Greg's evolving view is that leaning harder on external specialists, rather than trying to solve problems in-house, is one of the most important efficiency gains available to a company of Gesswein's size.
"Sometimes we'll hit our head against the wall a few times trying to fix something in-house, when Zaelab could fix it in 20 minutes. We need to focus on our business, our products, our customers — and lean on our third-party providers for the platforms."
Product Data: The Investment Most Distributors Underestimate
Gesswein carries 15,000 SKUs. Over 90% have images. Attributes, descriptions, and filtering characteristics are an ongoing investment — and Greg is candid that it is one of the most resource-intensive parts of running a serious B2B catalog.
The business is actively expanding its attribute library, working toward the kind of filterable, searchable product data that industrial buyers expect — material, diameter, length, use case, application. The inspiration is Grainger, which can carry dozens of attributes on a single product. Getting there requires structured effort, leadership time, and in Gesswein's case, AI-assisted tooling for product descriptions through partnerships with companies like Datax.ai.
The commercial case for this investment is clear. Product pages with complete images, bullet-point descriptions, and relevant attributes consistently outperform incomplete pages — not by a small margin, but dramatically. Buyers leave faster when images are missing. Conversion rates fall when attributes are insufficient for a purchasing decision. For a distributor in a precision tools category where the right specification matters, this is not a nice-to-have.
"You have to see product data as a marketing investment. It's easy to neglect because it just feels like a task, but once you frame it as an investment, you can justify the resources."
Print Is Not Dead — It Is Just More Targeted
One of the more surprising moments in the conversation is Greg's perspective on print catalogs. Gesswein actually considered eliminating printed catalogs entirely before deciding to produce a new one — and the reasoning reveals something important about how B2B buyers actually work.
A significant portion of Gesswein's customer base consists of technicians on the shop floor who do not work in front of computers. For them, a printed catalog is not nostalgia — it is a functional tool. The purchasing manager may use the website to check pricing and place orders, but the technician selecting the right abrasive or the right rotary tool needs something tactile and accessible at the workstation.
The result is a hybrid model: the website handles roughly 90% of commercial activity, while the catalog serves the specific use cases where digital is not the right format. It is a useful reminder that digital transformation does not mean eliminating every analog touchpoint — it means putting each format to work in the context where it actually adds value.
Tariffs and the Case for Digital Agility
The episode was recorded shortly after Liberation Day, and the tariff situation was impossible to ignore. As a distributor sourcing from Europe and parts of Asia, Gesswein was directly exposed to rapid, unpredictable pricing changes affecting some of its highest-volume product lines.
Greg's account of how the business responded illustrates exactly why a modern, agile platform matters in volatile conditions. The team was able to upload a list of affected items and add tariff notices directly to those product pages — using Shopify's native metafields and tags — within days of the policy changes. For special orders and capital equipment, tariff charges could be itemized in quotes. The system was flexible enough to respond at speed.
"We put a tag on the webpage for these items saying the price has increased because of the tariff. Shout out to Shopify metafields and tags — they're good for that."
For distributors still on legacy platforms, this kind of rapid response would require days of custom development, manual price list updates, or direct customer communication. The ability to move at the speed of market conditions is not just a competitive advantage in normal times — it is a survival capability when conditions shift as fast as they did in early 2025.
The Advice Greg Would Give Any Distributor
Asked directly what he would tell a distributor earlier in their digital journey, Greg offered several grounded takeaways:
Get the right consultation support. The decision of which platform to choose, and how to approach the project, is genuinely hard. Everyone pitches their solution confidently. Finding a partner with real B2B expertise — not a general web agency — makes a material difference in the quality of decisions made early, when they are hardest to reverse.
Sequence your projects. Do not combine a major ERP transition with a new eCommerce platform launch. Take them one at a time, learn from each, and build on a stable foundation.
Make it a CEO-level priority. eCommerce touches sales, operations, finance, marketing, and technology simultaneously. If it lives too far down the org chart, it loses the authority and cross-functional leverage it needs. Executive sponsorship is not just helpful — it is load-bearing.
Plan for the journey, not just the launch. The launch is the beginning, not the destination. The ROI from eCommerce comes from continuous investment after go-live — new features, better product data, improved merchandising, tighter integrations. Companies that treat the platform launch as the finish line consistently underperform those that treat it as the starting point.
"Once you launch a new website, you want to build on that for the future. That's the foundation of your business. You don't want to replatform anytime soon."
A New Beginning After 100 Years
What is most striking about Gesswein's story is not the metrics — though 101% transaction growth and 343% visitor growth are significant — it is the posture. A fourth-generation family business, carrying more than a century of institutional history, choosing to treat a platform migration as the start of something rather than the completion of something.
Greg's closing note captures it: two months after launch, the eCommerce experience is already better than it was at go-live. Six months from now it will be better still. The platform is improving continuously, the team is learning continuously, and the roadmap is expanding rather than contracting.
For distributors still weighing whether the investment is worth it, Gesswein's trajectory offers a concrete answer. The companies that make the investment, build the internal capability, and commit to continuous improvement are the ones that will be positioned to move faster when markets shift — on tariffs, on buyer expectations, on technology. The ones that wait are running out of runway.
Learn more about how Zaelab helped Gesswein modernize its digital ecosystem on Shopify B2B.
Listen to the full episode on YouTube or Buzzsprout.
