Magento CTO and co-founder Yoav Kutner said OroCommerce was built specifically for the B2B marketplace.

Earlier this month, Magento Commerce scored a massive $250 million round of funding. But former Magento CTO and co-founder Yoav Kutner is less than impressed.

The company's B2B ecommerce product is subpar, Kutner said. "It wasn't purpose-built, from the ground up for the way companies sell to and buy from each other," he told CMSWire.

To be fair, much of Magento's success is in the B2C, not B2B, space. And Kutner, CEO of West Hollywood, Calif.-based Oro, has a competitive reason for knocking Magento: OroCommerce, Oro new open source B2B ecommerce platform launches today. 

About OroCommerce

Kutner said OroCommerce was built specifically for the B2B marketplace. It understands purchase orders are the norm in B2B sales (and that they may need to be approved by multiple people). It uses a price engine to accommodate fluctuating prices (even within the same corporations). It recognizes permissions vary from user to user, that competitive bids are often part of the process and workflows may be required. 

"B2C ecommerce is pretty simple. B2B ecommerce becomes very complicated, very fast," Kutner said.

Oro was co-founded Kutner and two other Magento alumni, Jary Carter, the company's former Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Channel, and Dima Soroka, its former lead architect. They said they created the company because there was no existing B2B ecommerce solution that addressed customers' needs.

'A Hole in the Market'

“If you tried to modify B2C ecommerce software for B2B, it either cost too much, required an almost complete rewrite or it became so complex that users would refuse to use it," said Kutner. With open source options like Magento, "we would have had to fork it. A bad idea." 

"There was a hole in the market."

Kutner acknowledged there were a few vendors in the market before the Great Recession, but said they pivoted to B2C during the financial crisis. Another option, CloudCraze, sits on Salesforce, so its addressable market may be limited. SAP Hybris is also a player, but like Magento, it works with B2C software, too.

OroCommerce is open source and, the founders said, architected to be flexible and customizable to minimize time to market and greater ROI.

B2B ecommerce is a potentially lucrative market: According to analysts at Frost & Sullivan, it is projected to reach $6.7 trillion by 2020 — double the size of the B2C marketplace.