There Is No Best Platform with Yurii Kuzminov of Axceleris
I sat down with Yurii Kuzminov on day one of Shoptalk Fall in Nashville. Yurii is the CEO and founder of Axceleris, an agency that started in Magento more than sixteen years ago and now partners with both Adobe and Shopify, and before that he co-founded GoMage.
Networking Over Sessions
I asked what he hoped to learn at the show. He said the sessions are not why he comes.
“I came here mostly for the networking rather than learning. For me it’s like networking at such events it’s a gold,” he says.
He watches the session recordings later, in the time other people give to Netflix, and spends the show itself in as many meetings with merchants and partners as he can fit, because that is the rare chance to get so many people from the industry in one room.
Sixteen Years in Magento and the Hard Call on Shopify
Axceleris began in Magento, and Yurii still goes to almost every Meet Magento event in the world. The agency added Shopify anyway, and he did not pretend that was easy.
“It was like a bit hard decision to make at some point to kind of start working with Shopify because we were like kind of against Shopify at some point,” he says.
The platform kept growing until it was mature enough for the size of client his team works with, so it stopped being the place a startup tests an idea before migrating to Magento. He sees the reverse now, with businesses moving from Magento to Shopify.
“In many cases especially for like straightforward D2C stores it’s like no-brainer because they don’t utilize all the possibilities of Magento and at the same time they are paying premium for like keeping such a custom system and for the maintenance, updates, etc.,” he says.
Who Iterates Faster Wins
The gain he sees in that migration is speed, a marketing team that makes its own changes and runs its own tests without adding developers to the equation.
“The brands, retailers, you know, like whatever who iterate faster, who gather feedback from the client faster and implement that feedback faster on the website, they win, right? The competition,” he says.
AI Gave Magento a Second Breath
I told Yurii I can build and deploy a Magento store in under an hour now if the AWS wiring is already there, and asked whether AI is leveling the field. He agreed for small and simple builds, and drew the line at the big ones, catalogs with hundreds of thousands of products, hundreds of configurable attributes, and PIM and ERP integrations, where AI gets tricky and his team earns its keep. Every developer at Axceleris uses AI daily, including for testing.
“We as agency we need to, you know, bring as much value as possible within one working hour, you know, paid by the customer, right?” he says.
He thinks AI has done Magento a favor.
“If AI would not progress that fast, I think it would be like even bigger decline for Magento popularity. Right now it has like a bit of like a second breeze, second life, you know, because AI makes things a bit more simple, faster,” he says.
At an agency round table in London, he heard about one shop that moved a Magento site to Hyvä with AI and vibe coding doing ninety five to ninety eight percent of the work, and developers the last two to five percent. I told him about Mark Shust, who plans the work and then sends a group of agents off to build Magento extensions.
There Is No Best Platform
Shopify is not the best at everything, and neither is Adobe, so I asked how he advises a client on where to go.
“It’s like there is no best platform on the market. You know, every platform has its own pros and cons,” he says.
Some D2C merchants still belong on Magento. His recommendation comes from the merchant’s business, the facts, the calculations and the outcome each platform can deliver, compared on total cost of ownership, speed of change, how fast it can be customized, and conversion rate. He is blunt about why a single-platform agency cannot do that.
“If it’s like Shopify agency it will tell you that you know Shopify is the best for everything. If it’s Magento agency they will tell you the opposite, you know, no you have to own the code, the code should be open source, etcetera. You know like every agency will have its own kind of arguments and all those arguments will be true, right?” he says.
Shop Pay on Any Platform
The week before the show, Shopify opened Shop Pay to other platforms, which means it can now sit on a Magento store. Yurii thinks that matters most for D2C merchants who allow guest checkout.
“According to the Shopify benchmarks, it’s like fifty percent conversion rate increase if you’re using Shop Pay instead of just the guest checkout because there are like two hundred fifty million of users of the Shop Pay already,” he says.
AI Slop With a Person in the Loop
We heard the phrase AI slop all over the conference, so I asked for his take. He sees the fully generated LinkedIn videos and posts and is not against the tool, as long as a person sits in the circle.
“If I’m you know using my ideas, my experience and feed it to AI, you know, just providing just you know, AI will provide me with structured piece of text based on that, you know, it will still be my ideas, my insights, etc., my experience. You know, why not use AI for that,” he says.
Hot Take
It was only the middle of day one, so Yurii held his hot take. He had flown in from Groceryshop in Las Vegas, a show built like Shoptalk around one industry, and with grocery clients on the books he wanted both.
Axceleris is at axceleris.com, and Yurii is on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/yurii-kuzminov.