2019 Meet Magento New York Conference a Merchant’s Perspective

September of 2019 Pueblo Tech’s owner Ryan Ehlers embarks on his first journey to the Big Apple headed towards Meet Magento New York City. Some of the questions you may ask if you have never been to a Magento conference is, what can I learn there?  How can this help me build a better eCommerce cart? Is it worth your time and investment?  As a co-speaker representing our largest merchant Vapor Source Inc. we can say yes, yes, and yes! Artem Pugachev’s Magento agency MOBECLS invited Ryan to speak on Vapor Source’s behalf and it was the best experience of his career path helping to drive the direction of Pueblo Tech and its involvement in omni-channel web based solutions. Some of the more interesting topics were subjects such as headless Magento integrations, the future and reasoning for PWA technologies, and the reason why these kinds of platforms are going to quickly become the industry standard.  With google working tightly with PWA architecture the Magento ecosystem can be rest assured that the reasoning behind PWA architecture is being developed from real world experiences. 

Does it create a pain or added cost for the early adopters of Magento 2.2 and below?  The simple answer is yes, but the more detailed answer is that the future of the architecture after 2.3 was released should remain relatively the same for a while and have some added benefits to easily build front end experiences quickly for your customers giving developers the advantage over your competitors. It’s our understanding that search engine crawlers will recognize this integration and have the possibility to help rank your pages above others without such integrations.

Pueblo Tech, LLC would like to give a special thanks to the hosts of Magento NY 2019, Mage Mojo, and all the sponsors / organizers. The conference speeches were all very entertaining. It’s a lot of fun to mingle with like minded people that understand and speak the same technology related language.  So first, let’s start off with day number one, Wednesday, the PWA meet hosted by DotDigital, this is the first time I’ve ever been in what’s considered a tech studio suite. Ryan can admit at first the atmosphere seemed a little intimidating for someone attending for the first time from an outsiders perspective but found out very soon how everyone is receptive to your specific niche as we’re all there for the same reason, to continue education and understanding of the way forward in Magento eCommerce so the community can make better decisions as developers, agencies, marketers, and merchants.  One of the keynote speakers that really stood out to us was Contentful’s Shy Ruparel.  As someone who has experienced many aspects of Magento from its infancy and wearing many hats Ryan understands the power behind such tools. Sure, Magento’s later releases have built in page creation tools but independent software created by people with a desire to make Magento even better is what the ecosystem is all about.  We all know the entire Magento community can use these kinds of tools to their advantage and how these tools can enable your merchants to empower their pages with rich SEO information easily and effectively.  The core concept behind such tools is creating unique and interesting pages utilizing all the media and embedded materials you can while also presenting these pages in a mobile friendly format while delivering them at lightning fast speeds. Oh, and did we mention that this can save your merchant money by allowing the product manager to do this all on their own with a little bit of training?

 Please keep in mind this article is written by an IT integrations partner of a merchant with limited knowledge in development and is meant mostly for merchants. The goal behind this article is to get more merchants to rally around the ecosystem family and understand their contributions are necessary for the evolution of Magento’s core package.  Magento’s developers, agencies, and partners, need merchants voices just as much as the core developers and agencies. Merchants are the people working inside of the platform on a daily basis.  The more the ecosystem understands real world use cases and the more merchants share their stories the better developers and agencies can understand what the priority for us is. This also helps Magento’s core team decide what kind of features we need to consider included as standard piece of software packaged natively inside the base code of Magento. It’s become obvious that some other platforms have differentiated themselves with robust tools which are quickly becoming the desired standard. More and more we find ourselves after using the software is saying “Why isn’t this already included in the core package”. So, this is a call to all the merchants out there who may not understand or can’t reason with why they would want to spend the time and effort or money to send staff to represent their business as an eCommerce merchant. The answer is simple really, by engaging with the community face to face we can understand each other and relate to each other on a human level. Forums and articles are a great resource but there is no comparison when sharing or learning in a face to face setting.

So what are we doing here? What did Pueblo Tech find? While we can’t share individual experiences with others, we can share the core foundation of our findings which in our humblest opinion is outlined in the list below:

1. Magento is still easily the #1 solution for those who need customization and a large inventory set.
2. Importing from other systems into Magento is becoming more common place and better paths to achieve it.
3. Magento core network of developers and the commitment to it is stronger than ever.
4. Magento is at the forefront of future technology for mobile platforms
5. Magento is the place to be no matter what your status of the technology providing services you control for eCommerce.
6. Magento has the biggest and most robust marketing agencies support system.
7. Merchants needing specific requirements which are selling regulated products will find Magento as the #1 solution as its eco-system of developers are working very closely together to achieve some of the same goals. It’s truly a family and they do not mind sharing their successes with others.

Thanks for reading. Questions or requests for revisions can be sent to info@pueblotech.com