Introduction
Meet Magento is a leading annual e-commerce conference event series organized in more than 40 countries, including the USA, Japan, Germany, Indonesia, Argentina, Mexico, Spain, UAE, etc. Meet Magento 2022 New York edition took place on September 23, 2022, at a most spectacular venue – Pier 60, overlooking the Hudson River in NY. The event had a special significance as it was back in person for the first time in three years. While the event had technical discussions around Magento, it also offered specific tracks focused on merchants and trending eCommerce practices. As usual, it was a fantastic opportunity to make new connections.
Meet Magento is a platform that sees the coming together of technology companies, individuals, retailers, and merchants active in digital commerce. The idea is to share the latest updates and insights on how Magento disrupts the e-commerce industry and leads change. It is an opportunity for industry leaders to share insights and expertise with the global eCommerce community. This was an opportunity for Magento practitioners and the developer’s community to meet the experts from Magento, Magento Community, Magento Contributors, Magento Authorized Trainers, Magento merchants, and global leaders from Magento Solutions, Enterprise, and Gold partners.
The event had over 40 speakers, 500 attendees, and 25 sponsors. The headline sponsors were Adobe, PayPal, and Vertex, while dotdigital was the platinum sponsor. McFadyen Digital participated at the event and was represented by Umapathy Gandhi, SVP, Global Delivery at McFadyen Digital, Manuel Rosario & Abhilash Vijayan.
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Some of the Noteworthy Sessions
There were super engaging sessions throughout the day long event, and we will be focusing on just a few key ones in the interest of time and space.
Welcome Note – Marsha Naidoo opened the event with a welcome note providing a glimpse of the fantastic speaker lineup at the event around eCommerce, innovation, delivery, marketing, and customer experience. Marsha has been a driving force in the Magento community for seven years, an active contributor to the Magento Association, and an international speaker. She is currently the Chief Business Officer at Krish USA.
Opening Keynote – The opening keynote topic was “Optimizing payments for a Stronger eCommerce Brand.” Adobe’s Ritesh Somani and PayPal’s Mudita Tiwari examined the payments landscape in eCommerce and weighed its past, present, and future. They also discussed the evolution and state of the Adobe and PayPal partnership while emphasizing the importance of ensuring efficiency and growth of payments in the eCommerce space.
The sessions were divided into three categories – business, technical, and solutions.
Fahd Siddiqui, currently serving as the Director of Engineering at Adobe, covered “Intelligent Commerce Experiences – Adobe Commerce’s Journey towards personalization at scale.” At Adobe, Fahd leads teams responsible for delivering Intelligent Commerce solutions, such as Live Search and Product Recommendations. His session focused on how Adobe provides intelligent commerce solutions as multi-tenant SaaS services while retaining extensibility via API Mesh. It further explored how the data and AI-driven shopping experience address the scale and performance demands of B2B and enterprise customers of Adobe Commerce.
Nathan Smith, Engineering Manager at Adobe, covered “Keeping Core Secure.” This delved into measures Abode takes to keep Magento secure and provided an overview of the comprehensive approach they take to prevent vulnerabilities. The session also discussed topics like Magento’s historical vulnerability trends, vulnerability response, escalation handling procedures, upcoming release strategy changes, and more. Very topical and insightful session indeed.
The session “How Augmented Reality Can Enhance the Consumer Experience” by Sofia Aranha, Solutions Consultant at Adobe, provided an overview of a recent study done by Adobe Commerce on consumer sentiment. It highlighted the importance of using innovative technology, specifically Augmented Reality (AR), to enhance e-commerce business. This was further showcased through a demo of a top-tier e-commerce experience leveraging AR.
Vijay Golani, Solution Architect and Magento Master spoke on “How improving your web vitals will increase your ROI.” It provided an overview of the Google Lighthouse. It covered areas to improve, Frontend, Third-Party pixels, Middleware, Backend, and tools to access performance. Examples and practical solutions further supported this. Vijay is a Co-Founder and Solution Architect at Evrig and worldwide Adobe Commerce Technical and Business Instructor for Adobe Digital Learning Services. He was helped in this session by Brent Peterson, a seasoned Solution Specialist on the Adobe Commerce Platform. Brent hosts a podcast called Talk Commerce that draws stories from merchants, marketers, and entrepreneurs who share their experiences in the trenches on what platform is best for their specific needs.
One of the exciting sessions at the show was from Maksym Novik at vConnect. Makysm is Magento Developer, currently a Development Tech Lead at vConnect agency. In his “Which Magento Frontend to Choose” session, he compared the most popular Magento frontends, such as Luma, Vue Storefront, Hyva Themes, and Magento PWA Studio. The comparison was made across criteria like the complexity of development, supportability, upgradability, google page speed and lighthouse scores, 3rd party extension support, etc.
One of the most extensive and exciting panel discussions was on “How Modern & Flexible Infrastructure Improves eCommerce Outcomes.” The participants of this panel included Jorge Gonzalez, Director of Development at Turning Point Brands, Joseph Maxwell, President at SwiftOtter, Denis Zlatov, Co-founder and Customer Success Officer at JetRails, Rob Walls, IT Manager at Zanders Sporting Goods, Robert Rand, Director of Partnerships & Alliances at JetRails, Sushanth Mangalore, Solutions Architect at AWS. This panel emphasized how why infrastructure is the backbone of any eCommerce website and how to leverage it for flexibility and scalability. The panel discussed some of the real-world hosting challenges they faced as merchants. The infrastructure experts in the panel provided some real insights that helped merchants remove pain points and optimize their hosting costs.
Panel Discussion –Running Magento in the Age of SaaS had a panel of eCommerce veterans discussing the dynamics of operating digital commerce business on Magento while navigating the current SaaS landscape. The panel also addressed the advantages and challenges of running a flexible open-source platform. This was a highly educative panel discussion, and the panelists included Matt Serwin of Klaviyo, Mike Byrnes of Bolt, Robert Rand of JetRails, and moderator Brandon Urich of Rightpoint.
Alex Teller, CEO at Home Perfect, presented a business case study on “Running a 250,000 SKU Catalog on Magento.” His session covered how Magento’s flexibility came in handy when selling 200 brands and dozens of different product types and categories. He stressed how selling home fixtures online is an unforgiving and never-ending battle where you compete with Amazon’s and Home Depot’s of the world daily. His session articulated very well how Magento’s evolving capabilities helped them maintain their catalog management, control marketing budgets, and service customers.
The session “Defining the blueprint for PWA Studio projects” by Chris Brabender, Director, Adobe Practice at Valtech, delved into how to set up and build a PWA Studio project. Chris presented a blueprint that showed developers’ best practice implementation strategies. It covered areas such as – how to start a project, how to structure your development, how to build out extensions, and how to handle upgrades. Lead architects vet the unique approach to PWA Studio development presented by Chris within Adobe and multiple client implementations to ensure reliability and robustness. The session also showcased how Chris and his team are solving the multi-site / multi-brand problem with PWA Studio.
Summing it Up
It was yet another learning-filled Meet Magento event with expert speakers, insightful discussions, and notable attendees. We couldn’t be happier that it’s back in person after three years. We learned a lot over this one-day event and made many new friends. One year is a long time in this ever-evolving commerce world, but we are already looking forward to the following year’s event. If you missed the event and want to know more about digital commerce trends that can help you scale your business in 2022? Connect now!