Magento Imagine 2017 Conference – Day 2 Highlights

Magento Imagine 2017 General Session

While Mark Lavelle did not make any earth-shattering announcements, he did lay out the business case for commitment to Magento with a couple of key points:

• Injection of capital - he’s had a lot of money to spend
• Strategic investments and acquisitions
• Launching new services - Magento’s cloud hosting for Enterprise customers, Business Insights and other services

Some developers complain that the investments Magento has made in new services favor Enterprise-level clients and serve only to enrich Magento corporate at the expense of the community.

Certainly, my ‘off the record’ conversations with Magento folks show that they are aware that some decisions have damaged the trust of the developer community. Lavelle even alluded to ‘growing pains’ and ‘extraordinary efforts’ by developers to get up to speed on Magento 2.

I take a slightly different point of view. I want Magento to make a lot of money. A healthy Magento corporation is essential to a healthy community. The community really needs to realize that it needs Magento… and should show some confidence in them. Magento corporate also needs to show the community it is valued and invest in their success. Certainly, we’ve seen some evidence (like the security evaluation tool available in beta to developers) of that.

Overall, I think the Magento folks are working hard to convince the community and their client base that:

• We are healthy
• We are dedicated to understanding and supporting community
• We are preparing for upcoming trends

IMHO - Magento is still the best game in town for most merchants.

Laundry List

You can tell a lot about what is going on in an industry from the topics and buzzwords. There’s too much to go into here, but, here are some quick highlights:

• Emergence of mobile wallets and payment options. Make sure your payment options match your customer base… there’s no reason not to.
• Headless development. Great insight into Quicken using Drupal as a front end and Magento 2 EE as a back end and connecting via APIs.
• User Generated Content. If you want to build community on your website, this is now a given and the technology can be easily acquired and implemented.
• Reducing friction. Razoyo clients look out for us to hit you up about Addressy!
• Customer journey vs the funnel. This is not really a new way about thinking about customers, but, it does have consequences and seems to be gaining speed.
• The cloud. Everything should be in the cloud an accessible via API.

Reminders of things you should be doing already

• Test your changes before rolling them out
• All HTTPS
• Site monitoring
• Speed test and improve
• Use caching or CDN for speed
• Responsive design
• Rich snippets