Full transcript of YouTube episode of Shaping Commerce in which we talk with Ben Marks, Global Community Director of the Magento Association and a key figure at the PHP Foundation. As a long-time advocate for the global developer community, Ben shares a professional perspective on why technology is shifting from "low-level programming" to a focus on "ideation" and what this means for the survival of digital agencies.
Premiered May 26, 2026 IronPlane eCommerce Development
Kuba Zwoliński (Snowdog): Great. Long time. Are you at home?
Ben Marks (Global Community Director, Magento Association): Yeah, I'm at home.
Kuba Zwoliński: Okay, good. So, I'm happy that you made it for this time. It was like a pretty short notice, so I couldn't get you to Poland, but at least I can have you here.
Ben Marks: Yeah. Well, my schedule as it turns out is kind of open these days.
Kuba Zwoliński: How was Philippines?
Ben Marks: Philippines was cool. Yeah, we did a couple weeks in Thailand before that and I think actually it was a little bit too long. We haven't – you know – we're not used to our long trips like we used to do. But the conference was good – a solid like 200 people. There were a lot of really inspiring entrepreneurial stories there because, basically I mean, it really is a poor – it's a poor country. It's weird to say that because when you're in Philippines it's just, you know, highrises everywhere, but you know there are basically Brazilian style favllas next to the airport – you know, total slums. And you know there just – I don't know that there's a lot of mobility there. So basically you know anyone working in tech or you know anyone being an entrepreneur in the white collar sense is – they're potentially changing the course of their – not just themselves, but their family. So, the entrepreneurial force is really strong there.
Kuba Zwoliński: Yeah. Like you have to do something just to survive. So you build business.
Ben Marks: Yep.
Kuba Zwoliński: That's something I noticed at Meet Magento Poland – that I think it's really time that Meet Magento is a tech conference again – we don't try to make it a business conference. It's like we started what is a great space for developers, project managers – all people who really understand the technology and want to even know it better. So that was good for Meet Magento Poland, for sure – that people felt it's consistent. They have a good lineup on stage – you know everyone was more or less interested – we had a full room. Do you see the same in Philippines or other events when you started attending them again?
Ben Marks: Yeah, I mean, I was in New York, yeah New York, and then Philippines. It was, you know....
Kuba Zwoliński: I know how it was. So maybe let's stay with Philippines. You will come back to those events like from your perspective right now at PHP – do you think it makes sense for you in this new position or do you think that Magento is an important pillar for PHP?
Ben Marks: Well, I think I treat the two streams separately. So, my involvement with PHP Foundation came around because I started – I think I'd reached out. I think I saw them calling for funding. This was over a year ago. I was actually at the Web Engineering Unconference in Mallorca and had this conversation with Roman, who's been the executive director since PHP Foundation was founded about four years ago, and he's stepping down so he's going to be gone in I think Q1 of 2026. But I was just like, hey, you know, like how do you guys do funding because it's pretty – it's a remarkable number that you guys achieve every year. But I see, you know, big players coming in. You know, WordPress automatically throws in a ton of money. Laravel, Symphony, Jet Brains – it’s not only the money, but also has kind of created the space for Roman to be able to have this role. And so really, Jet Brains is I think the lynch pin, you know, the key – it has been the key sponsor and facilitator there. But I was like, "How are you guys doing this? How do you guys do the funding?" And they're like, "Well, you know, the funding basically – it comes in.”
Kuba Zwoliński: It keeps coming.
Ben Marks: “We just kind of ask people.” I mean, I'm abbreviating it a little bit. It's not like they're just sort of sitting there on their hands waiting for the money to come in. But they've had really good institutional sponsorship just without having to have a formal sponsorship – what I would think of as a formal nonprofit sort of sales cycle and tooling and everything else. And after we struggled to get sponsorship for Magento Association when that was spun up in 2018, I was like, “Well, this is really critical stuff. This is critical technology for the modern information age because so much content exists and is available because PHP is there. So, it seems like we really should have a formal process.”
Also, I kind of had this feeling that the economy was – the economy is not always going to just keep rising and there's always going to be this goodwill and money available. So, I really wanted to make sure that the PHP Foundation was set up to do proper fundraising and implement proper tooling and that's what I've been working on slowly. It took us really a long time from the announcement to really get to a point where this is all coming together. Now I bring that up, you know, in the context of the question that you asked because I think that's its own thing.
But a similar kind of issue is that Magento is still very important to me and I want to spend time there. Now, for me to go to events in faroff places, I can't subsidize that myself. Like I said, I mean, I haven't had a paycheck since May, you know, and my savings only goes so far. So basically, I have to have some help to be able to get to these events, but I do want....
Kuba Zwoliński: Now we have to build a fund just to bring the legend back!
Ben Marks: To get Ben back in the air! No, I mean it's a fun joke, but you know, speaking a little more realistically, it is important to make sure that the administration, the funding, but also just the cultural interest remains and is supported and can evolve also as time goes on.
So I'd like to – I have been interested and I had a lot of conversations at Meet Magento New York and a bit asynchronously or offline before and after about how we see the future of Magento working – what is the relationship with Adobe? We know what it has been, we kind of know what it is now, and Adobe’s there.
They have – I think the current status quo with Magento Association is Adobe will match whatever funds the Association can raise, which is I think appropriate for Adobe but it certainly does also send a message. But I think it's appropriate for where their head is at. But I'm of the opinion that – well I've had conversations this year with Ganty and with Lonnie Stark over at Adobe. You've got incredibly bright people who have their remit. And it's not really clear to me how Magento fits into that.
I think Magento is interesting to Adobe for two reasons, would be my guess, right? One, they paid $1.7 billion for the Magento brand, right?
Kuba Zwoliński: That is a good point.
Ben Marks: That is a piece – that is a real cost to a brand asset that, you know, what do they do with that? They can't just hand it out and say okay well we're done with this, right? Because someone has to be responsible for that decision and someone has to say well you know keeping this brand in our stable is costing us something. Well it's not costing them anything at all. In fact it makes them a lot of money. There's still – just chatting with people who are in the know about volume that is still driven by Magento 1, Magento 2, and how some of that volume is still monetized, especially through payments like especially through PayPal – there are tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars every year that is just basically passive income.
I would love to see the status quo evolve, but I think it's entirely in Adobe's hands. I think the community could probably organize itself well and give Adobe a narrative, you know, basically stake out its ideological and sort of actual like actionable position and have Adobe interact with that position, and I have no idea what that position is. I have no idea what, you know, how Adobe would respond, both immediately and then over time. I do think that Magento belongs – has always belonged to the community even with Adobe taking on the community enablement machinery which was myself and Sherry, community engineering from like 2018 up through 2021-22.
But I think it's really the Magento ecosystem has managed to organize itself and thrive in ways that I would not have had not really predicted, and especially around Hyvä and the fact that Hyvä is now generally available for everyone, you know, free of charge.
Kuba Zwoliński: That was a very smart move, I think – that they opened it. It creates completely new opportunities and I have to agree that Hyvä, even if it's a commercial product, it brought this important spark. But maybe that's also because it is commercial, because the community itself is a bunch of passionate people but it's always important to have some business. And Hyvä Commerce is kind of like, you know, Magento in the early stages, just using the same narrative and I like it. Because for me, running for years a business for a mid-market, I can see that as much as I like Adobe, Adobe is drifting away from mid-market. It's definitely – so this is a different product right now. They built a great add-on to the Experience Manager, but even if it shares some technologies it's a different product.
I'm super happy that I can see that interest in Magento Open Source is growing again. Two years ago, I thought that we were on a decreasing path, but right now I'm happy that I stayed with Magento because I can see again merchants asking for open source solutions and asking for Magento because, you know, many different things – SaaS is becoming expensive, open source is way cheaper than it used to be. So it's interesting to see that.
Ben Marks: I think there are some existential threats. So I agree – everything you just said I agree with. But I was just looking today at Shopify Editions – I mean, Shopify historically – they haven't been able to move nearly as quickly as we've been able to move in the open source world, and with good reason. I mean, when they do something, they are doing it for millions of their customers, which form a pretty broad swath. But, when Shopify does something they move the entire market. I mean I think back to when they said, “Hey, you know if you're a technology partner in the space, your first million in revenue is yours.” That really put a lot of pressure on the app store models that everyone else was using and I think they do lead by example. They are absolutely a worthy competitor, a worthy component in the whole e-commerce platform marketplace. But looking at additions today, we are – like, this is holy shit!
Kuba Zwoliński: I saw your post on LinkedIn about Sidekick.
Ben Marks: So, Sidekick is a perfect example of what I was talking about. They announced – when I was at Shopware, I mean, Chat GPT comes out – that was I think ‘22 – that was October of ‘22 Chat GPT drops and of course this is an epochal moment. Our leadership budget meeting that we had in Germany a little over a month later – we show up and I'm ready to fight, you know, do my budget ass everything. They're like, "No, budget settled. We're, you know, it's just AI. We're going big on AI." Okay.
And then in May of ‘23, Shopware was the first platform to release a generative AI operations features. So, this is all like backend stuff. There were a couple things that could be – that would change the experience for frontend, but largely these were just like helping admins do admin stuff.
Kuba Zwoliński: Better automation, yeah, just smarter automation.
Ben Marks: Yeah. Like make imports-exports not suck so much, you know, use natural language to do things. I mean, just make things a little bit easier, right? So this was not like hype stuff. This was actual real functionality. And then, of course, shortly thereafter Shopify announces Sidekick and I was one of a few people who was like, "Yeah, don't wring your hands over this. This is not a big deal. They're not going to do anything with this for a long time.” And that just stayed in beta until like last year, I think.
But you know the thing is again, once they have enough time – and now I think Shopify have really leveled up their development – they are all using AI internally. They are moving more quickly. So, Shopify is just a better and stronger competitor every single day. And you look at this update – now, what they've really done is they've taken Sidekick and it is fully integrated, fully operational, like the Death Star. It is able to do workflows. It's able to build apps like, "Hey, I need an app that does this." That is shocking.
But what really blew my hair back, from the community evangelist hat that I wear, was that they were smart enough to say, "Whoa, not only will we let our merchants use Sidekick to do this stuff, they can then share these little mini apps with each other." That's exactly how you make this sticky. This is really how you make your ecosystem sticky. You make them all friends with each other. I mean it's kind of an open sourcey – a sort of open source community move to be like, “Hey, you guys build this thing and you share it with each other.”
Kuba Zwoliński: Yeah, and it's less technical. Like, you can engage more small merchants who are personally involved in their stores. They can play with it and they can really merge or blend business and technology with that. That really interesting – that kind of – you know, I was always a big fan of the idea that open source is the best material for AI because it's documented, it's free to use. But what they invented – how they do it – oh, that's kind of disturbing in my point of view. It’s making it different.
Ben Marks: And they've got, you know, not only all the transactional data, but they have full insight into how the merchant’s customers are interacting. They have full insight into what the merchants themselves are doing. They have this really data-rich perspective on everything. And that is an existential sort of reality – when you start being something other than that, right?
Now, I do think – and I called this out on my LinkedIn post and this is really driven off of something that Mark Slocock from GPMD – he did a brilliant post on this as well. He does rightfully call out that there wasn't much in this “edition of editions” for B2B. And I kind of extrapolate from that – I say, look, you know, you’ve got B2B, and I think you do have really complex Shopify Plus builds that have, you know, real deep integrations, real deep customizations. Agencies working in that space are going to be – you know, they'll still have business, they'll still be able to eat. But I do think this really will start to eat into billable hours because the store operators can do a lot of the stuff that normally they've had to rely on agencies to do. And that trend will continue.
Now, this is I think what people have talked about. What does the future look like? What does development look like in 10 years? You have people prognosticating saying the underlying language won't even matter – things don't matter.
Kuba Zwoliński: Exactly. Do we need one language with all the agentic approach? It's not relevant. It’s more how you build your prompts, how you create a task to build something, less about the tools. It's like we moved from the really low level programming to the higher one and then....
Ben Marks: So this is a fully – I mean, they've built the sort of – the ideation, the infrastructure, and then you know like the integration, the sharing with the ecosystem. I mean, it is the full package. This is a bit of what the future looks like and I think it's an existential threat for small – if you're working with small businesses as a Shopify agency, I think the clock officially started ticking on you needing to do the next thing. And I'm not saying that to fearmonger. I'm saying that because there were agencies, you know, just before – when we had during [Zerp?], we had zero interest. The smart agencies saw some of the writing on the wall. This was even before generative AI came out. But they saw that like we're getting to kind of the tail end of – like, we've extracted all the resources from the hills, so I'm going to sell my agency. I'm going to get out. We're going to consolidate. We're going to become a bigger agency.
But there were a lot of agencies that didn't figure that out. There were a lot of agencies that didn't figure out that their business model that they had that allowed them to succeed during Magento 1 did not translate into Magento 2. So, I've taken it as a personal mission because I have a little bit of culpability there, you know, to warn agencies like “Get out now. You need to start making your transition, whether that's transitioning to a different industry, transitioning your ICP, going up market, whatever the case is – you got to figure that out now.”
Kuba Zwoliński: Yeah, like I was there. You know, it took us two years to rebuild our mindset, how we just, you know, change Snowdog, that we adapt. And it's interesting, yeah – how it all evolved, but it shows also how business requires us to adapt and don't think that we will be in the bubble forever.
Ben Marks: And honestly, Snowdog's a really good example because you all were very involved. I mean, you were involved in the training and certifications that we built, you were involved in contributing to the core. You weren't some just distal agency just kind of like disconnected from the “on the ground” “in the core” realities of what was happening there. So it's just really easy to – it's a kind of complacency, I guess. It's just really easy to be focused on doing your business and ignore some of these broader, you know, meta level trends that are really going to change how the market even works and how the businesses work.
But I think Shopify, again, has really – looking back, this will be seen as a monumental shift in just the nature of how merchants think of their platform. Because actually, if you think about it another way, the ability to customize your system, you know, hand-in-hand working with an agency – this was always the specialty of open source, right? And now, this is a reality for Shopify merchants but they don't even need an agency to do it. I mean, that is . . . that is . . . that's a moment.
Kuba Zwoliński: Yeah, it is. Like, for a moment – it was like two years ago – I thought, “Wow, it's time to let go of Magento, go all BigCommerce, Shopify, or commercetools.” We were playing with many different tools on the market. Right now, it's a little bit more steady or stable. Shopify – of course it's growing and dominating but it also – this is a big advantage and big threat for them because they are so big and everyone is on Shopify. So a lot of merchants are actually looking for an alternative because they don't – like, not everyone – merchants need to be on Amazon but it doesn't mean that they all want to be on Amazon for many different reasons, and that may be the same with Shopify. So that may be also the reason why Magento is becoming popular again.
Ben Marks: Well, I think at the end of the day there are – from a platform perspective, what Magento achieved just in general was pretty remarkable. Being able to serve, being suitable, generally with the help of agencies – being able to work for so many verticals, so many geographies, even different business models, the fact that the Magento 1 was like a top 50 internet retailer B2B platform without even native B2B functionality – it was and is an incredibly adaptive application and it is really hard to deliver that with a SaaS. But they – you know, Shopify – I've always maintained could be a false dichotomy or – I've always liked to put this into a continuum where you had consistency and reliability, lack of complexity but also limited flexibility and the [?] at one end....
Kuba Zwoliński: And then there's advantage for many that you just cannot do everything because if you can, you keep destroying a lot of things and make your life complicated.
Ben Marks: Over the years, I have recommended Shopify when I've had this question, you know, what should I use? I have recommended Shopify so many times or BigCommerce so many freaking times because like you just need to get up and running and your needs are not that complex and I don't think your needs are going to be that complex in the near future. So you can get going on this. You'll be up and running. You'll get far more benefit from being up and running and selling and delivering and figuring the shit out than you would by trying to build the perfect thing, you know, and predict what you might need. But that's the one end that TCO reliability, you know, but you're in a box and you're limited. And then at the other end, you have like completely bespoke software or your open source platforms and then everyone’s just trying to work towards the middle, right? They are basically trying to be reliable, flexible, TCO, you know, top-of-mind and easily calculable. But, yeah, we're really seeing, I think, Shopify getting that right. And over time, I can see that there will just be more and more space to customize and the things that merchants want to do, they can just literally use natural language, throw it at Sidekick, and it's going to work. But there will always be deep, deep, deep customization and the complexities of B2B.
[end of Part 1]