Special Episode: Hello Moxie eCommerce Edition with Ravi Mittal

In this episode of Hello Moxie, host Nicole Donnelly sits down with e-commerce expert Ravi Mittal to dive deep into the world of Magento.

Ever wondered what's happening behind the scenes of your favorite online shopping platforms? Ravi pulls back the curtain, sharing intimate insights about Magento's current landscape and the challenges facing developers and businesses.

We'll explore the fierce competition between Magento and rising stars like Shopify, uncovering the human stories behind the technology. Ravi breaks down the shift to subscription-based extensions, revealing how these changes impact small businesses and entrepreneurs.

But this isn't just a tech conversation! Ravi shares heartwarming stories of community collaboration, highlighting the power of connection in the e-commerce world. You'll hear about the passionate developers and business owners who are pushing boundaries and supporting each other.

From the struggles of adapting to new technologies to the triumphs of innovative problem-solving, this episode offers a deeply personal look at the human side of e-commerce. Whether you're a tech enthusiast or simply curious about the digital marketplace, you'll walk away feeling inspired and connected.

 

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Transcript

DMG Digital Support (00:00)
You're listening to the e-commerce edition of Hello Moxie with Nicole Donnelly. In each episode, we speak with leaders in the e-commerce industry on promoting diversity in the tech sector, the latest e-commerce trends, and how B2B brands can innovate through e-commerce. Hello Moxie is sponsored by DMG Digital, a woman-owned marketing consultancy dedicated to helping B2B companies create exceptional customer experiences. today is a very special episode for Hello Moxie.

I'm joined by my friend, Ravi Middle. And Ravi and I met when I keynoted at Meet Magento New York, little over, it's been a little over a year now. And Ravi has been a huge and wonderful support of diversity and women in e-commerce and tech. He invited me to speak at Meet Magento Florida last year, which was an incredible honor and a wonderful opportunity to share my experience specifically in B2B. And

I will be coming back to the conference in February to lead a B2B workshop and bring the podcast, Hello Moxie. We're going to be at the event. So it's going to be an incredible experience. And so I wanted to give Ravi a chance to share some of the new and latest that's happening within the Magento ecosystem. As you know, B2B e-commerce is constantly shifting and changing the marketplace. And of course that has created some changes within the Magento ecosystem, which is an e-commerce platform.

And so Ravi wanted to come on and share some of the things that's happening there, some of the innovation and the changes that he's looking to change within that space. So I wanted to have him come and share his thoughts there. And we also talk about the conference, what you can expect there, what you can look forward to. So if you are looking for a really innovative, fun, educational conference where you can really get to meet some really brilliant people.

highly recommend the Meet Magento Florida Conference. It's February 5th and 6th. And we wanted to drum up some excitement for that and just talk about the Magento ecosystem. So I hope you enjoy this special episode. And with yours truly and my dear friend Ravi, it's a great one. And if you can, come to Florida, I'll be there with bells on and we're gonna have a great time.

Hello and welcome to Hello Moxie. I am so delighted today to be joined by Ravi Mittal. Ravi is a dear friend of mine that I met several years ago at a lovely, lovely e-commerce conference, Meet Magento New York. And we've worked together in the Meet Magento community now for several years and he's just such a delight. I have this very vivid image of him dancing in Fort Lauderdale last year.

after the conference and he just so phenomenal, such a wonderful, wonderful man. So Ravi, I'm so excited to have you on the show today. Thank you for joining me. I'd love for you to tell our listeners a little bit about who you are and what your background is. Sure. And Nicole, I reciprocate the same sentiment. The first time I met you, you were a keynote at Meet Me in New York, right? And then you came and spoke at Meet Me in New Florida and since then we have been in.

Constant Touch or various things and initiatives. So thank you for having me. My name is Ravi Mittal. I run and operate two companies. started after I left my corporate job with IBM, I started Rave Digital, which is a full service e-commerce agency in 2008, nine. At that time, it was just me consulting under my company and it took the shape of whom we had first employed more like in 2009, 2010.

We pivoted into an e-commerce agency, purely e-commerce agency with Magento as core focus in around 2015 or 16. So for 10 years, we have been focused on Magento and Adobe Commerce platforms. In 2019, we acquired a Headworks, which is a four-time award-winning extension building company. At that time, they had Magento and Magento to extension. So we had approximately

140 products around 80 on M1 and 60 on Magento 2. So that happened in 2019. And since then I've been running and operating a Magento extension building company as well. Man, you're busy. You got a lot on your plate. Running the company and as you said, we are a host of Meet Magento Florida as well. that definitely keeps me playful for sure. Yeah. And I'm so excited to talk about Meet Magento Florida. Really excited to support that.

You've really, you've been in the e-commerce space for quite a while and have really been front and center to see how e-commerce has evolved from when it first began, which is really incredible that you have that historical perspective to really see and be part of that evolution of what e-commerce looks like. And so I'd love to hear from you. What have you seen that's changed so much? What does the ecosystem look like now for Magento?

compared to some of the other platforms and just at large, what are you seeing in the space? And what are you seeing that's becoming really important or maybe kind of important for e-commerce agencies and merchants really to be thinking about? Yeah, for sure. mean, just a quick note that I first, know, when I came here as a programmer, right? So my first website or site gig that I did is I launched an e-commerce site in 2003.

I'm always commerce and I quoted it myself. So my friend of ender with the commerce and e-commerce online commerce has been much longer than I've been running an e-commerce agency, you know. So I've seen this ecosystem evolve change and how platforms have gone up and down and stuff like that. and that's what we're going to talk about right now. in Magento ecosystem, if you,

Think about it, it was one of the most popular e-commerce platforms. In the data from BeltWit and those kinds of websites, you could go over there, how many merchants are there on Magento, open source commerce, United States globally. You would see that the numbers were completely dominant by Magento as a platform. It had, during Magento one times, if I remember it right, it had around 5,000 extensions on the marketplace. Now on Magento two,

I believe there are 3000 extensions on the marketplace. So an ecosystem can be assessed in terms of where it is going by the community that is behind it. And what are those leading indicators of that community behind it is how many devs are excited about it? Are the number of devs increasing? If you go to Indeed and you search for Magento programmer job, right? You see more job posting or those job postings are increasing. That means Magento is growing.

Right? So the job postings, number of devs, the number of definitely merchants and brands that are using Magento as a platform, is that increasing? Number of extensions, is that increasing as compared to other competitors like Shopify? Those are the parameters that define where the ecosystem is going. And unfortunately, the Magento ecosystem is shrinking. So if anything says otherwise, they're in denial.

I mean, so, and you cannot fix anything unless until you first acknowledge and you come at terms with it. So we have to be honest with ourselves that where are we going as a ecosystem, as a community? And it is definitely shrinking, which is definitely. Yeah. And why do you think that is? Why do you think that the open source, know, Magento is open source versus these SaaS, Shopify is, let's be honest, dominating the market, especially in the U.S. There's such an appetite for SaaS.

Yeah. You think that's what do you think is happening there? Where where is Magento kind of like gone wrong? And how do you see Magento and Shopify and BigCommerce and Spriker and Shopware and all these platforms playing together in the space? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's a loaded question, by the way, right? So there is parameters. There are things that Magento in the community is responsible for and there are things that is beyond our control. Right. So.

the things that are beyond our control is that, you know, when you come up with a managed e-commerce platform like Shopify or others, then it is easier to maintain. It is easier to manage when any system, it is Apple versus Google, it is Android versus iPhone. When the system is closed, then there are the user experience and the control on that system can be much more better as in case of iPhone. But when it is open source, can the experience of that particular product or platform

can be allows you to the architecture allows you to be just open and for people to really do things. It comes with the cost and comes with the price, right? So that merchants and brands are feeling the, you feeling that other platforms are easier to manage, maintain, they don't need a dev, they can focus on the main thing, keep maintaining the main thing. And that is one of the reasons that is beyond our kind of control, but I'm going to just focus on what we can do. So.

So Magento extensions are the key, we can say culprit, or we can say the instrument behind this community, right? So there are, there's Magento as a platform, and on top of it will be some of these add-ons, plugins, extensions, apps, whatever different system. And then there are tech vendors like, know, .digital for marketing automation, hosting providers are there, and tech solution like Vertex and one-step checkout like Gold Commerce.

All those people are there in the ecosystem, so they're tech vendors around it. But extensions are kind of sitting on top of Magento, and they impact that platform and their user experience and the ease or the pain associated with more, right? So they're very much attached to the hip, per se, you know, with Magento. So what happened in 2000 after M1 to M2 migrations were done, most of the people that migrated to M2,

the extension sales were not doing well because they were just one time sale. So we were selling these extensions or apps for $300 for open source and $600 for commerce. Let's, let's say as an example, right? And, and, they were one time on an average brand was using our extensions for seven to 10 years. And Magento Adobe will come up with a new release like in 2.1. I think they came up with like

crazy number like 15 version of it. So 15 times in a year, I have like eight engineers upgrading all of our 60 products, testing it and submitting again to the marketplace for approval. It's a lot of payroll plus the pandemic, the cost of doing business increase crazy. we were, there were times that we were making a loss of 20 to $40,000 a month on extension business. And something had to be done because if extension building companies can't make money,

then they would start building extension. They would start building other apps and other platforms, right? So something had to be done. So we introduced subscription in the extensions. So we reached out and as a community, we decided that, you know, it is only fair for us to get some money for all the maintenance and new versions and fixes that we do to our product. roughly in my example of $300, $600, roughly,

these extension providers, including a headworks, so I'm the culprit as well, would charge $150 as a yearly maintenance cost. And in case of commerce, which came at $600, it would be $300. So around 50 % of the cost would be charged for yearly maintenance. And with that, definitely we are now breaking even. We are not heavily profitable. Extensions are not very heavily profitable. But it definitely helped the bleeding.

And bleeding for us is bleeding for community, right? So it definitely helped the bleeding. was required, yes. And I mean, for customers, it really makes sense, honestly, that I can see why you would move to the subscription model, but it makes sense from the customer perspective because they need those extensions to be maintained and updated. And to be able to do that, it takes time and resources to manage that. So it's important. I mean, I think that change that you made was made with the customer in mind.

really says that you could continue to make sure that these extensions were performing well and secure and all of those things is so critical. So. Absolutely. Yeah. So where do you see, mean, so you changed to the subscription model and now that you see that Magento ecosystem is shrinking and that's the reality that, that, you know, you're facing and we're facing. What do you see as the next step? How do you see these extensions? What's the next phase of evolution for

I had works in for the extension marketplace in order to really serve Magento customers in the best way. So in the ecosystem, we are specifically talking about extension because they are the kind of cause of the pain point, I believe. So, right. Like if it's a SaaS solution, it is external to a platform. It is not that big of concern. There is not much maintenance and there's not speed optimization or performance that is related to.

those solutions. So we are specifically talking about extensions and these extensions are kind of small modules like I want reward point, I want gift card, I want one step checkout. So these are small modules that are necessary to amplify the functionality of the base platform with this Magento or Adobe commerce. But the subscription posed a new challenge in this market. The subscription on an average like

decent brand doing one, two, three mil in revenue, they'll have around 70 of these extensions. Okay. And they're from seven different vendors. So now we are having that same subscription for tea every household is having. I have a subscription to monitor subscription, which I forget to monitor. Now I'm left with one more subscription. know, don't even remember. What is this? What am I paying for? Yeah, absolutely. Right. So.

So now just imagine a brand, not even like, and I've seen instances, we do these kinds of audits like a couple of times in a week. look at the part of audit is extension analysis. So we are looking at like some of these guys, just a million dollar in revenue and having 150, 180, 200 extensions. So I'm talking about at the lower end, at the very bare minimum, I've seen like 70 extensions from at least seven different providers, right?

How can you keep up? Is it even fair or possible for a brand to be subjected to maintain 70 extension subscriptions? And then the way the DevOps work is they depend on these composers and access to that. So sometimes there are instances when we introduce subscription and the subscription is not active, then the build has failed. So there are all those challenges. But even if

There is the community understand that subscription is necessary for the extension building partner and companies to survive, right? It is required. Is it even possible for them to maintain 70 different extension employees come and go? It can be, some of them can be on Nicole's card and some of them can be on Ravi's card, right? And then it goes like, how do I even keep up with that? So that is a huge problem in the community right now that I don't think so we're talking about right now.

And it's not in my interest to get rid of subscription. And I'm not suggesting that, but there has to be something done to create the dent in the ecosystem so that we stop shrinking and start growing. That's why we are having this conversation. One more thing, if I may say, that has always bothered me since I've acquired Headworks is that we charge $300 for open source and $600 for commerce.

Vendors charge 2.5 times the cost or three times the cost of the open source. That means 750 to 9.0. The code is the same. 99.99 % of these extension have the same code, right? In Magento, commercial open source license works on different, that okay, you can get these sets of features as part of open source, comes free. It can afford to pay, but okay, we will give you this plus support plus AI search plus this.

And we will give you all of this thing at a paid or at a premium. So that is a premium model commercial open source model. In our case, we have no reason to charge separate prices depending on the version of margin. It is technically, if you think about in two terms, I said, I'm going to charge you $600 for the same thing that I'm charging $300. Why? Because you can pay more. That to me also is not very fair.

And I'm talking against my own business, but you know, it's to me as always bothered me. doesn't work. you know what I love about that Ravi is it just shows and this whole conversation just shows just your transparency and all of this, how much you really care about the customer experience. Absolutely. want to do right by the customer. And I really, that really comes through loud and clear. Yeah. It's a comes from a selfish place as well. Right.

I mean, you can say that for anything for the charity that you do. it makes you feel good. That's why I do it. So I'm just probably trying to be devil's advocate. But it comes from a selfish place of if this community keeps shrinking, it's not good for me as a business because my both the hands, my head is in magenta ecosystem. Right. So my selfish interest there is to create a dent in the ecosystem and stop it from shrinking. Right.

That's my selfish interest, yes, I do definitely. I'm at a place now that I've been here. I run two successful business and at some point in time you work for the greater good, right? So I definitely feel that I need to do a good job with the things that I'm doing my part in the community and the ecosystem. So I run an extension building company. So I can probably try and fix that. So we are making the subscription easier. So if we're going to talk about that, can briefly. Yeah.

Let's talk about that. Let's share about what you're changing now, what you've heard maybe from the community and the market that you feel like needs to change and what the next phase is for Headworks and for the Headworks extensions. So right now, as I said, there are sometimes definitely two different licensing prices, right? At times there three different licensing prices based on Magento. know, addition that you're using, open source, commerce, commerce cloud.

On top of it, after 30 days of support that you get when you buy the initializing of $300, there's a monthly or yearly subscription that you have to enroll into, right? As I said, so now that is 50 % of the cost of the product, roughly 50, 60%. So that is another different kind of amount for support and maintenance. It's just too complicated. Like, if you think it's just too much, right? Why can't we just simplify it and make it

$250 per year. $300 per year. That's it, right? why do we need to? And I would love to do $20 per month, right? In magenta ecosystem, that's not possible, but that will be the phase two of what I would propose as a change. Forget about, we talk about the licensing and it's not possible in open source and DRM and all those things that come in the way of this thing.

But the first thing we need to think about is from brand or customer perspective, right? That's what we say, customer first. All the companies like Salesforce have become great companies because of that mindset. Absolutely. If we first start in agreement as a community that subscriptions are too much, it's impossible for a brand to keep up with it. Then first thing we can begin with is easing this whole subscription model monthly. First, let's begin with yearly.

Right? Yearly, $250, $300 per year for no matter what edition that you're on. Because my product is same. I cannot in my heart and my mind, I can justify that I will charge two times or two and a half or three times more than what I charge other people. Right? That's just completely wrong to me. So that's what we are doing. We are launching simplified extension yearly licensing model.

The second thing that I'm hearing is people don't want the subscription, right? They don't want the subscription. So we are offering a five year, no subscription. Okay. Cost of 3.5, you know, times a licensing cost. So in that example, $300 open source extension at 1,050 will give you a five year license. So you don't need to worry about subscription now. Right. So now you have both the options.

In both of these cases, we anticipate that initially you may think that I will have a loss of revenue, right? Because I'm selling commerce at now 50 % discount, right? Which is going to be true, but I'm hopeful that with any good change like this, that the community itself will grow because of that ease of doing business. And then that would cover for that loss. That's my hope. That's my intent behind this.

So if we make those changes, it definitely would help. The next thing that we can do is there should be one bill right now. Every extension is on some credit card. So even if I buy a few of them together, there must be like, my credit card must be associated with multiple orders and multiple places that is difficult to keep up with. So we need to keep one bill. that is something that though I'm easing the way

We are doing licensing of the product, which is simple, $250, $300 a year. And I can introduce one bill for my product, but if you remember, I said that on an average, there are seven extension building companies in there. I cannot unify them. I cannot unify the billing for those other six companies. So me doing that unifying or having that one bill will not help, right? And that is where we would need the...

support from community, support from Adobe and Adobe can make the change for sure. Because all the extensions right now are sold on marketplace. All of these seven providers and others, they are listed on marketplace. That's a central place where people go and Adobe can make the change, can do one bill. Are they open to that? Is that something that they would consider or what other conversations been around that that you know of?

We will be talking about this. So we will have a roadmap conversation at Meet Me into Florida, where it's invite only. So some thought leaders from the community and people from Adobe will be coming together to talk about topics like this. This is not going to be the only topic, but this is my main agenda for next two months. This is what I think is the most important thing. this feature can be included in open source and

supporting PR and supporting change requests, supporting more features for open source. Yes, there can be a back and forth there, but to me, this is where we should begin with. We should begin with this change in the community and ecosystem, and that would have a huge impact. Yeah, I absolutely agree with you because the extensions, the marketplace is such a, my gosh, it's a critical part in terms of the ease.

of being able to build and manage and maintain your e-commerce store is how strong is that extension marketplace? How well maintained are those extensions? It really reduces the complexity in many ways. So, so important. But how do you find that balance for vendors? I know I'm kind of going a little bit off topic in terms of, obviously you don't want to have a store that's custom, everything's custom built, right? That just makes it crazy. So that's the reason why we have these extensions. It's so important because it reduces the...

complexity and the technical debt and all of those things. How do you recommend that people balance the number of extensions they may need, right? Versus custom building. Yeah. So I have from very recent audit, I've seen one customer where there were 37 marketplace extensions and there were some 60 sub three or custom modules, right?

which is completely skewed. one of the, it is not like, generally I'm saying for most of the instances, for most of the instances, the rule of thumb should be, we should leverage more marketplace extensions because they are maintained by the provider of the extension. And then we need to have as much solutions or extensions available, use them for marketplace. And it may not take you like, let's say 10 out of 10 there. It's not one shoe fit all.

But then you can always write a small custom add-on module to extend that extension. That is the first thing we should do. And then there are times that it is completely need for complete custom module. They will always be there, but they should be probably 20, 25 % of the marketplace extensions that you have. Yeah, you're absolutely right. There is always going to be a need for custom work, especially as we move more into the B2B. I mean, the B2B market is just...

projected to grow so much like three times B2C in the next 10 years. And so that just, I think, highlights, because of how complex B2B is in terms of transacting, how important it is going to be for the marketplace, the extensions to be really robust and well-maintained and that sort of a thing, but also balanced really well with custom modules at the same time. Absolutely. Absolutely.

when B2B wasn't possible like back in the day, would be phone or a mail order kind of thing, right? And now we are seeing that B2B, know, completely can be implemented online. have had one of most complex, you know, B2B implementations, we have done that. So the more modules are to come for B2B enablement, the less of customization would be needed for B2B implementation.

It is very important for us to keep growing the B2B and B2B space will grow even more. There's more room for growth in B2B space and B2C. And there's more need for work also from agency perspective, because no matter how many extension module you have, B2B is something that would require more customization than B2C, generic. But definitely we need to reduce that technical debt, as you said. Yeah, absolutely. Very good. Well, this is really exciting.

How do you see these pricing changes aligning with your broader vision for growing the Magento community and supporting customers? Like, how do you see, like, if you look ahead five to 10 years from now, what do you see? What's your vision for how this could look for merchants and for Magento? Especially in light of the complexity of B2B and all of that. Yep. The first thing, as we said, is that it's making licensing simpler, unifying the bill. That should be the...

So, and it should be as simple right now, key fact before I talk about that, know, on only 10 % to 15 % of our sales come from Marketplace. 85 and that applies to all extension provider. 85 % of the sale is happening on mst.com and headworks.com and mageplaza.com. So Marketplace is getting only 15 % of the revenue associated with extension.

But there's a reason why people are going and buying directly from the vendor website rather than marketplace, right? That needs to first of all change. And how can that change is if Adobe makes one bill happen, right? And it should be as simple as like right now, if you buy extension, I don't know if you're buying experiences, you add to cart and check out as if it is a B2C site.

Right? Just like as if I'm buying water bottles, right? I add to cart, buy checkout. I don't do shipping definitely because of digital product, but it's like that. But that's not how you buy. First of all, these products belong to a company. They don't belong to because Ravi, because Ravi just bought it for my company. He may go away, but it belongs to a company. So first of all, we need to introduce a concept of B2B buying. That a company is coming and then there is a team and Ravi can be employee, Nicole can be employee in there.

and then they just hit install. Yes. is charged, right? If you need to simplify that buying, it begins with that. Simplify that buying experience. Simplify billing. It needs to be just one bill. most of the sales then that would go through Adobe marketplace, Magento marketplace, right? Right now, Adobe is charging 15 % for a fee to the extension vendor.

So if you think about it, like it's a $10 million, roughly a year market, right? If 15 % of that, that is 1.5 million is going through marketplace. And then 15 % of that is what, I don't even know how to do it. $200,000 like that. $200,000, No. Yeah, 15 % and $200,000. That's nothing for Adobe. Why are we collecting $200,000 from the ecosystem that is shrinking, right?

So my suggestion is that you make extension, don't charge any fee like Shopify does for up to one mil, they don't charge zero percent fee. That is common if we just are keeping our eyes and ears open and see what the other providers that are growing doing. And we just don't need to be the pioneer of the chain. we at least, that thing was launched around three, four years ago. And that is for a reason that is they are enabling the more extended, the community to,

flourish, know, that with those kind of changes. So first thing is what I would do is definitely make the licensing cost, sorry, the commission part of it go away from the marketplace for up to $500,000 million, right? So that means now extension building companies are not, because most of them are less than a mil. They are not incentivized to sell it on their website. And then if it is one bill and it is easier for the brands, and now it will be easier for the agencies as well, why would they send them

headworks.com, they should send them to the marketplace. Now out of that, even if they give five million at zero percent fee on five mil, if they correct 15%, right? If all of those extension sales are happening through, then that amount is six and seven and $50,000. It's way much more than $203,000 that they're collecting right now. And that's a simple math to me, right? mean, that's simple. That's a no brainer like Amazon prime. Why would we not do that? And that would definitely

jumpstart and kickstart or community. Because now merchants are not feeling the pain. They are finding ease of doing business with Magento as a platform. So they will stay with Magento as a platform. I'm getting one bill. Now if they have an Adobe commerce customer, they get Adobe commerce licensing plus extensions as one bill. If they're tech vendors like dot digital, what not, if they want to be part of this as well.

One bill, right? For all, for the platform, for the extension, for the tech vendors. Now my accountant and my controller can keep up with it. This is my bill associated with my e-commerce website. It's easy to digest, consume, and manage and maintain. Yeah. Much more centralized. What do you see are going to be the biggest barriers to getting adoption to this?

Look, I can create that marketplace. can make a head-first marketplace and I can do one bill. But why would other vendors who are my company? So this is purely, this is the kind of change only somebody, you know, it's called grass pattern. We know when I was technically, I generally responsibility assignment pattern. So you need to give the responsibility of anything to the person who knows about it, who can control that thing. Right here, Adobe is that company.

They need to be, they are working on Adobe Exchange and they are talking about App Builder. But no matter how much they try, there are 3,000 extension that Adobe Commerce customers also use, right? So when I have briefly talked to Adobe about it, they say, we can do this thing for open source community, which is not for open source. It is for commerce as well. Because you really think that Adobe Commerce can be installed with

bunch of apps using app builder and that is what just merchant will need. It would never reach there. There will be extensions that will be installed and there are 3000 of them, right? So it is not just for open. So it is for commerce. It applies to commerce as well. So if Adobe wants, they can make the change and it's not a huge change. It's humans. It takes just some leadership. Some leadership and willing to do that change. I would also want to take it further as phase two is do monthly subscription or $20.

Right? Yeah. Which very easy. If I don't like a product, I can cancel it. The challenge there is because Magento extensions are open source. Once you buy the product from us, we give you the code and then they can cancel subscription. So now we have given our product for $20, which is not going to be financially viable. Yeah, exactly. And right now also there is a little bit of extension, licensing misuse that is happening in the extension business because it's not

Deliberate, it just happens. For example, I buy extension as an agency for one of my customers and then the devs are there. Most of them, I have a 140 people team. I cannot have processing control to that place. Now they may by mistake take that extension because another customer came and used them there as well without going through the... People commit those kind of innocent and stupid mistakes.

So there is license abuse that is probably definitely happening. And I'm not suggesting it from that perspective. But whenever people for that reason have tried to put some kind of licensing check, the community has come down guns blazing on them. It is not about, it's open source, then I have a right to abuse. It doesn't mean that. Even if it is a commercial open source, you have right to collect the money that is due for the product that somebody is using from you.

So I'm not talking about DRM check, but there has to be some check when if you're using my product, then I can disable that product from any further use, right? Because if you want to get to the $20 a month model, right? Then it is leasing versus buying. If you're doing $253 per year, it is leasing versus buying, right? That's a different thing that.

If after one year of license they they cancel the subscription and they can keep the product They will not get the further upgrade but in commerce, they will keep the product but in monthly it will not work, right? We need to think about from leasing mindset that you are using the product I can make it very easy for you $20 a month and if we make it easy for like $20 a month one bill More merchants will stay with me and in fact come towards magento as a platform choice

It's one of the most powerful platform to be honest, like that is no denying for sure. Right. So absolutely. Let's talk about that a little bit before you like Magento is an incredibly powerful platform. Yeah. And I think there's because of the shift lately, people aren't talking about that as much. Maybe that there hasn't been as great marketing to be honest about how. So I would love to hear from you, Robbie. What is it? Who?

you know, what do you find still that is so incredible about the Magento product and who is right for it? People definitely with multiple, multiple stores, right? So if you are operating globally and those global operations are they're independent entities, right? So they have their own company in cooperation there. I'm not talking about merchants who are from US one warehouse location, shipping their goods to Europe. I'm talking about

I have a global company, have a product and SKU set that may have a overlap with the US product and SKU set and customer same way. you know, there is segmentation, segregation and then there is also completely different business entity for that business in Europe, right? For those larger corporation, even when let's say Shopify, Shopify markets and they can do internationalization to certain extent, is still,

doesn't like there can be only one payment gateway that can be associated with the entire account. So but the financial control for a European company for the group of companies lies with Europe. The money should from Europe store go to Europe, right? All those things. All those things, that level of control is still not available in many platforms. So when you are a large company and at the end of it, if you think about it,

People are going Shopify route because the cost of maintenance and support and like, it's just like, know, but when you get even few million dollar in online commerce, Magento ecosystem, I have seen businesses up to 50, a hundred million dollars run on open source. So there is a zero licensing cost option. You own it versus you lease it, right? You are not happy with the hosting provider, you're not happy with the whatever, like a web application firewall cannot keep you. You can take that and move somewhere else. You own it.

Versus in manage e-commerce you are always leasing it. should the landscape change? Should there are more restriction in the industry vertical line of product that you're selling? You are at the mercy of the platform provider. Right? Yeah, absolutely. And I think with the SaaS, especially Shopify, because of the fees, the payment fees for transactions, if you're an enterprise level company that's had a lot of sales,

Yeah. are going to get hit by those payment fees that you don't have to, that doesn't happen with Magento because it's completely. Yeah. Yeah. They have different way of smart way of monetizing it. Adobe did come late, but you know, it did come with Adobe Payments for the same reason. Just the way they saw Shopify Payments, came with Adobe Payments. I think they should do the same thing with the app marketplace or extension marketplace. One bill, click install. That's it. One bill, right?

Just make it same. It will definitely help. So if you will think about those big customers that are Shopify Plus and in the fees and everything, only the entity that they're paying for the maintenance that changes. In Magenta Space, they will pay the agency for maintenance and whatnot. And as long as they find a good one, they will be happy. Our average lifetime duration of customer stays with us is 4.7 years.

So once the customer comes our way, they don't go away. So, yeah, definitely if the agency is good, the cost of maintaining that platform, be it on one of these, whatever platform is going to be the same. I can crunch numbers and show you the math. It's going to be not any different. If anything, if you're like, let's say $25 million online commerce, you can run with open source. So if anything, you'll save money and you'll own it.

you'll have better control over it. And definitely there are certain B2B like specifically space where I have a customer where there's no checkout. Completely, completely like there's workflows around a requisition list where a store supervisor will do end of the day, know, place order and goods will be shipped on a truck and all those things. Those kinds of implementations cannot happen using a managed e-commerce platform. So there will always be those, but that

The thing is that Shopify, they are implementing B2B, they're implementing. So there are different maturity levels and needs for B2B and other things where Magento used to win, but that gap is also reducing. So now for eight out of those 10 merchants, maybe they can get away with the limitations that the managed e-commerce platform like Shopify will come And let's be honest, Shopify is investing a lot of money and building out there. They've got a lot of money to spend to build that out.

you know, the future there, I think it's gonna, you know, it's gonna shift, there's gonna be a lot more possibilities for B2B. But you did hit make a good point, like especially in manufacturing too, you know, lot of manufacturers, you know, they're working with distributors, they don't need like a true checkout experience, they're there just to have like a catalog, truthfully for their distributors, it's a completely different kind of e-commerce experience. do have to, you know, have, yeah, think about that when you're.

Deciding any of these have their own conferences like we had one customer. They have their own conference, right? So we had to come up with a mobile app for buying on the floor, right? Completely like those kind of things. You cannot need the full control. You need the keys to the kingdom. You need the source code. You need to be able to do things freely, right? So then you cannot be. Yeah, you cannot find out later on. Okay, I can't. I can't do this. That is.

not going to help and enable the business to grow because there's lack of freedom around that, right? Again, as I said, that only applies to very few percent of the case. unless until we make changes to ecosystem, that has always been the case till the market is shrinking, right? Yeah. can just bank on it. We need to come up with a better reason than lease versus buying or better reason than can do B2B that well because the need for those

people who will face that limitation or hit that limitation introduced by Shopify or BigCommerce will be lesser and lesser because these guys will keep on growing their product. If they keep growing their product. I did read somewhere that Shopify is coming up with markets where if it's a US versus Europe market, they can attach different payment gateways to it. So my point is that they can very easily keep growing their roadmap and that gap will keep reducing. If we are just sitting ducks.

I completely agree. Yeah, we will definitely lose the battle for sure. Yeah, it's a matter of time. And so I think like to your point, I love your approach to really trying to continue to push with Adobe so that they are really driving, you know, more product development, more innovation so that all of the beautiful things about open source can continue to live on because there is so much great.

great things as part of this community. I think that's what I love about it so much, Ravi, is the people in this community are so brilliant and so innovative and so collaborative that I think there will always be a strong future for Magenta. I love the community. I completely invested into it, neck deep into it. I loved Magenta Imagine and that kind of pushed me to do

meet Magenta, Florida. wanted it to return and have same kind of vibe and feeling. So we came with it will be a third year and for third year in the running, you know, we are growing 25, 30 % year over year in terms of attendance and sponsorships and whatnot. So this year we're going to have three tracks instead of two tracks, learning tracks. We'll have more. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the third track. You can have a technical track, a business track. What's the third track?

Case study.

So that would be and there are good brands we are able to attract Helen of Troy will be there, Chui will be there, Chui is taking I'm excited to see Chui. Great guy, great speaker. Yeah, there will be like, you know, Helen of Troy, Henry Schein, Hanes brand, all decent good brands that are coming. There are a bunch of brands that are coming from Europe as well. So we are getting good traction.

for the conference and this year we are positioned to a place where we are now thinking that it is getting to a place where we can do something more than just a conference, which is begin this chain that we talking about in 2025. So I will leverage this platform to get the community together and I'm talking to various people to have their buy-ins and

I'm open to like, maybe I'm wrong here. Maybe I don't understand it, but tell me that I'm wrong if I'm wrong, right? If I'm not wrong and if we, short debate, we agree that this change is required, then I'm just needing support from everyone because everything that we do in this community is so great that people come together and make it happen together. We don't fly solo here, right? So we need that.

community on the same page and that's why we are going to have a proper plated sit down lunch in a separate room this time. We tried to do this last year but it was in a general area. It was too noisy. We couldn't but this time we are putting more structure around that and I'm looking forward to be honest. I'm looking forward to that one hour of lunch the most. Why? Because that is where we will talk about this change and we'll probably solidify and come up with a roadmap and have binds of people, right?

A meeting of the minds. Yeah. Yeah, it's a fantastic event. Having attended it last year, it's very well organized. The content is fantastic. So for anyone who's a merchant in the space, who's considering Magento or who is a Magento merchant, I can't recommend the Meet Magento Florida Conference enough. There's just really top notch.

The sponsors are great. Everything about it is really fabulous. I'm excited to come back. The food is really good and the entertainment is fantastic. it's really, really great. Robbie, you and your team do such a great job and your commitment really shines through your commitment to really being a leader in the space and really focusing on innovation really shines through, think, which is so important now. I mean, with the way that technology is going and it's so important to stay.

really on the front with AI and everything. So I love the work that you're doing. It's so important and so needed. yeah, very Absolutely. Thank you. can do it without the support and help of people like yourself and others, you know. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I'm excited to be there. We'll be bringing Hello Moxie to the conference. Yeah. And can't wait to be interviewed. We're going to interview attendees about, you know, the future of e-commerce and

women and men and how they can be working together. So I'd love to ask you that question, because we kind of close out our show, Ravi. I've seen you just really collaborate so well in really promoting diversity in e-commerce. What have you seen really work well and be successful there to drive innovation and promote diversity? And what do you think would need to change? So we need to, I mean, what can we do is there are

topics that are related to magenta. There's magenta specific case studies. is technical sessions, there's business. But then there are sessions that need, there are around greater good. Now greater good can be DI, know, diversity and inclusion, or it can be go green, you know, and how can we have better infrastructure with low carbon emissions. So there needs to be topic around that as well.

I, my general thought process is that 80 % of conference, for small size conference, right? The bigger the conference, the bigger the company, the bigger the entities associated with this, they need to do more about this, these bigger topics, right? But at our conference, we try to keep 15 to 20 % of the content for these bigger topics. We also segue from 5.30 to 7.00 PM women in e-commerce. So we,

We come up with a light agenda. It is more informal conversations around the challenges, the pain points, or the upcoming trends that women are seeing in the tech or e-commerce space. And so we enable that by having a separate session for that. We have had conversation on the going green and those kinds of things. In general, we also ensure that there is enough participation, whether it is selection committee.

whether it is people taking the stage and speaker, along with five different parameters that we do keep in mind, like, you know, who is our sponsor and show them some love, is the content really good? You know, there are, is the presenter, how is it presented? Do you have past experience? So there are so many other factors that come in the play, but we try to strike the balance and keep that in mind that we need to have.

representation from all kind of people. It is not just a gender, it can be race, can be other criteria as well. And we keep that in mind when we make the decision. Yeah, and I've definitely been the recipient of that. So I think that you guys do a very, very good job in the selection committee with really being very thoughtful about bringing in different voices and different perspectives. And it's something that I've really appreciated about being in the community is being able to have a platform to share.

you know, in that way. So kudos, you're doing great work. Very good, Robbie. Well, this has been such a great, wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for joining me on the show. This is a special episode and can't wait to see you in person when we bring the podcast to the show and we'll interview you there. I hope I'm asking you now live if you'll let me interview you there again. When I come, that would be fantastic. And for any of our listeners, if you get a chance, please check out Meet Magento Florida.

It's a fantastic event. We will love it. You will eat it up. And Ravi, is there anything else that you'd like to share how listeners can get a hold of you, get in touch with you, any other information that you think would be helpful for them as they're navigating the e-commerce space and thinking about next steps? I mean, a business, how can we help the community is definitely by participation. Meet Magenta Florida and all these changes that we talked about.

But our biggest bias, why we acquired a Headworks was we wanted to have better control on our deliveries, whether it is quality or whether it is like right now, another challenge in Magento ecosystem is that all these extensions people buy and they're from seven different vendors. And then they need some customization that back and forth takes a lot of time. So one of the biggest thing that we are trying to make it easy for the community and the merchants that are.

on budget to platform is that how can we reduce that back and forth and time to delivery faster because if we can deliver things faster, again, ease of doing business. So those are the important things that we are constantly working on at Rave plus Headworks and we leverage our 70 plus apps for our deliveries so that we get a quality and we can take the customers to market faster. So we're doing that. I also wanted to say that thank you for first of all.

I'm looking forward to your workshop, the B2B workshop that you're doing at Meet Majinto Florida. And I'm looking forward to content that you will be creating through the podcast that you will be doing at the conference. So I'm looking forward to that. And I'm excited for the conference for listening and sitting in your session and definitely listening to your podcast after the conference, the content that you create. So thank you for all the work that you're doing for the conference and for in general in the community, right? Thank you.

Thank you, Robbie. It's my pleasure. I'm delighted. I can't wait. I'm like counting down the days. So it's going to be great. And B2B, as we've talked about on this episode, it's just a passion and there's such opportunity there. And so much growth there. So many merchants that need help. such a need to address the complexity there and have a roadmap that will really help these merchants be successful.

So I can't wait to talk about it and then it's gonna be great. So. It'll be great learning workshop. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks again, Ravi and have a wonderful holiday. You too. You too, Nicole. That's a wrap for today's episode of Hello Moxie E-commerce Edition. Thanks for joining us as we bring you the latest news in the e-commerce industry and celebrate diversity and innovation in the tech sector.