How Can Shopware & Magento Live in Harmony? - Ben Marks

Your host: Joseph Maxwell, Founder and CEO of SwiftOtter

Special Guest: Ben Marks, Director of Global Market Development at Shopware AG and Former Magento Evangelist

Show Notes

You might not have heard of him before (totally kidding here), but his name is Benjamin Marks and he is the director of growth for Shopware in the “places that don’t speak German”. Ben spent many years with Magento as what he would call their “evangelist” and was carried through the transition when Adobe purchased Magento. In 2021, he decided it was time to follow his hunch that Shopware was laying the foundation that Ecommerce would build its future on. Was he right? Maybe so, but as he quickly mentions in this conversation with Joseph, he believes that Adobe Commerce (Magento) will make strides towards greater openness in the near future. In fact, he believes they will have to in order to keep up with the kind of culture that Shopware is building. Ben actually believes this town is big enough for both platforms. Interesting, right? Let’s see why he thinks that.

What immediately drew Ben to Shopware was their culture of openness and how their business has been rooted in collaboration from the very beginning. Companies tend to say they have that culture when they have nothing to show for it. On the flip side, companies who open up their playbook and achieve full transparency can find it harder to survive as they offer so much free value to the community that they just can’t seem to turn a profit. They want to believe that “changing the industry for the better” will cause their success in the long run, but the theory doesn’t always become reality. Ben felt that Adobe was losing their sight of the “open source” goal while Shopware was leaning into it more and more.

Joseph decided to get a bit more direct with Ben pretty quickly and ask him which platform a new developer should spend more time on: “Shopware or Magento”? We all know that learning Ecommerce development is not a walk in the park and that decent Magento-focused (Adobe Commerce) developers are seeing what amounts to ZERO unemployment. Should they focus on the widely-rooted platform (Magento) or start with the platform that seems to potentially have a higher upside? What are their opportunities looking like? Ben’s response to this might surprise you, as he basically recommends that they start with Magento if they need a job/career “sooner rather than later”. He argues that commerce experience in general is an excellent option and that they could start with Shopify or BigCommerce and do well, especially if they start with front-end work. To be more specific, Ben thinks that if you’re wanting to ramp your career up in 2021, focus on Magento first. If you can wait until 2022, Ben seriously believes that Shopware will be exponentially bigger. From Ben’s experience speaking with agencies who work on Magento and Shopware both, the overwhelming consensus is that Shopware is “easier to learn and ramp employees up on” and that, from an hourly-rate standpoint, it is likely more profitable.

Joseph switches the conversation up a bit and makes an opinionated assessment that there seem to be more front-end developers nowadays than back-end developers, which might be due to how intensely customizable the front-end has become. “There are never enough developers to be found” says Ben, as he ties this conversation together and returns back to the original point that there are many ways to get into this business that have a common foundation but a variation of different career trajectories. Maybe the better question to ask is what developers should actually avoid spending their time on! Looking into the future of ecommerce, Ben’s big encouragement is to not lock yourself into one platform or see one opportunity as ultimate. It is wise to remember that your focus really might need to change pretty often, based on the opportunities you come across. 

As Ben and Joseph dive into the world of frameworks, customization and dependency management mechanisms, they shed light on the maturity of ecommerce development and the issue of building overly complex tools that don’t age well. Things are changing so fast that it’s really important to remember core-principles, leverage existing systems and keep things “swappable”. For ecommerce to continue to evolve the way it has grown so much in the last 20 years, there will need to be a whole lot of volunteer commitment from the community. The excitement over all of the opportunities in Ecommerce will need to continue on and stay healthy. An abundance of creativity and comradery is still at the core of this career path!

(Theme music courtesy of TrendingAudio)