Experience of partnership with Hyvä

Transcript

Brandon: Well, Sanne, welcome! I’m super excited to be here with you today and just have a quick conversation about yourself and about Hyvä. So, why don’t we kick it off with that? Tell us about who you are, introduce yourself, and tell us who you’re with.

Sanne: Sure! Thanks, first of all, for having me here today. I’m very happy to be invited. My name is Sanne, and I’m the Commercial Director for Hyvä. I’ve been working in e-commerce, specifically with Magento, for almost a decade now in various commercial roles, from hosting companies to other ventures. But since September of last year, I’ve been part of the Hyvä team. Hyvä is a frontend solution for Magento 2. We’re a startup founded in 2020, and now, three years down the road, we have a lot of additional products. While the Theme is still our main product, we’ve also developed other projects like our UI Library, Checkout, and our Enterprise product.

Brandon: Oh, amazing! So, it started off as trying to solve a little bit of an issue, right? It seems like all that extra stuff was just making Magento, you know, it does a lot of things, but maybe just works slow. So, what was the goal? What did Willem set out to accomplish, and would you say he’s done that?

Sanne: Yeah, so basically, what he wanted to do was make Magento fun again — fun to work with, but also to create a reasonable product. He wanted to make it feasible for people to have a timeline they could adhere to within a budget that was reasonable. When Magento 2 came to market, that kind of became impossible because of the way the frontend is constructed. All of a sudden, project times took three times as long and went more than three times over budget compared to Magento 1. This actually led a lot of customers to choose different platforms when they needed to upgrade from Magento 1. So, they turned away from Magento 2 for alternatives that were more budget-friendly and could deliver projects within a better scope of time. His goal was to make Magento an attractive product again, both for developers and also merchants. And to answer your question — did he do that? Absolutely.

Brandon: I’d say this: speaking specifically to merchants, if there’s a merchant out there, what are the signs to look for in their store? What might be the red flags that suggest they should consider checking out Hyvä and what it can do for them?

Sanne: First of all, I’d say the most important reason for merchants to choose us is performance. If you look at the alternative Magento frontend solutions in the market, Hyvä outperforms all of them by hundreds of percent. For example, if you look at Core Web Vitals, more than 50% of Hyvä shops pass, whereas with Luma, only 19% do, and with PWA solutions, it’s even less — around 3%. So, the difference is quite significant. However, there’s still 50% of Hyvä shops that don’t pass Core Web Vitals, so I always say it’s important to understand that Hyvä is the best starting point, it’s not a silver bullet. It’s going to give you an out-of-the-box Lighthouse score of 100 — there’s no alternative in the market that will give you that. Some might go up to 70, while Luma only gives you 48. This means you need to do a lot of improvements in performance without even touching design or third-party plugins. With Hyvä, it’s a completely different ballgame, but you can still mess up that score if not handled correctly.

On a broader perspective, I would say if you’re an e-commerce merchant, whether you’re just starting out or have been around for a while, it’s crucial to periodically take a step back and look at your overall strategy. Consider what technology best fits that strategy. This includes choosing a frontend vendor and deciding what kind of infrastructure you need to run your shop on — not just now, but five years down the road when you aim to realize the goals you’ve set. What can best serve me to get there at which cost? 

Brandon: Yeah, that’s incredibly powerful. I think you’re right. One of the reasons we do what we do at IT Delight is because we recognize that there are many platform choices for merchants. But we firmly believe that shoppers will reward those who provide unique experiences over time. There’s power in the one-size-fits-all approach, but you can still add a layer of customization that truly makes it yours. In my own store, I remember Google rewarding us for customizing our Magento store, boosting our organic rankings above competitors using similar technology. We created a unique experience both for Google as a bot and for the shopper, which was rewarding.

You’ve got an incredibly powerful tool, obviously, with Hyvä, that we can leverage to get all that performance. Your perspective on why even small performance improvements matter is crucial. Why is that so critical to merchants today?

Sanne: Performance directly relates to conversion rates. Online shoppers are becoming increasingly impatient, and with the growing competition online, it’s easy to click away. It’s not like in a physical store where you’re willing to wait for assistance. Online, it only takes a click to leave. Research consistently shows that every second you save in performance directly translates into higher conversion rates. If you want to be competitive, not just now but in the future, it’s vital to have good performance — not just on quiet days, when you have 10 visitors, but especially on busy days like Black Friday. That’s when you want to smash your revenue records, and the only way to do that is by having everything in your shop optimized to serve your customers with the performance they want, even when your traffic is 10 or 100 times higher than usual.

Brandon: I want to shift gears a bit. We’ve talked about the Theme side of things and the importance of performance, which is the base of what you do. Now, I want to talk about Checkout for a moment. I know that’s an area our team is really excited about, especially understanding Checkout. We participated a little bit in the project on the checkout side, helping with the PayPal integration. Can you give us an introduction to Checkout and why it’s so important on the Hyvä side?

Sanne: Sure! When the theme was launched and in production, and we saw a lot of people using it and being very happy with it, we wanted to take on the next big thing in Magento conversion: Checkout. Traditionally, Checkout has been a pain point for developers. It’s slow, and the code is extremely difficult to work with. A lot of the work needs to be done on the frontend, but it often has to be done by backend developers — Magento developers who are typically backend-focused. So, you kind of build it and hope it stands, and it’s something you don’t want to touch again. But that’s quite outdated because nowadays, performance is everything, and the Checkout process needs to be smooth as well. Different types of users require different Checkout experiences, and limiting that in any way directly impacts conversion and revenue.

One of our colleagues, Willem Portman, designed his own technology called Magewire, which he adapted from the Laravel community and applied to Magento. He’s been very excited about it, and rightfully so, because it can be used for numerous purposes. When he joined Hyvä, he and Willem Wigman decided to use it to build a Checkout experience. It took us about a year and a half to finish, but now we feel we can offer the checkout experience that any Magento developer wants. It’s so much less code than Luma, making it incredibly fast. On average, we see a 13 times improvement in performance compared to Luma Checkout. But even more importantly, it’s a breeze for developers to work with. It becomes very easy to build different Checkout experiences for different users, for instance, B2B versus B2C. You can do A/B testing and make all kinds of changes much more easily. Before, it might have taken a week to make a change, now, it can be done in 30 minutes. It saves so much time and makes it infinitely more usable for developers to customize the Checkout experience any way they want. That’s the power of open source — you can customize it to infinity, but you need the infrastructure that facilitates that, and that’s essentially what Magewire and the Hyvä Checkout do.

Brandon: That’s amazing! I don’t think I’ve ever met a merchant who hasn’t told me that their business is unique. And of course it is — that’s why they do what they do. So having a customizable Checkout is crucial. You’re right, fewer lines of code mean fewer dependencies, making it easier to customize without the risk of breaking something else. I love the concept of reducing complexity while still enabling customization.

Sanne: Exactly! And it’s also thanks to the help from partners like you. We rely heavily on our partners to help us make our products adaptable to the market. For instance, with checkout, we have all the major shipping and payment providers integrated, including the PayPal integration you worked on. This ensures that anyone who wants to use Hyvä Checkout with PayPal has an out-of-the-box integration that works.

Brandon: Yes, that’s one of the challenges as you enter new markets — making sure all the integrations are built and the pieces are there. You’re doing a great job with that. A big part of what we’re doing in the Hyvä space right now is helping extension providers get their extensions compatible with Hyvä and Hyvä Checkout. We’re spending a significant amount of time helping them get up to speed and make sure everything works smoothly for merchants.

I think we’ll get some examples listed up as we post some of this content about why choose Hyvä and the difference that it’s actually making. I think some of those are really big. But what I would say is, you know, if there are merchants out there considering this, or they’re identifying that their Magento store is running a little bit slow — or maybe they don’t even know if it is, to be perfectly honest — you know, you’ve got a great network of partners. We are one of those. But any suggestions to these merchants as they begin that discovery process, looking at partners and people who can support them, and even their own developers, to take on a project like this?

Sanne: Yes, unfortunately, “Magento developer” is not a protected title, so anybody can call themselves that. I always advise people to first be very clear on what it is that they want, what timeline they have in mind, and what budget. Because those three factors are going to determine who you’re going to work with or not. If one of those factors is not clear, then you’re bound to go into lengthy conversations with numerous parties, only to find out that they can’t meet your standards at the end of the road. And that’s kind of a waste of time for both of you.

So if you have a very clear idea, like: “This is what I do now. I have a web shop, I do 1 million in revenue per year, and I want to grow to 10 million in the next 5 years.” That’s a very clear goal. Then you can decide, okay, on markets — which market segments are you working in? Which geographies? The more specific you become, the clearer you become on determining which partner to work with. And the same goes for timeline and budget.

As you talk to different agencies, always ask for references because that’s the strongest indicator that you can get of their quality. The prices that they will give you and the timelines that they will give you will vary a lot — that’s just a given. But if you can at least get a grip on what they’ve done for previous customers, if you could have a direct conversation with those references, that’s a very strong indicator that not only do they provide quality, but they also have a good relationship with their customers.

So that is something that I would always do — do your homework. Because this is a company that’s going to take responsibility for a very essential part of your business, and probably for a longer period of time. Ideally, you don’t want to switch agencies every year, because the discovery phase and getting to know each other, getting them familiar with the code, etc., takes so long. It only starts to pay off after a certain amount of time when they become completely familiarized with how you work, what your goal is, how you work as a company, your culture, etc., and, of course, the code, before they can add that extra that you’re looking for.

So yeah, also very much trust your intuition. Make sure that you meet people physically, that you see the people you’re working with, and if you have a good feeling — backed by stats, you know, the references, official partnerships — like you said, you are an official Hyvä partner. That says something about the level of proficiency that you have working with Hyvä. So obviously, there are a lot of agencies out there who claim Hyvä expertise but don’t necessarily have it or not as much. But if you’re a Hyvä partner, you can trust that they have significant experience working with us, and so they know the drill. They know how to build Hyvä shops and can give you that as well. So yeah, do your homework.

Brandon: Hey, no better advice, right? Do your homework, make sure you know what you’re getting into. And it’s tough, right? You’re right. I mean, there are independent developers, agencies, you have your own dev teams, and there’s a lot of people who claim to have Magento experience, who claim to have Hyvä experience. And so I think you’re right, you know, look for those who are listed, who’ve gone through the process of becoming affiliated directly in a partnership model with Hyvä.

I saw a friend and a former client post something on LinkedIn the other day, and he has a problem he’s trying to solve — some code he wants to rip out of his site for some solution that he’s got. And I loved what he wrote. He put it up there and said, “Here is what I’m trying to do. Any recommendations?” But then he qualified that recommendation. He said, “If you’re a provider that provides these types of services, do yourself a favor and have your best clients come to my post and make a comment, not you.” I loved it! I was like, this guy’s smart.

But I think you’re right. We learn so much by talking to those who’ve gone ahead and done that, who’ve had the experience with those. You know, that’s why we do a lot of the interviews that we do, right? It’s not possible for everybody to have a conversation with every one of those clients, but if we can record a few video snippets and share those at the right time in the process, it tends to help, right? We’re trying to build relationships, and we do want to ultimately make those connections for them because, again, this is all about community. So it is — you do business with people. Might as well be people you like, right, in the end?

Sanne: Yeah, well, you know, if you trust them enough to spend an evening with them having dinner or drinking a beer in a bar, then it’s a pretty good indicator if you want to do business with them.

Brandon: That’s right. Well, so one thing that we did as we were talking in preparation for chatting with you today is our marketing manager went and talked to some of our developers who are Hyvä certified, right? Essentially, who have gone through and have worked on Hyvä in the past. And it was awesome. So I’m looking over here at another screen. You know, they each had different comments and different things about Hyvä, but little comments for you that I just wanted to share with you.

So one of our developers, Artem, he’s like, “Well, in short, I like Hyvä, right? New technologies in Magento — it’s like a breath of fresh air.” He likes actively developing on those. You know, he talked about Hyvä Checkout and the UI components and all of that type of stuff. What I loved about where he went with his comment is he talked about lowering kind of a barrier to entry to getting a high-performance store. So that was cool.

We have, you know, Olena, she talked a lot about JavaScript and using Alpine JS instead. Like, you know, these guys are diving into some pretty cool things. 

But the one that kind of stood out to me that I thought I would share with you is we’ve got a developer, Alexander, who’s done a number of Hyvä projects, but he says, “But I’ve not worked with Hyvä for the last four months, and I miss it very much.” Oh, and then he finished off, “Working with Luma has only brought disappointment.” 

I wanted to just kind of share those with you.

Sanne: That’s very nice. This is our t-shirt that we designed for Meet Magento UK, and as you can read here, it says “E-commerce made happy.” That’s our tagline, so I think what you just mentioned is proof that we live what we say.

Brandon: Yeah, you certainly do. In fact, a number of individuals that are part of the Hyvä group and organization I’ve had the opportunity to work with in the very early days of Magento in varying different roles long before Hyvä was around, right? In Magento’s first days. And great people. They’ve always been part of the community, always been part of creating these amazing solutions that, in the end, Adobe saw as extremely valuable, and, of course, it’s the reason why they acquired what Magento was doing.

Well, and I’ve also heard it said, “Hyvä was the theme Magento probably should have shipped with,” but, you know, we’ll leave that as a comment for another day.

Sanne: You’re not the first to tell me that.

Brandon: Well, listen, thank you. We appreciate your time. I would ask, I guess, any parting words that you would like to throw out there about Hyvä, about yourself, about e-commerce — anything that comes to mind that you want to leave our merchants with?

Sanne: I think that it’s important to look to the future, like what kind of requirements you have, but also work with companies that stay on top of things. So again, of course, preaching to the choir here, but we’ve developed a number of extra products, like our Enterprise, for instance, a product that is completely compatible with Adobe B2B Commerce and Sensei. And furthermore, we are compliant with WCAG regulations, also known as accessibility. I know in the American market, this is already a thing, but it’s also going to be a matter of regulatory compliance in the EU in 2025, where your website has to be accessible for all types of users. This is very interesting, not only from an ethical point of view but also from an economic point of view because there’s a whole set of customers with purchasing power that at this moment doesn’t have the possibility to execute that power online.So by opening your shop to people with disabilities or to people with challenges in online shopping, you can actually increase your potential market. And also, of course, the average age of online shoppers is rising, so with that comes different needs in terms of visibility and stuff. As Hyvä, we are completely compliant with that, meaning that we provide the basis for you to become compliant with accessibility regulations. So again, this is also something to be mindful of because it might not be something you think of immediately when you’re thinking about the design for your shop, but it is something to definitely be aware of as it becomes a compliance requirement in 2025. So this is something to keep in mind.

Brandon: Absolutely. Listen, just last week I had a conversation with a merchant that got hit by one of those ADA lawsuits essentially for not being WCAG compliant. And you’re right, there are so many things that you have to figure out. Just making sure that those are already taken care of at some level. Of course, you can add images and then become non-compliant — there’s always something to do. But staying on top of that can increase the conversion rate and the value, but it can ultimately open up that customer base and just serve those who need to be served. And I think that’s a great way to look at it.

Sanne: Yeah, for sure.

Brandon: Well, thank you for your time today. Let’s get out there and make e-commerce happy! You know, I think it’s about time.

Sanne: I agree, thank you very much.

Brandon: Thank you. Have a wonderful day.

Sanne: You too. Bye, see you.