Events - Hyvä
Bronze Sponsor at Meet Magento Italy 2026: What Florence Told Magento Merchants
June 15, 2026 - by Alexandru-Manuel Carabus
LIQUIDLAB was a Bronze Sponsor of Meet Magento Italy 2026 in Florence. What we took home: infrastructure built in layers, a PrestaShop to Magento move that paid off, the quarter of shoppers your speed data hides, and the agentic commerce question.
On the morning of 11 June, the slide behind the stage at Meet Magento Italy 2026 read “I nostri Bronze Sponsor”. LIQUIDLAB was on it, next to Magebit, Dynamica, Fattoretto, Qapla' and eShoppingAdvisor.
We sponsor events like this for the same reason we contribute code to the Hyvä and Magento ecosystem. The merchants we work with do better when the community around their platform is strong, and Meet Magento is where that community meets in person.
The event brought the Italian Magento community to Nana Bianca, a startup hub on the Lungarno Soderini, a short walk from Ponte Vecchio. Two days: a Mage-OS hackathon on 10 June, then a full conference day on 11 June, organised by Magentiamo, in Italian and English, with a Business room and a Tech room running side by side.
Here is what we took home, and what it means if you run a Magento store.
The Night Before: A Mage-OS Hackathon by the River
Meet Magento Italy opened on 10 June with a full-day Mage-OS hackathon: teams working hands-on on real platform problems, closing with an apericena along the Arno. By the evening, the main hall was ready for the next day, lights down and “Welcome to Meet Magento” already on the screen.
Mage-OS is the community-driven distribution of Magento Open Source. An Italian Meet Magento that starts with a Mage-OS hackathon says a lot about where the platform's energy comes from in 2026: the people who build on it every day. Hyvä was in the building too. Alessandro Ronchi, Hyvä's Developer Evangelist and Engineering Manager, spoke in the Tech room and sat on the closing roundtable, and Davide Lunardon showed how Hyvä and Mage-OS together power Magento Open Source.
Host: Do Not Rewrite Magento, Rebuild the Infrastructure Around It
Andrea Saccà of Magentiamo welcomed a full room on the morning of 11 June. Soon after, Marco Mangione, CEO of Host S.p.A., took the stage with the infrastructure story behind a Magento store with 300k SKUs in an international multi-store setup, including the bot protection work nobody sees.
One slide summed up the talk: “Non riscrivi Magento. Scomponi l'infrastruttura attorno a Magento.” You do not rewrite Magento. You split the infrastructure around it into layers that scale and fail on their own:
- Edge and distribution: WAF, CDN, Nginx, Redis, Varnish, OpenSearch
- Application processing: PHP-FPM running Magento, with RabbitMQ handling work asynchronously
- The core: a mission-critical MySQL or MariaDB database
A component that gives way does not take the checkout down. Layer isolation is the only real guarantee of business continuity.
That was the slide's key principle, and the line above it went further: in a layered setup, the checkout does not even know that search is under stress.
This is the stability argument we make to merchants every week. When a Magento store falls over during a campaign, the code is rarely the first thing that broke. Search or a cache gives way under load and takes the checkout with it, because nothing kept them apart. It is why Stability comes first among the four Liquid Framework pillars.
Avenyr: PrestaShop to Magento 2, and the Iceberg Under Every Store
Enrico Cammareri, CEO and founder of Avenyr, told the story of a global scale-up that moved from PrestaShop to Magento 2, presented with Amasty and accelerated by process, AI and a Merchant of Record model.
The iceberg slide is worth printing. Above the waterline sits what everyone sees: the e-shop, the marketplace, performance, strategy, marketing, B2B, the physical store. Below it sits what a Merchant of Record carries: invoices and payments, tax and customs, logistics, returns, tracking, customer care and reporting. Selling across borders is mostly the part under the water.
Then came the results after the migration, all on one slide:
- B2C export: +15k, already from the first quarter of 2026
- Average conversion rate: +0.4%
- Time saved: 1.5 hours a day, thanks to integrated modules
- Speed: grade A, Largest Contentful Paint 910 ms, Total Blocking Time 173 ms, zero layout shift
Look at which numbers share the slide. The commercial results and the speed results sit side by side, because they are the same story. A replatform that goes live showing its main content in under a second is a different business from one that goes live slow and promises to fix speed later.
Performize: Your Speed Report Hides a Quarter of Your Shoppers
Andrea Cardinali, CEO and founder of Performize, gave the talk with the most merchant-friendly title of the day: Speed That Sells: How to Turn Magento Performance into Sales Performance.
Our favourite slide was the fifth limit of the way most teams read speed data: “Dati aggregati al 75esimo percentile. Non sappiamo nulla del restante 25% degli utenti.” Data aggregated at the 75th percentile. We know nothing about the remaining 25% of users.
This deserves attention. Google's Core Web Vitals call a page fast when 75% of real visits are fast enough. A green report can still hide one shopper in four, waiting on a slow phone on the product page that matters, and the report says nothing about what that shopper did next.
The answer is not to ignore the 75th percentile. It is to push the whole curve, not just the line.
Update, October 2026: we have since moved Equitana from Magento 1 to Magento 2 and Hyvä. Real shoppers on phones went from 4.2 s to 1.1 s for the main content at the 75th percentile, and 53% of phone page views now open instantly. The second number is the one that tells you about the whole curve.
The Closing Roundtable: Magento, AI and Agentic Commerce
The day closed on the main stage with a roundtable titled Magento, AI & Agentic Commerce: What Happens Next? On stage: Katy Wilson, Executive Director of the Magento Association (who had opened the morning with Magento: Your E-Commerce, Your Rules), Sander Mangel, Alessandro Ronchi of Hyvä and Andrea Saccà.
The roundtable put the agentic commerce question to the people closest to the platform: the Magento Association, Hyvä and the community that runs Meet Magento in Italy.
Our read for merchants is practical. Before you plan for shoppers who arrive as AI agents, make sure the basics any shopper needs are in order: clean product data, a fast and stable storefront, and search that returns the right product.
Update, October 2026: two weeks later, Meet Magento France 2026 in Paris came back to the same question. Our Meet Magento France 2026 recap covers that side of it: Magento's structured framework is exactly what lets AI work on it safely.
Between Sessions, on the Arno
Nana Bianca sits right on the river, so the lunch break moved outside, to the stone wall of the Lungarno, with the Meet Magento Firenze banner, a glass of something Tuscan and a view down the Arno.
This is the part of a conference that never makes the agenda. It is where merchants compare notes on partners, agencies compare notes on modules, and the community decides what to build next.
What Magento Merchants Should Take From Florence
Five things worth doing this month.
- Ask your hosting partner how your store is layered. If search, cache and checkout share one fate, one busy day can take all three down.
- Planning a replatform? Put speed targets in the brief, next to the revenue targets. Avenyr's results slide had both, and that is no accident.
- Look past the green Core Web Vitals badge. Ask what the slowest quarter of your phone visitors actually experiences.
- Before you sell into a new country, map the part under the waterline: invoices, tax, customs, returns. It is most of the work.
- Before you plan for AI agents, fix what every shopper needs: clean product data, a fast storefront, search that finds the product.
A sincere thank you to Andrea Saccà and the Magentiamo team for organising, to Host S.p.A. and every fellow sponsor, to Katy Wilson and the Magento Association, to the Mage-OS community for the hackathon, and to every speaker who took the stage at Nana Bianca, including Marco Mangione, Enrico Cammareri, Andrea Cardinali, Sander Mangel and Alessandro Ronchi. Grazie, Firenze.
Want to know what these signals mean for your store? Book a free strategy call and we will show you what fixing (or changing) your setup would actually look like.
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