Meet Magento Netherlands 2025: What Actually Mattered

On 6 November we were at Meet Magento Netherlands 2025, at LIEF Amsterdam. The event is run by Mage-OS Nederland, the association of the Dutch Magento community: one day, 2 tracks (Tech and Business), 15 talks, 500 expected attendees and more than 20 sponsors, according to the event website.

Below are five things we brought home for the merchants we work with, plus four checks you can run this week.

A day made by the community

Meet Magento Netherlands is not run by an agency but by Mage-OS Nederland. Anyone who owns or works for a Magento store gets in for free. The headline sponsor was Hyvä × Mollie, followed at Gold level by Hosted Power, Hypernode and Tweakwise.

Hyvä turned 5 and announced its free theme

At the Hyvä stand, under the line “Where good stores begin”, visitors wrote on the wall and stuck up instant photos. The theme was Hyvä's fifth birthday, with wishes in several languages, from “Happy 5th Birthday” to “Buon compleanno Hyvä”. We left a message too, signed LIQUIDLAB.

On the same wall, someone had written “Free Hyvä Theme” with an arrow to “Open source”. That same day, 6 November, Willem Wigman, Hyvä's founder, announced that the Hyvä theme was going free. As of today, 10 November 2025, the theme is open source under the OSL3 and AFL3 licences, the same licence family as Magento Open Source. Hyvä Checkout, Hyvä Commerce and Hyvä Enterprise stay paid.

For a merchant on Luma, this changes the maths: the licence price is no longer a reason to put off moving to Hyvä. The real cost is still the migration work and the extensions that need adapting.

One returned sweater: 5 stages, 31 steps

The most useful slide of the day for merchants was not about code. It broke the return of one sweater into 5 stages: the parcel arriving, registering the return, inspecting the product, restocking and processing. We counted 31 steps, nearly all of them done by people, from “an employee interrupts their current task” to the admin work for the finance department.

The first two stages alone hold 14 steps: someone hunts for the return form, the order and the customer, then picks the return reason. An online return form with predefined reasons and an automatically generated label moves a good share of them from the warehouse table into the store.

Ivan Chepurnyi: 400 domains on one Magento

In the Tech track, Ivan Chepurnyi (EcomDev) started from an architecture question: what do you do when you need hundreds of stores, each on its own domain? The classic answer is a website, a store group and a store view for every store, 200 times over.

On the next slide, the same stores sat under one website, one store group and one store view, each with its own anchor category in a single category tree. He showed it all live, profiling a category page of the demo store in Tideways. The title said the rest: “400 Domains, 1 Magento, 200 EUR / month”. The hosting package in the demo had 3 CPU cores, 8 GB of RAM and 100 GB of SSD, at 190 euros a month.

The lesson for a merchant with several stores or several countries: an extra store view is not free. Each one brings more configuration, translations and indexing. Before you add another, ask whether a category on a separate domain would do the same job.

ANWB and Tweakwise: search is never finished

We also sat in on the ANWB session with Tweakwise, given by Rob Minnee (Directeur Marketplace, ANWB) and Mark Veldkamp (Executive Director, Tweakwise). The main points, as Tweakwise summed them up after the event: dynamic search and filter logic, personalisation and merchandising that inspire and convert, AI to better understand customer intent, and the fact that optimising is never done.

For a Magento store, that means search results deserve a check every month, not a one-off setup at launch that nobody touches again.

Vendic: let your partner talk

Tabitha Karta (Vendic) closed “Let your partner talk!” with three prompts for the whole community. The first one stayed with us: which small action can you take this month to share knowledge, visibility or value with your community?

Our answer is this article: what we learn at events, we write up here, with numbers, for the merchants who were not in the room.

The close, and what comes next

Mage-OS Nederland closed the day on stage with the organising team and the next dates in the calendar: a Women in Ecommerce meetup in Groningen on 13 November 2025, the annual members' meeting in January 2026 and Meet Magento NL 2026 on 5 November 2026. The evening went on with dinner and the afterparty.

What you can do this week

• Returns: count the manual steps in your return process. On the Amsterdam slide, the first two stages alone had 14.
• Several stores: before adding another store view, check whether an anchor category on a separate domain would do the same job. Ivan showed 400 domains on one Magento.
• Search: look at the top 10 searches in your store and what they return. If nobody has checked since launch, now is the time.
• Frontend: if you stayed on Luma because of the licence, the Hyvä theme costs nothing as of 10 November 2025.

Update, October 2026: we wrote separately about what the free Hyvä theme means for merchants, in our article on Hyvä going open source. Ivan Chepurnyi came back at Meet Magento France 2026 in Paris with a TTFB under 150 ms without a cache, covered in our Paris recap. And on 5 November 2026 we are going back to LIEF for Meet Magento NL 2026.

Thank you

Thank you to the Mage-OS Nederland team for a day that was, as their own website puts it, “for the community, by the community”. And thank you to the speakers who put real numbers and real processes on their slides, not just promises.

Want to know how many manual steps a return takes in your store, or whether you really need another store view? Book a free strategy call and we will tell you what is worth fixing first.