“eCommerce made happy” is more than a tagline. It’s what drives the Hyvä team to build extraordinary products. If you’ve been around for a while, you already now how much we believe in this solution. If you’re new here: hello, nice to e-meet you! This is Baldwin, proud Hyvä ambasador. Whether you’re a developer, a business owner, or a tech enthusiast, this conversation promises valuable insights about the future of Hyvä.
Let’s start with a couple of questions about the Hyvä’s vision and the impact on Magento development.
We all read the stories on what inspired the creation of Hyvä. How do you see it evolving in the Magento ecosystem?
“We recently announced that we will start building Hyvä Commerce, which will also bring new features and improvements to Magento’s backend. In addition to that, our partnership with Mollie allows us to put significant budget towards Magento marketing, so merchants know the benefits of Magento and it will be easier for agencies to sell Magento. Our goal is to keep Magento as the market leader in the small and medium-sized business – enterprise eCommerce market.”
How does Hyvä approach performance and scalability differently compared to other frontends?
“Our motto is: keep it simple. By heavily reducing the code in the frontend, especially Javascript, Hyvä is an extremely lightweight and therefore performant frontend. We are also a native Magento frontend: we fully support the power of the monolith. This is different from other, often headless, frontend solutions.”
The next natural step is to dive into the commercial value.
How does adopting Hyvä impact store owners?
“Adoption of Hyvä generally results in 2 things: improved performance and lower total cost of ownership. Improved performance because Hyvä is so lightweight and built for performance, lower total cost of ownership because development, maintenance and updates take much less time with Hyvä than with Luma.”
Are there any common misconceptions about Hyvä that you would like to address?
“With the announcement of Hyvä Commerce, some have expressed concern that our core product, Hyvä Themes, will disappear. This is not the case: we will continue to support and sell Hyvä Themes. Hyvä Commerce will be an add-on for those who want it, and we believe upgrading is a no-brainer, but we will always support freedom of choice for our customers.”
What excites you the most about the future of frontend development for ecommerce?
We continue to expand the possibilities of HyväUI, our UI library that comes with a Hyvä license. This will make it even easier to develop a frontend in Hyvä, and allow agencies to focus on what they do best.
What are some of the biggest challenges facing ecommerce at this point and how is Hyvä addressing them?
The economic climate is less favorable than it was a few years ago, and competition is increasing. This makes a lot of merchants more cost-conscious. By building products that deliver instant ROI at an affordable price, we allow merchants to remain profitable and facilitate a diverse ecommerce landscape.
We have a few curiosities on community and developer ecosystem.
What’s one piece of feedback from the community that really influenced Hyvä’s roadmap?
“We are continuously building our roadmap influenced by feedback we get from the community. The best current example is Hyvä Commerce: we just hosted a townhall meeting with our most important agency partners to discuss what features should be built first.”
How can developers contribute to collaborate on the Hyvä project? Are there any key areas where help is most needed?
“You can contribute to the Hyvä community (both the core and extensions) through Gitlab, and many developers have done so in the past. While we are very appreciative of all the contributions that have helped Hyvä grow to where it is today, we are currently focusing on in-house development of Hyvä Commerce, so we are not looking for any contributions at this time.”
For developers transitioning from traditional Magento frontend development to Hyvä, what do you think would be the biggest learning curve?
“The biggest learning curve would be the sense of relief from how little Javascript is needed to work with Hyvä.😉 In general, we see that developers who know Magento adopt Hyvä very quickly and easily, because it is still a native Magento solution.”
Ok, let’s talk the future of Hyvä!
Where are some upcoming features or enhancements?
“As I mentioned earlier, Hyvä Commerce will bring some much needed improvements for the Magento backend, such as Page Builder enhancements.”
How do you think AI and machine learning might intersect with frontend development, and does Hyvä have any plans to integrate these technologies?
“AI and machine learning will be vital for frontend development in the future for sure, but how exactly, is still something we’re figuring out. We mean to implement it where it makes sense, not just because it’s a fancy new term.😊 Content creation might be a logical place to start.”
What future trends in ecommerce do you think Hyvä will help merchants tackle most effectively?
“This is difficult to predict. But I believe we have shown to be able to adapt very quickly to the market’s needs, the launch of Hyvä Edge is a good example of this. So if anything, you can rest assured that Hyvä will be on top of new trends and has the capacity and flexibility to adapt to them rapidly.”
Last but not least: we are interested to learn more about Hyvä Commerce.
What is the main target audience for Hyvä Commerce?
“Anyone with an online store. Typically we see that we are very strong in the small and medium-sized business – Enterprise market.”
Can you share more about the planned features of Hyvä Commerce? What gaps in Magento’s offering does it aim to fill?
“As I mentioned earlier, we just organised a townhall meeting with our most important agency partners to gather feedback about which features are needed the most. While we can’t say too much about this yet, we will concentrate on issues most users have with Magento, and add features that are mostly requested. Having operated in the Magento ecosystem for many years already, we have a pretty clear idea about the current gaps in Magento’s offering.”
What advantages will Hyvä Commerce offer to small and mid-sized merchants compared to other Magento options?
“While Magento is being maintained and kept secure by Adobe, for which we are very grateful, it lacks innovation. We aim to bring this innovation with new features and enhancement of existing features, so that Magento stays relevant and competitive. There are no other Magento options that offer this at this point, and we feel the responsibility to take this up. Luckily, our partnership with Mollie allows us to do that.”
Here’s a big shout out to the work done by the Hyvä team, but also to the agencies & developers using it everyday. We are excited about the latest projects we delivered using this solution and we cannot wait to see what the future will bring.
Are you interested in what we have achieved for our clients so far?
Feel free to read more about some of our latest projects:
- Revamped e-commerce for Thienpont Wine.
- Direct e-commerce approach for N.E.W.S Records.
- Building a webshop for Amanvida’s eco-friendly products.
Until next time,
Baldwin team.
