Magento and Adobe Commerce merchants are getting a conference of their own.
Mage Camp will take over Sister, in Manchester’s Renold Building, on Wednesday 14th October 2026 – with a day of community fringe events, including Women in eCommerce, the day before. Merchants go free.
Mage Camp is community-owned and non-profit. It’s organised by five independent agencies — On Tap, PushON, GENE Commerce, Foundation Commerce and Monsoon Consulting — and supported by the Magento Association and Manchester Digital.
The brief is simple: put the people who run stores at the centre, and keep the sales patter out of the room.
The programme runs across two parallel tracks and sticks to what moves the numbers: traffic, conversion, retention, average order value and day-to-day operations. Attendees can expect merchant case studies, technical deep dives, lightning talks and roundtables, plus honest conversations about performance, platform decisions and migrations.
The speaker line-up mixes merchants, practitioners and people who’ve scaled stores for real. It includes Ankit Jadav (global head of digital operations, Portmeirion Group), Duke Tanson (chief digital officer, Glamira), Phil Knight (chief digital experience officer, Haier Europe), John Hughes (VP of product, Hyvä), Karlijn Löwik (CEO, RUMvision), James Allen-Lewis (managing director, Wind & Kite) and Katie Gallagher OBE (managing director, Manchester Digital).
Talks already announced include ‘The Second Purchase Problem: You Won the Customer. Now Don’t Lose Them’ from Emily Berriman of Foundation CRM, ‘How B2B merchants win on Magento’ from James Allen-Lewis, and Mat O’Connor of Actuate on why ‘you can’t see conversion problems when your website is on fire’.
Tuesday 13th October brings the fringe: a free Women in Ecommerce panel and a free pre-event networking evening, each bookable on its own. Every session is live streamed, and ticket holders keep access to recordings for 12 months.
The event is backed by headline sponsors Hypernode and Stripe, with further support from Corefinity and Hyvä.
Simon Wharton, founder of PushON and one of Mage Camp’s co-organisers, said: “Most ecommerce events are built for the people selling to merchants, not the merchants themselves.
“We wanted to flip that. Mage Camp is free for anyone running a Magento store, the talks come from people who’ve done the work, and nobody’s getting cornered by a sales team at the coffee station.
“Manchester’s always punched above its weight in ecommerce, so it felt right to bring the community together here. Come for the talks, stay for the conversations — that’s where the good stuff happens.”
Dan Garner, founder and MD of On Tap, said: “On paper, five agencies putting on an event together shouldn’t work — we’re all chasing the same clients. But the Magento community has always been at its best when people share what they know, and merchants have told us loud and clear they’re tired of events that feel like a sales floor.
“So we’ve parked the logos at the door. Every talk has to earn its place by being useful to someone running a store on Monday morning. If a merchant walks out with one idea that lifts their conversion or keeps a customer coming back, we’ve done our job.”