The Past, Present, and Future of E-commerce, PHP, and Open Source with Ben Marks

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This week, Varato's Matt Harris sat down with e-commerce veteran Ben Marks—Ambassador for the PHP Foundation , co-founder of Nomicore , founder of CommVisory , and former Director of Global Marketing Development for Shopware —to discuss the evolution of the web, the durability of PHP, the future of open source software, and the implications of the AI revolution.

💻 Ben Marks: An Accidental Career in E-commerce

Marks, who started his life as a sculptor , described his entire career in e-commerce as "entirely... accidental". His past roles include founding the Magento Association, serving as a Magento Evangelist at Adobe and Magento, and working as the Director of Development at Blue Acorn.

Reflecting on the early days of website development in the 90s and early 2000s, Marks noted the prevalence of people from diverse backgrounds, with surprisingly few holding classic computer science or electrical engineering degrees. When he was hiring at Blue Acorn, he found that local higher learning institutions weren't teaching web development, with some barely touching PHP for more than a day. He observed that early Magento, for instance, was essentially a Java enterprise app written in PHP, so a background in Java lent itself well to the platform.

🐘 The Durability of PHP in the Age of AI

When asked about the future of PHP over the next 10 years, Marks acknowledged its historical success, noting that technology and platform decisions tend to be "incredibly inertial".

• Ease of Learning: PHP's initial success came from its accessibility as a "friendly language". Marks, an autodidact, found it simple to get up and running. Unlike Java, which might give a stack trace with null pointer exceptions, PHP would often simply point out missing semicolons.

• Evolution and Stewardship: PHP was initially written in C in 1994 by Rasmus. It has evolved through the Zen era with big corporate backing, and now into its current PHP 7+ iteration, which saw a complete redo of the internals and is run by a foundation.

• A Developer-Friendly Tool: Marks views PHP as a very developer-friendly tool, a "fourth generation abstraction" that frameworks like Laravel, Symfony, Magento, and Shopware build upon.

• The AI Challenge: Marks believes that PHP's durability relies on intentional curation and advocacy. In an AI-driven development world, the underlying language (PHP, JavaScript, Go, etc.) will become "largely immaterial" for top-level functionality. If the PHP community doesn't actively shape its story and future, it risks a "heat death" as attention and investment shift to more general directions.

🤝 Open Source: A Hard Thing to Kill Off

Marks, often referred to as the "open source commerce guy" , tackled the question of whether open source or SaaS represents the future of technology.

• Low Barrier to Entry: Open source is "hard to kill off" because the barrier to entry remains consistently low. For Marks, the initial appeal of Magento was simply that it was free software he could inspect, allowing him to choose his own level of involvement, from simply using it to deep customization.

• The "Pay It Forward" Model: The open source ecosystem thrives on willing participation and a "pay us back" ethos. Marks recounts a colleague who spent three hours helping him understand Magento's layout XML, explaining that the way to pay him back was to "consider holding the ladder for the person behind".

• A Virtuous Cycle: Contributions—from code fixes to writing blog posts and hosting conferences—create a huge web of interconnected professionals and a sense of community and belonging.

• SaaS and the Evolving Market: SaaS platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce have set a high bar for reliability, apparent de-risked total cost of ownership, and ease of maintenance, which has influenced market expectations. However, Marks notes that the inherent flexibility of open source will always be necessary because we'll "never going to solve... one true way for people to buy and sell stuff to each other".

• Flexibility vs. Complexity: While SaaS attempts to be more flexible, "the more flexibility you have, probably the more complexity you have," which naturally limits how far a SaaS system can go.

Ultimately, Marks argues that open source projects will enjoy longevity as long as they focus on their customers' expectations and solve their problems, evolving away from the idea that "open source means open code and I run my own infrastructure".

❓ What's Next?

The conversation touched on the parallels between the current AI race and the dot-com race of the 90s , the rise of techno-feudalism , and the need for new generations to find an optimistic path forward.

Would you like to hear more of Ben Marks' thoughts on the future of headless commerce?

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