Mage Camp organiser introduction: On Tap
Meet On Tap, one of five agencies co-organising Mage Camp 2026, and the team behind the very first Mage Camp back in 2009.
Read
Articles
Loading the latest writing…
Article
Why we're building Mage Camp: The story behind a not-for-profit event for eCommerce merchants
On any normal day, we're five competing agencies. But when it comes to Mage Camp, we set that rivalry aside to build something rarer: a not-for-profit, no-pitch growth event for eCommerce merchants. Here's the story of why five rivals decided this was worth building together.
17 August 2026·6 min read·Updated 17 August 2026
If you've ever sat through a conference talk that turned out to be a product demo in disguise, you know the feeling: you came for advice, you got a pitch. We wanted to build a day that never does that to a merchant. A room where every talk earns its place because it's genuinely useful, not because someone paid to be on stage. So we built Mage Camp.
We've seen this room before, and it worked
Mage Camp isn't a startup idea we dreamed up over a slide deck. It's a name with history. Back in 2009, Mage Camp launched in London as the first English-language Magento event anywhere in the world, at a time when "eCommerce conference" barely existed as a category. It became significant enough that Magento itself chose that stage to unveil Enterprise Edition, the product line that would eventually become Adobe Commerce, in front of a room of early adopters and a live-stream audience watching from around the globe.
That event was built by people in the ecosystem, for people in the ecosystem, not as a vendor showcase. After years away, we're bringing it back with the same spirit, just rooted in Manchester now and rebuilt for merchants dealing with AI, composable commerce, and a far more competitive online landscape than 2009 ever saw. The name hasn't changed. Neither has the mission: community over competition.
The unlikely team behind Mage Camp
"We" are five agencies who, on any normal working day, are competitors. On Tap, PushOn, GENE Commerce, Foundation Commerce, and Monsoon Consulting pitch against each other, and we definitely don't share client lists over coffee. But when it comes to Mage Camp, a one-day Magento and Adobe Commerce growth event returning to Manchester on 14 October 2026, we set that rivalry aside. Here’s why.
No single agency sees the whole picture. One of us might be deep in retention and lifecycle work, another in performance marketing, another in platform architecture or international expansion. Between the five of us, we cover the full spread of what actually drives eCommerce growth, decades of hands-on experience across acquisition, conversion, retention, and operations, and that breadth is exactly what makes Mage Camp's programme stronger than anything one agency could put together alone.
It also means the event doesn't skew toward one specialism or one client type. Build something with only one agency behind it, and the agenda quietly bends towards that agency's services, its partners, its point of view. We didn't want that. So instead of one of us running it, we pooled people, time, and kit, five agencies who are supposed to be rivals, so a merchant sitting in the room hears from people who've solved genuinely different problems, not one agency's narrow view of what "growth" means. No single agency owns Mage Camp, either: the effort, and the credit, is shared equally across all five of us.
