Magento 2 & Hyvä, done right by one developer.

MCP is an open protocol Anthropic shipped in November 2024 that lets large language models talk to external tools and data sources through a standard interface. Think of it as USB-C for AI — one socket, many devices. For Magento, MCP means Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor can query your catalogue, check stock, summarise yesterday’s orders, or draft a discount code without you writing five different REST integrations. The protocol crossed tribal lines fast: OpenAI and Google both adopted it in early 2025, and Adobe made it the default agent protocol for Commerce at Summit 2026. That puts MCP in the same “assume it’s there” bucket as JSON-RPC or OAuth — you build for it once and every major AI client gets your Magento data for free.

The honest minimum is 12 weeks of daily sales data per SKU — that’s enough for Prophet to lock onto a weekly pattern and produce a usable 4–6 week forecast. With 26 weeks you start getting yearly seasonality. With 52+ weeks (one full annual cycle including your peak season) Prophet really shines and you can forecast 90 days out with sub-15% MAPE on most retail SKUs. Below 12 weeks, do NOT use Prophet — fall back to a 28-day moving average plus a manual safety-stock multiplier. The model will overfit garbage if you feed it too little.

Both. Everything in the build runs on stock Magento 2.4.7+ Open Source — there’s no Adobe Commerce-specific API used. The observer hooks into catalog_product_save_after, which is identical on both editions. The MessageQueue layer uses Magento’s built-in MessageQueue module (also Open Source). The only Adobe Commerce-only consideration is the Image Editor extension Adobe ships, which you’d disable to avoid duplicate processing. Bottom line: Open Source merchants get the full benefit without paying for Adobe Commerce just for image handling.

Yes — in the segments where it’s strongest. Magento (Open Source + Adobe Commerce) will dominate enterprise B2B, multi-store, regulated industries, and EU-compliance-heavy commerce through 2030 and beyond. Where it bleeds is the SMB / DTC segment under $5M GMV, which Shopify already won and now cements with Sidekick + Hydrogen. Magento survives, but its addressable market shrinks: from “everyone” to “serious B2B + custom-heavy enterprise.” That’s still a multi-billion-dollar segment globally. The platform isn’t going anywhere; the merchants who choose it just look more specific.

No — they are different products from the same company. Hyvä Theme is a free, open-source (OSL3) Tailwind + Alpine storefront frontend for Magento, released to free in November 2025. Hyvä Commerce is a paid commercial suite of admin, media, and CMS modules that sits on top of Magento Open Source. You can run Theme without Commerce, but most stores that buy Commerce also use Theme.

AWS wins on Magento share, ecosystem, and price-perf in us-east. Roughly 65–70% of self-hosted Magento stores in my book run on AWS. The canonical stack is EC2 (compute) + RDS Aurora MySQL (database) + ElastiCache Redis (sessions + cache) + OpenSearch Service (catalog search) + CloudFront / S3. Every Magento agency and freelancer has tuned this stack a dozen times.

Azure wins when you’re a Microsoft shop. If the customer is on Azure AD, Microsoft 365, Power BI, Dynamics ERP — running Magento on Azure App Service + Azure Database for MySQL + Azure Cache for Redis means one bill, one IAM, one support contract. The Magento community is smaller on Azure but Adobe officially supports it.

GCP is the dark horse. Best raw price-perf, especially with Cloud Run + Cloud SQL HA + Memorystore. But the Magento community on GCP is tiny — expect to do more DevOps work yourself because there are fewer pre-baked Terraform / Pulumi modules. I’d only pick GCP if the customer is already there.

Rule of thumb: AWS unless there’s a Microsoft-shop reason to choose Azure or a strategic-deal reason to choose GCP. The price difference at most workloads is <15% — not enough to override ecosystem maturity.

For a typical Magento store, six types drive most rich-result eligibility:

• Product — every PDP. Drives star ratings, price snippets, and Google Merchant Listings (free).
• BreadcrumbList — site-wide. Drives the breadcrumb trail in the SERP instead of the raw URL.
• Organization — once per site. Drives the knowledge panel + logo in branded SERPs.
• Article — blog and pillar pages. Drives Article rich result + Top Stories eligibility.
• FAQPage — FAQ-heavy CMS pages. The FAQ accordion in SERP is still supported for some queries (Google quietly demoted it for product/commercial intent in 2023).
• LocalBusiness — for stores with a physical address. Drives the local pack + Google Business Profile cross-checks.

The validator supports all six plus another nine (Person, Service, SoftwareApplication, Course, HowTo, Recipe, Event, Review, DefinedTerm) which Magento stores emit less often but still ship for certain use cases (Service-type pages on Magento + Hyvä service-business stores; Recipe-type for food brands; Course-type for academy/training sites; etc.).