Theodore Wittmann

Hey — if you’re a marketer or working alongside one, this is the practical, no-fluff walkthrough you’ve been waiting for. We’re going to show how to use Magento 2’s Page Builder to give marketing teams real control over product visibility and stock status without pinging engineering every time. Expect code snippets, step-by-step config, and small automation patterns so marketers can independently tweak stock-related rules from Page Builder blocks and templates.

Why Page Builder for marketer independence?

Page Builder is already a marketer-first tool for building content and landing pages. What many shops miss is treating Page Builder not just as a visual composer, but as an operational interface for marketing-controlled product behavior: stock visibility toggles, forced stock attributes, automated syncs and dynamic show/hide rules. With a few sensible extensions and a little integration code, you can:

• Expose product-level flags like Force

Let’s keep it real: Magento 2 ships with a solid set of built‑in security controls, but “solid” doesn’t mean “complete for every use case.” If you’re running a store — small or large — you need to understand what Magento protects out of the box, what it doesn’t, and when it’s time to add third‑party tools or managed services (or both). This post walks you through Magento 2’s native security features, maps them to common vulnerabilities, gives a practical audit checklist with commands and snippets, and explains concrete cases where buying extra security makes sense. I’ll be relaxed and direct, like talking to a colleague who’s getting their hands dirty for the first time.

Quick overview: What Magento 2 protects natively

Out of the box Magento 2 includes a number of defensive measures you should know about before you reach for extra tools:

• CSRF protection via form keys — Magento uses form_key tokens to protect forms and state‑changing actions from cross‑site

Why I Care About Magento 2 Service Contracts (and you should too)

If you write Magento 2 extensions, eventually you’ll bump into the term "Service Contracts." It sounds formal, a bit bureaucratic — but in reality, they are one of the most practical tools Magento provides to keep your code stable, maintainable, and upgrade-friendly. Think of service contracts as the public API of your module: clean interfaces, predictable data objects, and a clear separation between what other code calls and how your module actually implements the logic.

What is a Service Contract and why Magento recommends them

At its simplest, a Service Contract in Magento 2 is a set of PHP interfaces that define:

• Data structures (Data Interfaces)
• Operations (Service Interfaces)
• Sometimes API exposure (webapi.xml for REST/SOAP)

Magento recommends them because they:

• Define a stable public API for your module.

Why upselling on Magento 2 matters

Let’s be real: most stores can squeeze another 10–30% from the customers already on the site. Upselling and smart cross-selling aren’t magic — they’re about the right offer, shown at the right time, with the right context. On Magento 2, you already have powerful building blocks (related/upsell/cross-sell products, layered navigation, full product page control). What you need is the design and logic to turn those blocks into conversions.

What this post covers (quick roadmap)

• Core principles of high-converting product pages
• How to display dynamic stock status and create urgency (using Force Product Stock Status pattern)
• Cross-selling strategies that respect real availability
• Optimizing product pages for out-of-stock products with alternatives
• Using stock data to personalize recommendations and increase Average Order Value (AOV)
• Concrete Magento 2 code examples and step-by-step

Let’s build a clean, responsible, and reusable “product sampling” program in Magento 2 — the kind of module you can drop into stores to let shoppers request free or discounted samples, with fine-grained eligibility rules, cart and order integration, and admin reporting. I’ll walk you through the architecture, the core code pieces, and practical examples for beauty, food, and high-tech brands. No fluff — just explanations you can follow along with, copy-paste, and adapt.

Why build a custom sampling module?

Many merchants want to offer samples as a marketing lever. But built-in product types don’t capture the business rules: how many samples per customer, whether samples are free or discounted, per-category eligibility, or reporting on sample-to-purchase conversion. A custom module gives you a specialized product type and workflows, so sampling behaves predictably and is easy to manage.

High-level architecture

Here’s the mental model before we code.

Introduction

Managing inventory across multiple warehouses can feel like juggling while riding a unicycle—especially when each site is running its own Magento instance or when you rely on extensions to tune stock behavior. If you want a single place to see stock levels, automate status updates, trigger alerts for critical shortages, and optimize transfers between warehouses in (near) real time, building a custom inventory management dashboard is a pragmatic solution.

This post walks you through building a practical, extensible inventory dashboard for multi-warehouse operations, with concrete code examples and integration tips for Magento 2. I’ll include how to integrate the Force Product Stock Status extension into the dashboard, automate stock-status updates across sites, create custom critical-stock alerts, and optimize inventory transfers with real-time synchronization.

What this dashboard solves

• Centralized visibility across multiple warehouses

Introduction

If your Magento 2 store handles B2B customers who buy regularly — think office supplies, chemicals, or food distribution — building a custom "Scheduled Order" module can save time, lower churn, and improve retention. In this post I’ll walk you through a practical approach to implement a recurring scheduled-order system in Magento 2: architecture, cron jobs, payment automation, admin UI, and customer experience. I’ll keep it relaxed and practical, with step-by-step code examples you can adapt.

What this module does (brief)

• Create and store subscription-like scheduled orders (not a subscription for content, but scheduled B2B purchases).
• Run cron jobs to generate actual orders at the right time.
• Charge customers automatically using saved payment tokens / vault.
• Provide admin UI to manage schedules and a merchant-friendly order log.
• Provide customer-facing controls to change frequency, pause or cancel

If you’re building B2B flows in Magento 2, chances are you’ll need a proper Request for Quote (RFQ) system at some point. In this post I’ll walk you through how to build a custom RFQ module for complex B2B products in Magento 2 — architecture, DB entities, multi-level approval workflows, advanced product configuration handling, automated email notifications, and an admin dashboard to manage and analyze RFQs. Think of this as a practical, code-first walkthrough you can adapt to your store or extension.

Why a custom RFQ module?

Built-in Magento pricing and cart flows are great for standard retail. But B2B RFQs often need:

• Structured RFQ entities (requests, items, created quotes)
• Multi-level approval (procurement, finance, management)
• Support for configurable and highly-customized products
• Conditional pricing and custom price calculators
• Automated notifications and reporting

A custom

Hey — if you want to add a trade-in or upgrade program to your Magento 2 store, this post walks you through the architecture, the data model, the key code pieces and a pragmatic workflow so you can ship a working module. I’ll talk like I’d explain it to a colleague who’s comfortable with Magento basics but hasn’t built a full-featured custom module like this yet.

What this post covers

- High-level architecture to integrate a trade-in system into Magento 2’s ecosystem.
- How to store trade-in offers and compute automatic credit values.
- Workflow for approval and processing of traded items.
- How to integrate trade-in credit with the existing checkout and order flow.
- Best practices to maximize customer adoption and conversions.
- Step-by-step code examples for the most important parts.

Why build a trade-in/upgrade module?

Trade-in programs help increase average order value, reduce return friction, and keep customers in your ecosystem. A