Checkout Summit 2026 in Palermo: A Recap

I'm back from #CheckoutSummit in Palermo, and I'm still smiling.

This was a special conference in many ways. The talks were excellent and highly relevant. The conversations were deep, open, and honest. I reconnected with friends I hadn't seen in a while, met new ones, and what stood out most was the feeling around it all.

Nothing felt forced. The connections felt real, human, and meaningful.

A different kind of conference

A lot of conferences these days feel like networking marathons with a side of slides. Checkout Summit is the opposite: a deliberately small, focused event built around the people actually shipping checkout, payments, and conversion infrastructure for WooCommerce and beyond.

That focus changes everything. You don't need to "find" the right people in the hallway, because almost everyone in the room is the right person. By the second coffee break it stopped feeling like a conference and started feeling like a working group.

The talks that stuck with me

Three sessions in particular kept coming up in conversations afterwards.

James Kemp - "WooCommerce Unfiltered: Inside the Decisions Shaping the Platform" A candid look at how decisions actually get made inside WooCommerce, what trade-offs the team is wrestling with, and where the platform is heading. The "unfiltered" part wasn't marketing - James was genuinely open about the things that work and the things that don't, which is exactly the kind of conversation our ecosystem needs more of.

Katie Keith - "ShopifyDiary 365: A Year Building Shopify Apps (And What WooCommerce Can Learn)" Katie spent a year building inside the Shopify ecosystem and brought back a stack of observations. The interesting part wasn't the "Shopify is better/worse" framing - it was the very concrete list of developer-experience and merchant-experience details that WooCommerce could simply adopt. Uncomfortable in the best way.

Patrick Rauland - "An Apples-to-Apples Look at WooCommerce vs. Shopify After a Large-Scale Migration" Real numbers, real migration, real pain points. Patrick walked through the parts of WooCommerce that genuinely outperform Shopify, the parts where the gap is real, and where the difference is mostly perception. As someone who lives inside WooCommerce conversion tracking every day, this was the talk I was scribbling notes through.

The common thread: nobody was selling. People were sharing what they had actually learned by building.

Palermo did its part

A conference is a conference. Palermo, on the other hand, was something else.

Sunshine, the sea, food that was almost unfairly good, and that relaxed Sicilian rhythm where dinner starts late and ends later. It made everything feel a little more generous.

I also achieved one of my favorite goals for the week: swimming in the sea every morning before sessions. There's something about starting the day in cold-ish water with the sun coming up that recalibrates you for everything that follows.

And then there was the food. I won't list everything, but I will mention this:

If you've never had a cartoccio within thirty kilometers of where it was invented, you've technically had a cartoccio. Just not the cartoccio.

Side events and community

Some of the best moments happened outside the conference room. A street-food gathering with long communal tables, dinners with the sun setting over the sea, late-night chats that drifted from technical deep-dives to family stories and back again.

We were happy to support the side events as one of the sponsors - alongside Mollie, Crucible CRM, LMPR and Wise. These events are where the real conversations happen, and being part of making them possible felt like the right way to give back to the community that's behind so much of what we build at SweetCode.

Thank you, and what's next

Huge thank you to Rodolfo Melogli and the whole organizing team for creating something with such a wonderful atmosphere. The level of care behind the scenes - the pacing, the venue, the small touches, the way side events were stitched together - was visible everywhere.

I'm grateful, inspired, and already craving more. I'm looking forward to #CheckoutSummit2027, and I'll support the next edition in every way I can.

If you build, sell, or care about checkout in the WooCommerce world, do yourself a favor and put it on your calendar. Keep an eye on checkoutsummit.com for next year's dates.

See you in 2027.