How we built an open-source alternative to Shopify

As the picture of this article indicates, the solution has rapidly gained popularity among developers in only three months the project has reached a milestone of 5,000 GitHub stars 🤩 In this post, I want to give a bit of insight into the story behind Medusa

TL:DR, Medusa is:

• A headless open-source Shopify alternative

• Aiming to lower the bar for when developers and merchants can start building headless

• Originally build together with a client, TEKLA Fabrics, to give them a scaleable and unique ecom setup

What is it?

Medusa is the open-source alternative to Shopify. We provide most of the same standard features that Shopify's backend gives out of the box (e.g. E2E order handling, easy-to-use admin interface etc.) but with a much better developer experience; giving unlimited customization and extensibility options. In addition, we have aimed to fix some of the regular backend hurdles we know from Shopify like full multi-regional support (local currency, shipment, and payment options) and fully automated exchange + claim handling

What is the purpose of Medusa?

Medusa aims to lower the bar for when developers and merchants can start building headless. For many years, the headless approach to commerce has been an enterprise exclusivity due to the large number of resources that it required. You would need frontend developers to build your storefront and backend developers to maintain your infrastructure and services. From the get-go, we've focused on lowering the bar for when you can enter the headless commerce space. We do this by 1) removing the need for a complex infrastructure through a clever plugin architecture. The core engine and all plugins run as part of the same Node.js server which is contrary to how other headless platforms need connectors and translation layers between the commerce engine and third-party services. And 2) we have a very high focus on optimizing the developer experience through strong tooling such as quick-starters, documentation, CLI, reference, etc.

How did it come to exist?

We originally build the solution together with a customer, TEKLA Fabrics, back when we were operating an agency. They were running a WooCommerce setup and wanted to change to a more scalable platform. The requirements were:

• a custom storefront for them to own their brand identity and the entire user experience
• a flexible backend for them to scale with as their business needs grow
• a multi-regional setup allowing them to operate in multiple different markets in multiple different currencies through a single platform

After researching different solutions in the market it became clear that there were no platforms that could cater to the requirements in a way that would be easily maintainable into the future. We had evaluated solutions like Shopify, but had oftentimes been in situations where there was a need to "hack" our way to a feature which made us frustrated and a bit embarrassed about the work we were delivering. To overcome this we decided to create a bespoke solution, which we designed to be as flexible as possible so that we would never be in a situation where we couldn't support a customer request in a native way. We shared offices with them for a year giving us the best possibilities for improving and iterating on the product, quickly and efficiently.

Fast-forward 2 years and we open-sourced the full solution in August and has gotten a lot of very positive feedback from other developers and already have a lot of new use cases being built with Medusa. Check Medusa out!