How we ended up building the open-source headless commerce engine, Medusa

Medusa is an open-source headless commerce platform build to lower the bar for when businesses and developers can start building headless commerce solutions.

We didn’t wake up one morning thinking to ourselves that we wanted to build a headless commerce engine, but rather we got to build Medusa through experience with the limitations of existing commerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce and similar. Before transitioning to working full-time on Medusa, we operated as an agency, building all kinds of tools for our customers. We built everything from portfolio websites to custom integrations to ecommerce websites, but quickly started specializing in the latter; as we found new customers we also experienced that many of them were hitting limitations with the platforms available at the time.

The problem really became evident when a client of ours, TEKLA Fabrics, expressed interest in switching platforms. We started looking for good alternatives but we realized that none of the existing solutions would support the expansion across markets and brand ownership that they required. Instead, we decided together with them that we should try to build a bespoke solution that would cater to their exact needs. So we began building a fully-fledged ecommerce platform with a CMS system, fulfillment system, etc. It was not soon after that we realized that we could not do everything well at once so we started removing parts of what we’d built and replacing them with integrations to better tools. In the end, we were left with a core that was capable of processing and managing orders, ensuring payments were going through, and handling basic product and customer data. What was even more important was that this core was extremely good at integrating other tools and as such able to function as the glue between all the tools and services in your ecommerce stack. Essentially we had built a headless ecommerce engine, simply by following what was easiest for us as developers and most cost-efficient and scalable for our customers.

Our customers were really happy with the solution as they were able to expand to multiple markets while picking and choosing from any services they found interesting without having to worry about the cost of integration. Furthermore, our customers got a high degree of ownership when using our custom-built solution, as they could ask us to build features that they needed and have them released typically within a couple of days. When contemplating how we could ensure the same level of ownership going forward it became clear that we had to open-source the solution so that no central organization would ever be in control of what was possible for the merchant. Open-sourcing Medusa would also bring a bunch of other benefits such as leveraging the community for feedback and contributions which further strengthens the product.

To follow the latest stage of our journey, please check out our GitHub repo on: https://github.com/medusajs/medusa