Headless commerce framework
I needed to build an ecommerce solution in a modern way, using the tools I know - node, TypeScript. No existing framework had what I needed. I figured that others are looking for it too.
The business model of Vendure is to provide a first-class open-source platform, and then offer optional paid extras that can plug in to the core. Also known as "open core".
Today sees the first sale of a licence for paid Vendure plugins! I wrote more about how it came about here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/first-sale-of-1-500-after-4-years-hard-work-55d9223e08
IBM, one of the world’s largest tech companies, is using Vendure to replace its legacy commerce systems. E-commerce applications built on outdated, expensive, difficult-to-maintain proprietary solutions have been migrated to Vendure.
What’s great about this story is that is shows clearly how far open-source as a movement has come, that a relatively new, lean project like Vendure is replacing proprietary systems in the enterprise.
It also highlights just how flexible Vendure is. Integrating seamlessly with existing enterprise systems run by separate teams. Extending to handle advanced multi-tenant use-cases. The case study contains a lot of illustrative detail so go read the whole thing!
All in all this is really exciting - you can read the full write-up here: https://www.vendure.io/case-study/ibm/
So it's been almost exactly 3 years sine the first commit to the Vendure repo, and today we launched v1.0!
This launch sets the stage for the next phase of the project: community growth. This is where focus will shift to encompass more marketing, partnership and community-building efforts.
The end-goal business-wise is an open-core model where we sell paid plugins on top of the open-source core framework. To make that viable we need a critical mass of users. So that's the next target!
Release announcement: https://www.vendure.io/blog/2021/05/announcing-vendure-v1.0/
An agency that used Vendure for a major project recently wrote about the experience.
Great article that discusses why they chose Vendure over incumbents such as Shopify & Magento.
https://www.ekreative.com/blog/modern-e-commerce-development-with-headless-frameworks/
I had a call today with a web dev agency who are using Vendure to power the national online retail application of a major European supermarket chain.
I can't reveal any specifics of the company, but if you live in Europe you probably have heard of it.
We chatted about the development & scaling challenges involved and about what features they are missing. It was extremely useful to hear about what issues they have run into - they are operating on a much larger scale than other projects I've seen so I was able to learn about what parts of the framework need attention in this regard.
The project is in the latter stages, and I hope to be able to generate an in-depth case-study once it goes live.
This past week saw the independent publication of 2 articles featuring Vendure - a first as far as I am aware.
The first is an evaluation of modern e-commerce frameworks: https://www.monterail.com/blog/e-commerce-platform-comparison
The second is a technical tutorial on production deployment: https://dev.to/oncode/how-to-setup-a-vendure-e-commerce-api-on-a-dokku-droplet-3enc/
Nice to see some community and name recognition forming around the project!
After around 2 years working on the open-source ecommerce framework vendure.io, I got my first paying customer!
It was unexpected - I was approached via my Slack channel by a company who are evaluating frameworks for building a new product on top of. I provided 2 days of consulting to help speed up their evaluation of Vendure.
Support/consulting is not my goal in terms of business model, since it doesn't scale so easily. But it's still exciting to start seeing enough interest in my work that companies are willing to pay for my time!
Yesterday the Vendure Slack workspace passed 100 members! It has been really rewarding to grow our small community and interact daily with developers who are building things with Vendure.
Slack has also proven to be a great tool for business development leads - quite a few initial contacts on Slack developed into video calls with potential for future collaboration.
Vendure is an open-source e-commerce framework targeted at JavaScript developers. It's been under development for almost 2 years now.
At the suggestion of a friend, I did a "soft launch" by posting to Hacker News and Reddit.
The Hacker News link was swallowed into the void. 3 upvotes, a couple of comments and about 20 visits to the GitHub repo. Posted around 11am CET Tuesday morning, so maybe the timing was off (US was asleep).
Reddit, on the other hand went really well! My friend posted it to /r/JavaScript (812k members) yesterday afternoon (https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/ez9bex/vendure_an_open_source_magento_alternative/). The post went to the top and currently has ~100 upvotes and a bunch of positive feedback and interest!
Also resulted in about 50 extra stars on the GitHub repo, which always helps.
Very encouraging!
I've just published my first blog post which is not just a release announcement: https://www.vendure.io/blog/2019/09/vendure-tooling-overview-of-a-modern-developer-toolchain/
I guess it could be considered "content marketing". Right now my target audience is developers so I've written a very developer-focused piece.
Personally I can't stand the typical low-effort listicle-type content marketing piece ("7 awesome jQuery plugins you need" etc), so I wrote something that I would write anyway for my personal blog, but put it on the Vendure blog instead.
I'm quite happy with this since it scratches my itch for technical writing whilst also (hopefully) getting people curious about the project itself.
I needed to build an ecommerce solution in a modern way, using the tools I know - node, TypeScript. No existing framework had what I needed. I figured that others are looking for it too.