11 ms·

Show HN: Medusa – Open-source alternative to Shopify

373 points by owjuhl 5y ago

Reubend 5y ago
Congrats, this is one of the best landing pages I've seen this year. It looks really nice, and I love the idea of a headless ecommerce platform, especially one that comes with a nice backend GUI for managing inventory, etc. I took a quick look through the documentation as well, and was pleasantly surprised by the maturity of the features that it has. This provides pretty much all of the basics I think one would need to manage a medium sized store. One area I do think could be improved perhaps is in the internationalization; it seems to me that every product has a single string to be the description, a single string to be the title, etc. with no easy way to localize the text across different regions. I also am curious about the pricing; the landing page mentions that you can get started for free, and "start building for free", but is there some component that costs money down the road? I don't see any pricing page on the website so for now I'm assuming it's 100% open source.
- owjuhl 5y ago
  Many thanks for the kind words Reubend! And the feedback for internationalization is on point; it is in our roadmap to add a localization element to the core. Though, not in the very near future, since this is more a nice-to-have feature compared to a lot of other things in these early stages. You are correct in regards to pricing. We are 100% open source, and are soon to release an easy `npx` command to get you up and running with everything in a matter of seconds. Until then you can find our admin and other simple starters under our Github organization.
  - moneywoes 5y ago
    What did you use to build the landing page? Also the GitHub and LinkedIn buttons don’t work on it
    - abstract_put 5y ago
      Specifically the GitHub button at the bottom of the page, the GitHub button at the top does work and leads to: https://github.com/medusajs/medusa https://github.com/medusajs/medusa
  - tsuujin 5y ago
    A word of caution: every project I have ever worked on that added i18n “later” has strongly regretted it. I18n is much easier to tackle early than as a refactor.
- RL_Quine 5y ago
  It renders almost unusably for me in Safari 14. https://a.uguu.se/khPaNnDA.png https://a.uguu.se/khPaNnDA.png
  - owjuhl 5y ago
    Sorry - my bad! Will fix that immediately. Thanks for showing it.
    - owjuhl 5y ago
      It seems to be a Safari + Webflow issue, so using a different browser would be the best solution right now :)
      - blitzar 5y ago
        Your main logo (top left hand corner) directs to a bad url btw.
      - DenseComet 5y ago
        Could be an issue with content blockers and safari. The page works fine with safari for me.
    - dotancohen 5y ago
      While we're at it, the "Open Positions" page needs some work. I see that the page is hosted on notion.io so this might be a review of their process, not yours, but it will certainly affect you if you depend on it for acquiring talent. Clicking the links under the "Open Positions" heading simply opens a small text popup repeating the name of the position. In fact, these are not even links so non-mouse-users cannot target them. Here's your screenshot, tested on Firefox 91 on Kubuntu with and without an ad blocker. https://i.imgur.com/jOEYsei.png https://i.imgur.com/jOEYsei.png
- brookside 5y ago
  Something about the landing page invoked Team Treehouse visual style: https://teamtreehouse.com/ https://teamtreehouse.com/
- dubcanada 5y ago
  My biggest problem is there is zero discussion on why this is better/worse then the other 500 options available. WooCommerce, Craft Commerce, Drupal Commerce, Magento, Vendura, etc all offer APIs to build a headless ecommerce platform. Why is this better/worse?
  - ukyrgf 5y ago
    I mean right off the bat it means not having to maintain WordPress, Craft, Drupal, Magento. I've maintained all of those at some point over the years and I'll probably have nightmares tonight now that you reminded me of them. Don't know Vendura.
    - dewey 5y ago
      Isn't it just a matter of time until this one also becomes hard to maintain? These other platforms are complicated for a reason and that is that ecommerce isn't easy. Localizations (Medusa doesn't seem to have a proper system for that yet according to the top comment), deep support for taxes in various countries, changing tax rates, b2b and b2c price rates etc.
      - ukyrgf 5y ago
        I'm sure it could become hard to maintain, but it is built as an ecommerce platform. Plugins like Woocommerce are just one of innumerable amounts of plugins that WordPress has to attempt to not break.
        dewey 5y ago
        I was more referring to the dedicated and feature rich frameworks like Drupal and Magento than the WordPress plug-ins.
    - pineconewarrior 5y ago
      at the mere utterance of "Magento" thousands of souls to cry out in terror
    - 5y ago
DoctorOW 5y ago
Personally, I'd prefer the submission title kept the webpage title's "Open-source headless commerce engine". Much more descriptive of what it actually does. Some Shopify customers use it headless but I'd be surprised if even the majority do.
agustif 5y ago
This looks super nice! I've been interested in the ecommerce + graphql space for a while, yours seems a really great project, will be following along and looking into migration paths! I love the stack choices as well, seems much more lightweight and approachable to me than other alternatives like saleor (which I don't really dig these days anymore) or vendure which is an excellent project too but with a stack I am no too familiar with (NestJS, Angular)... So kudos for making this open source!
stefanvdw1 5y ago
Looks very good! I’ve been looking for a headless e-commerce solution for a new product for a while and I might go for Medusa. One thing I was missing was a demo admin panel and demo store to get a bit of a feel for what is possible.
- ngellner 5y ago
  That sounds really interesting! We are working on getting to a demo to showcase it a bit better on out dotcom as well, but we would be happy to give you a personal walk-through of the solution if you could be interested Just reach us on Discord and we can set up a session either in the weekend or next week :-) https://discord.gg/F87eGuwkTp https://discord.gg/F87eGuwkTp
  - stefanvdw1 5y ago
    Sounds great! I’ll definitely reach out as it seems like a great platform after diving some more into it
raman162 5y ago
Very impressive work! This seems promising and well thought-out. I plan on taking a deeper look at this especially regarding payments.
- Vadim__Smirnov 5y ago
  Thank you so much! Would love to help you with onboarding and intro session, feel free to join our Discord, so we can see how we can help you https://discord.gg/DSHySyMu https://discord.gg/DSHySyMu :)
vira28 5y ago
Awesome work. How does it differ from WooCommerce? Perhaps that might my other question. What is headless ecommerce platform? Thanks.
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  A headless ecommerce platform is an API first ecommerce platform where you build your own FEs on it.
jazzyjackson 5y ago
i’ve gotta ask, why name it Medusa?
- ngellner 5y ago
  Great question! If you check how the Greek Medusa ended her life then you might see some linkage with building headless ;-)
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    ahhhhhahaha good job
  - boringg 5y ago
    Right I guess that kind of in a warped way makes sense, but medusa was also a monstrous mess of a creature that would turn people to stone. I mean I get the headless reference but wouldn't it make sense to be called Perseus (the hero who killed Medusa)? Named after beheading a monstrous creature, instead of being named after the creature?
    - IgorPartola 5y ago
      Pedantic stuff incoming: Medusa was actually a young maiden who was raped and shamed into isolation which is what drove her mad. She wasn’t a monster, she became one in reaction to what was done to her. From Wikipedia: > In a late version of the Medusa myth, by the Roman poet Ovid (Metamorphoses 4.794–803), Medusa was originally a beautiful maiden, but when Poseidon had sex with her in Minerva's (i.e. Athena's) temple,[7] Athena punished Medusa by transforming her beautiful hair into horrible snakes.
      - dannyw 5y ago
        Additional context from Wikipedia: > Whether Ovid means that Medusa was a willing participant is unclear. Hard, p. 61, says she was "seduced"; Grimal, s.v. Gorgons, p. 174, says she was "ravished"; Tripp, s.v. Medusa, p. 363 says she "yielded". In the original Latin text, Ovid uses the verb "vitiasse" which is translated to mean "violate" or "corrupt".
Bishop_ 5y ago
The linkedin and github links in the footer aren't set. Best of luck.
mariushn 5y ago
Thanks for building it as open source! Few q's: 1. It doesn't seem to be multi-tenant (that is, hosting multiple shops/companies with one db). Are there plans to add multi-tenancy? 2. What are the major differences vs https://github.com/vendure-ecommerce/vendure https://github.com/vendure-ecommerce/vendure ? (another nodejs solution, with included Admin panel and storefront) 3. How do you plan to monetize?
- s_severus 5y ago
  I'm the maintainer of Vendure, so I might be able to offer a bit of insight on your second question, after having studied the Medusa repo a little. Medusa devs, please correct me if any of this is wrong! * The Vendure project is a bit older and I think a bit further ahead in terms of awareness and adoption. * Medusa lists a team of 10 on their notion board, plus a bunch of investors. Vendure is just me (plus OSS contributors) and is bootstrapped. * Medusa exposes a REST-style API, whereas Vendure uses GraphQL. * Medusa seems to be mostly JS built directly on Express, whereas Vendure is TypeScript built on NestJS. * We're both using TypeORM for the data layer. * As mentioned, Medusa does not ship with an admin interface, whereas Vendure does. * Medusa seems to have a whole bunch of supported integrations in the monorepo (Stripe, Adyen, Klarna, Sendgrid, Twilio), whereas Vendure does not currently have any official integrations like this. * Vendure supports multi-channel, multi-language stores. Could not see much about Medusa's support for that, but maybe I missed it. All in all, Medusa is very much the most similar project I've seen to Vendure. The Node ecosystem has long been neglected in terms of e-commerce dev tooling, so I'm glad to see more interest in this area. Full-stack JS/TS/Node can be very productive and really nice to work with, in my experience. Congratulations to the Medusa team for the launch. Slightly envious that your post has gained so much traction compared to the ~3 upvotes from my launch a few months ago, but no hard feelings, haha. edit: formatting
  - pelasaco 5y ago
    > Congratulations to the Medusa team for the launch. Slightly envious that your post has gained so much traction > compared to the ~3 upvotes from my launch a few months ago, but no hard feelings, haha Interesting. Maybe your title wasn't so "click-bait" as this one and you linked your github repo instead of your well made website https://www.vendure.io/ https://www.vendure.io/? Both are definitely great projects!
sent-hil 5y ago
Interesting project. Couple questions: 1. What separates you from Spree which recently started offering a headless platform as well? 2. Do you support Tax/Shipping calculations? 3. Where can I see a list of all supported integrations? 4. Do you offer deployment options?
codegeek 5y ago
Looks nice but to be a Shopify alternative, headless is not the way. Does it come with batteries included so I can plug and play after a quick installation ? Headless makes me think that I have write my own interfaces which then is not really a shopify alternative. As a developer though, I like it.
- mixologic 5y ago
  It is also not a Shopify alternative in that Shopify is a service and not just software. Its like comparing "raw organic apples" to "Apple cider made with conventionally farmed apples"
  - codegeek 5y ago
    The service part is just how it is distributed. I would say it is ok to claim as Open Source Shopify alternative if you can install and get it running in a few minutes and could be used by a non technical ecommerce business owner.
mbesto 5y ago
I've kept a list of headless ecommerce providers: https://saleor.io/ https://saleor.io/ https://www.swell.is/ https://www.swell.is/ https://www.vuestorefront.io/ https://www.vuestorefront.io/ https://www.elasticpath.com/ https://www.elasticpath.com/ https://boldcommerce.com/ https://boldcommerce.com/ https://nacelle.com/ https://nacelle.com/ https://www.contentful.com/ https://www.contentful.com/ Why are there so many of these? What are people actually using? I see a lot of e-commerce companies (albeit older and using solutions like Magento, Shopify, Oracle, etc.) and I rarely see any full blown e-comm companies using them, but rather they use them for simple checkout/cart functionality. Curious to get people's views here.
- s_severus 5y ago
  There is a compelling argument for headless e-commerce, which is the _freedom to build and rebuild your storefront using the technologies that you want_. With non-headless (traditional) platforms, you are limited to using the templating features or themes provided by the vendor. Another benefit is the ability to power multiple clients (web, mobile, in-store) from a single API & back-end. A full refresh of the storefront using the latest technologies or developer workflows can prove either impossible or incredibly challenging. That's why there are a lot of e.g. Magento projects stuck with huge JS bundles and unpleasant developer ergonomics. Ultimately there is the risk of needing to "replatform" - re-build the entire solution (front-end and server-side) on a different framework/platform, which is not a desirable situation to be put in. That said, headless has its trade-offs. Building a storefront is not trivial. For many merchants it may not make sense. But for a certain class of use-cases it is a massive advantage. It should also be noted that "headless e-commerce" has also graduated into buzzword territory, so you might get an inflated impression of the relative importance or use of it. Even Magento & Shopify are leaning into "headless" despite their clear interest in the monolithic model which is relied on by the majority of their marketplace offerings currently. Other platforms (e.g. Saleor, Sylius) which started off as non-headless have recently re-branded as headless. Ultimately there is definitely hype in this area, but there is also genuine value too. Source: I've been developing a headless e-comm framework for the past 3 years (vendure.io)
  - 5y ago
RileyJames 5y ago
Great landing page. Love the focus on integrations, tho I immediately wanted to know more. None of those logos are clickable, and I was impatiently waiting for the logos to scroll to see if there was an accounting integration. I also don’t recognise all the logos. I’d suggest this deserves its own page, and from experience, this will draw in users / customers via search / seo. I found a repo for your admin panel which talks about a ‘Medusa Cloud’ account, but I can’t find any other details about this. There a couple of models with integrations, you can build them as open source, but then you have to maintain them. Or you can have 3rd parties build and maintain them as Saas offerings. Either works, they both have significant positives and negatives. Either way it’s a significant opportunity for revenue generation. If you’re interested in Xero / accounting integration reach out. I could work with you to build your own, or could connect you with folks that would build out such services around your product. Minor: Copy under ‘SEO Friendly’ header is duplicated from another header. ‘Get Started’ doesn’t go anywhere.
thenberlin 5y ago
Heads up that the landing page appears broken in Safari v14.0.3 -- the header logo and top-nav links are floating over the main hero image like halfway down it, and when I scroll I can see that the hero collapses, but the header remains, as does the big blue area behind it, taking up 50+% of the viewport. Otherwise looks like an interesting project and I'll keep an eye on it!
- ngellner 5y ago
  Sorry about this problem - we are aware and are working to get it fixed soon! Until it is fixed, the best solution will be to use a different browser :-)
gdsdfe 5y ago
I've never understood why people use nodeJs for more than a hobby projects or small internal tools
- jimmyspice 5y ago
  If it's well written, customers won't be able to tell
  - gdsdfe 5y ago
    By customers I guess you mean shoppers, yeah they never care nor they should. Merchants on the other hand will loose money if the solution don't scale affordably.
    - XCSme 5y ago
      What's the issue with scaling Node.js? From my experience it's pretty easy if you build your application correctly.
kasbah 5y ago
I'm wondering if this could be used for building a crowd-funding platform or if there are headless solutions someone might recommend for that.
fblp 5y ago
Is there any way i can sponsor or support this! So needed! Thank you!
- zakariaelas 5y ago
  fblp Thank you very much for the kind words! Similar responses are really the best kind of support. Feel free to follow us on twitter @medusajs and drop a star on the Github repo. We'd also love to have you on our discord server!
iddan 5y ago
A big differentiator you can have over Shpofiy is support for RTL websites. Many businesses in Israel pass on Shopify because of its lack of RTL support
- papertokyo 5y ago
  What is the missing mechanic here exactly? Theme implementation of RTL? Dashboard? Or something else...
tomnipotent 5y ago
Really love that you have starter kits for both Gatsby and Nextjs. I was just looking at Nacelle the other day. Some thoughts below after spending about an hour going through the docs and repo (from the position of an e-com CTO). Metadata - this is a killer Shopify feature for anyone that's done serious integration, and is the secret sauce to a lot of UI customization. I only see it for orders and not products. Really appreciate the versatility of this across multiple types. Payment Providers - needs top-level docs visibility, seems to be hidden under "Regions" right now. Same provider/account often used for multiple countries. Swap - rename this to Exchange, because this is how employees will talk about it internally. Customer service training will be all that harder if it has language like "Swap", and "Exchange" is already an understood industry term. It will help communicate expectations with readers better. To a head of operations, it's just part of a larger RMA process and will be number-crunched accordingly. Swap Difference - love that you have this out of the box. Many e-commerce companies use 3rd party returns/exchange services because Shopify has shit internal support and this "difference" comes up right away because retailers want to support any transaction that lets them keep customer money even if the exchange is for a less expensive product. Claims - aka RMA. Technically this is still a Return, but a return can also trigger a replacement/exchange/repair. I also see "Claim Fulfillment", which seems redundant with the replacement Orders Fulfillment. Curious how all the data interplays to record this business process. Return Reasons - nested support is important. For example, "Wrong Size" leads to "Too Small/Too Large" but I don't necessarily want to show the later upfront. This also aligns with how the business will want to report on them internally, and break them down for analysis. Gift Cards - it's REALLY important that I can understand how these are used for accounting and bookkeeping. I need to know if a gift card was purchased and tied to cash, and not just created out of thin air. Accountants will do accruals to manage gift card revenues vs. liabilities, while marketing will create free gift cards to hand out at events or give to vendors, and customer service will create gift cards for customer gratuity or exchanges. It WILL get messy. Discounts - another important accounting gotcha, because the tool will be abused by staff to get their job done. Some discounts will be actual discounts, and treated on the books as such. Other discounts will be marketing-driven and an accountant will manually group them up in Excel and charge them to correct accounts. Having a field similar to "product type" will go a long way to letting the team manage discount reporting (Discount Category). Very impressed with everything so far, I will definitely be trying it out more and looking forward to your roadmap.
gitgud 5y ago
Is there any plan to charge for premium features or something? The landing page looks like it's trying to sell me a product, but the Github says it's MIT licensed...
- ngellner 5y ago
  The plan is first and foremost to build a community platform that allows even small to midsized merchants to build headless. The landing page is a bit more "marketed" in the communication style, but indeed it is a free to use our solution
rsstack 5y ago
Clicking on the logo at the top of the page (mobile) leads to a 404. The product looks great! The homepage doesn't explain pricing or what is a "large enough company" to require a paid license/subscription.
dhruvkar 5y ago
This looks fantastic! What I haven't found is a similar open-source project for distributors who work B2B. Their (our) customers also need to browse products, have invoice history, place product on hold, get notified when we have get stock, get delivery updates etc. There are enough minor differences that Shopify (or Medusa) can't be used for small/mid sized distributors, which makes me think there is a market for a product like that. If I'm missing some software that fills this need, HN please enlighten me!
imwillofficial 5y ago
Seriously, what a breath of fresh air
schmappel 5y ago
Hey owjuhl, just a friendly heads up that the Github and LinkedIn icons in the footer don't have URLs yet, just hashtags.
known 5y ago
Looks cool; I'll subscribe;
mirrormaster 5y ago
Why do you have to request for a demo, if this is an open source product. Just let me see the demo!
prakashn27 5y ago
The homepage is not loading properly in my iPad
waskip 5y ago
Alternative to Shopify? Sorry but the title is click bait. Doesn’t even have a demo. This sounds like more a MVP at best as others have said it lacks a lot of features. Pricing is confusing, open source with a button ‘get started for free’?
- ngellner 5y ago
  Medusa is indeed an alternative to Shopify, it just comes with a widely different value proposition. No doubt that Shopify has a broader ecosystem and feature set at the moment - but with Medusa you get the opportunity to shape the platform much better to your needs Our open source solution is free to use = get started for free. We just put it in a language that even non-tech merchants can understand
dayjaby 5y ago
Looks great. Do you have any plans of not being misused for fake shops? Just got hit by one recently.
- ngellner 5y ago
  This is a difficult variable to control for - especially as it is an open source solution. My hunch would be that many scam sites will use some straight out-of-the-box setups instead of more sophisticated tools like Medusa. But we would definitely address it should this become a problem in the future

373 points by owjuhl 5y ago

Congrats, this is one of the best landing pages I've seen this year. It looks really nice, and I love the idea of a headless ecommerce platform, especially one that comes with a nice backend GUI for managing inventory, etc. I took a quick look through the documentation as well, and was pleasantly surprised by the maturity of the features that it has. This provides pretty much all of the basics I think one would need to manage a medium sized store. One area I do think could be improved perhaps is in the internationalization; it seems to me that every product has a single string to be the description, a single string to be the title, etc. with no easy way to localize the text across different regions. I also am curious about the pricing; the landing page mentions that you can get started for free, and "start building for free", but is there some component that costs money down the road? I don't see any pricing page on the website so for now I'm assuming it's 100% open source.

owjuhl 5y ago
Many thanks for the kind words Reubend! And the feedback for internationalization is on point; it is in our roadmap to add a localization element to the core. Though, not in the very near future, since this is more a nice-to-have feature compared to a lot of other things in these early stages. You are correct in regards to pricing. We are 100% open source, and are soon to release an easy `npx` command to get you up and running with everything in a matter of seconds. Until then you can find our admin and other simple starters under our Github organization.
- moneywoes 5y ago
  What did you use to build the landing page? Also the GitHub and LinkedIn buttons don’t work on it
  - abstract_put 5y ago
    Specifically the GitHub button at the bottom of the page, the GitHub button at the top does work and leads to: https://github.com/medusajs/medusa https://github.com/medusajs/medusa
- tsuujin 5y ago
  A word of caution: every project I have ever worked on that added i18n “later” has strongly regretted it. I18n is much easier to tackle early than as a refactor.
RL_Quine 5y ago
It renders almost unusably for me in Safari 14. https://a.uguu.se/khPaNnDA.png https://a.uguu.se/khPaNnDA.png
- owjuhl 5y ago
  Sorry - my bad! Will fix that immediately. Thanks for showing it.
  - owjuhl 5y ago
    It seems to be a Safari + Webflow issue, so using a different browser would be the best solution right now :)
    - blitzar 5y ago
      Your main logo (top left hand corner) directs to a bad url btw.
    - DenseComet 5y ago
      Could be an issue with content blockers and safari. The page works fine with safari for me.
  - dotancohen 5y ago
    While we're at it, the "Open Positions" page needs some work. I see that the page is hosted on notion.io so this might be a review of their process, not yours, but it will certainly affect you if you depend on it for acquiring talent. Clicking the links under the "Open Positions" heading simply opens a small text popup repeating the name of the position. In fact, these are not even links so non-mouse-users cannot target them. Here's your screenshot, tested on Firefox 91 on Kubuntu with and without an ad blocker. https://i.imgur.com/jOEYsei.png https://i.imgur.com/jOEYsei.png
brookside 5y ago
Something about the landing page invoked Team Treehouse visual style: https://teamtreehouse.com/ https://teamtreehouse.com/
dubcanada 5y ago
My biggest problem is there is zero discussion on why this is better/worse then the other 500 options available. WooCommerce, Craft Commerce, Drupal Commerce, Magento, Vendura, etc all offer APIs to build a headless ecommerce platform. Why is this better/worse?
- ukyrgf 5y ago
  I mean right off the bat it means not having to maintain WordPress, Craft, Drupal, Magento. I've maintained all of those at some point over the years and I'll probably have nightmares tonight now that you reminded me of them. Don't know Vendura.
  - dewey 5y ago
    Isn't it just a matter of time until this one also becomes hard to maintain? These other platforms are complicated for a reason and that is that ecommerce isn't easy. Localizations (Medusa doesn't seem to have a proper system for that yet according to the top comment), deep support for taxes in various countries, changing tax rates, b2b and b2c price rates etc.
    - ukyrgf 5y ago
      I'm sure it could become hard to maintain, but it is built as an ecommerce platform. Plugins like Woocommerce are just one of innumerable amounts of plugins that WordPress has to attempt to not break.
      - dewey 5y ago
        I was more referring to the dedicated and feature rich frameworks like Drupal and Magento than the WordPress plug-ins.
  - pineconewarrior 5y ago
    at the mere utterance of "Magento" thousands of souls to cry out in terror
  - 5y ago

DoctorOW 5y ago

Personally, I'd prefer the submission title kept the webpage title's "Open-source headless commerce engine". Much more descriptive of what it actually does. Some Shopify customers use it headless but I'd be surprised if even the majority do.

agustif 5y ago

This looks super nice! I've been interested in the ecommerce + graphql space for a while, yours seems a really great project, will be following along and looking into migration paths! I love the stack choices as well, seems much more lightweight and approachable to me than other alternatives like saleor (which I don't really dig these days anymore) or vendure which is an excellent project too but with a stack I am no too familiar with (NestJS, Angular)... So kudos for making this open source!

stefanvdw1 5y ago

Looks very good! I’ve been looking for a headless e-commerce solution for a new product for a while and I might go for Medusa. One thing I was missing was a demo admin panel and demo store to get a bit of a feel for what is possible.

ngellner 5y ago
That sounds really interesting! We are working on getting to a demo to showcase it a bit better on out dotcom as well, but we would be happy to give you a personal walk-through of the solution if you could be interested Just reach us on Discord and we can set up a session either in the weekend or next week :-) https://discord.gg/F87eGuwkTp https://discord.gg/F87eGuwkTp
- stefanvdw1 5y ago
  Sounds great! I’ll definitely reach out as it seems like a great platform after diving some more into it

raman162 5y ago

Very impressive work! This seems promising and well thought-out. I plan on taking a deeper look at this especially regarding payments.

Vadim__Smirnov 5y ago
Thank you so much! Would love to help you with onboarding and intro session, feel free to join our Discord, so we can see how we can help you https://discord.gg/DSHySyMu https://discord.gg/DSHySyMu :)

vira28 5y ago

Awesome work. How does it differ from WooCommerce? Perhaps that might my other question. What is headless ecommerce platform? Thanks.

vorpalhex 5y ago
A headless ecommerce platform is an API first ecommerce platform where you build your own FEs on it.

jazzyjackson 5y ago

i’ve gotta ask, why name it Medusa?

ngellner 5y ago
Great question! If you check how the Greek Medusa ended her life then you might see some linkage with building headless ;-)
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  ahhhhhahaha good job
- boringg 5y ago
  Right I guess that kind of in a warped way makes sense, but medusa was also a monstrous mess of a creature that would turn people to stone. I mean I get the headless reference but wouldn't it make sense to be called Perseus (the hero who killed Medusa)? Named after beheading a monstrous creature, instead of being named after the creature?
  - IgorPartola 5y ago
    Pedantic stuff incoming: Medusa was actually a young maiden who was raped and shamed into isolation which is what drove her mad. She wasn’t a monster, she became one in reaction to what was done to her. From Wikipedia: > In a late version of the Medusa myth, by the Roman poet Ovid (Metamorphoses 4.794–803), Medusa was originally a beautiful maiden, but when Poseidon had sex with her in Minerva's (i.e. Athena's) temple,[7] Athena punished Medusa by transforming her beautiful hair into horrible snakes.
    - dannyw 5y ago
      Additional context from Wikipedia: > Whether Ovid means that Medusa was a willing participant is unclear. Hard, p. 61, says she was "seduced"; Grimal, s.v. Gorgons, p. 174, says she was "ravished"; Tripp, s.v. Medusa, p. 363 says she "yielded". In the original Latin text, Ovid uses the verb "vitiasse" which is translated to mean "violate" or "corrupt".

Bishop_ 5y ago

The linkedin and github links in the footer aren't set. Best of luck.

mariushn 5y ago

Thanks for building it as open source! Few q's: 1. It doesn't seem to be multi-tenant (that is, hosting multiple shops/companies with one db). Are there plans to add multi-tenancy? 2. What are the major differences vs https://github.com/vendure-ecommerce/vendure https://github.com/vendure-ecommerce/vendure ? (another nodejs solution, with included Admin panel and storefront) 3. How do you plan to monetize?

s_severus 5y ago
I'm the maintainer of Vendure, so I might be able to offer a bit of insight on your second question, after having studied the Medusa repo a little. Medusa devs, please correct me if any of this is wrong! * The Vendure project is a bit older and I think a bit further ahead in terms of awareness and adoption. * Medusa lists a team of 10 on their notion board, plus a bunch of investors. Vendure is just me (plus OSS contributors) and is bootstrapped. * Medusa exposes a REST-style API, whereas Vendure uses GraphQL. * Medusa seems to be mostly JS built directly on Express, whereas Vendure is TypeScript built on NestJS. * We're both using TypeORM for the data layer. * As mentioned, Medusa does not ship with an admin interface, whereas Vendure does. * Medusa seems to have a whole bunch of supported integrations in the monorepo (Stripe, Adyen, Klarna, Sendgrid, Twilio), whereas Vendure does not currently have any official integrations like this. * Vendure supports multi-channel, multi-language stores. Could not see much about Medusa's support for that, but maybe I missed it. All in all, Medusa is very much the most similar project I've seen to Vendure. The Node ecosystem has long been neglected in terms of e-commerce dev tooling, so I'm glad to see more interest in this area. Full-stack JS/TS/Node can be very productive and really nice to work with, in my experience. Congratulations to the Medusa team for the launch. Slightly envious that your post has gained so much traction compared to the ~3 upvotes from my launch a few months ago, but no hard feelings, haha. edit: formatting
- pelasaco 5y ago
  > Congratulations to the Medusa team for the launch. Slightly envious that your post has gained so much traction > compared to the ~3 upvotes from my launch a few months ago, but no hard feelings, haha Interesting. Maybe your title wasn't so "click-bait" as this one and you linked your github repo instead of your well made website https://www.vendure.io/ https://www.vendure.io/? Both are definitely great projects!

sent-hil 5y ago

Interesting project. Couple questions: 1. What separates you from Spree which recently started offering a headless platform as well? 2. Do you support Tax/Shipping calculations? 3. Where can I see a list of all supported integrations? 4. Do you offer deployment options?

codegeek 5y ago

Looks nice but to be a Shopify alternative, headless is not the way. Does it come with batteries included so I can plug and play after a quick installation ? Headless makes me think that I have write my own interfaces which then is not really a shopify alternative. As a developer though, I like it.

mixologic 5y ago
It is also not a Shopify alternative in that Shopify is a service and not just software. Its like comparing "raw organic apples" to "Apple cider made with conventionally farmed apples"
- codegeek 5y ago
  The service part is just how it is distributed. I would say it is ok to claim as Open Source Shopify alternative if you can install and get it running in a few minutes and could be used by a non technical ecommerce business owner.

mbesto 5y ago

I've kept a list of headless ecommerce providers: https://saleor.io/ https://saleor.io/ https://www.swell.is/ https://www.swell.is/ https://www.vuestorefront.io/ https://www.vuestorefront.io/ https://www.elasticpath.com/ https://www.elasticpath.com/ https://boldcommerce.com/ https://boldcommerce.com/ https://nacelle.com/ https://nacelle.com/ https://www.contentful.com/ https://www.contentful.com/ Why are there so many of these? What are people actually using? I see a lot of e-commerce companies (albeit older and using solutions like Magento, Shopify, Oracle, etc.) and I rarely see any full blown e-comm companies using them, but rather they use them for simple checkout/cart functionality. Curious to get people's views here.

s_severus 5y ago
There is a compelling argument for headless e-commerce, which is the _freedom to build and rebuild your storefront using the technologies that you want_. With non-headless (traditional) platforms, you are limited to using the templating features or themes provided by the vendor. Another benefit is the ability to power multiple clients (web, mobile, in-store) from a single API & back-end. A full refresh of the storefront using the latest technologies or developer workflows can prove either impossible or incredibly challenging. That's why there are a lot of e.g. Magento projects stuck with huge JS bundles and unpleasant developer ergonomics. Ultimately there is the risk of needing to "replatform" - re-build the entire solution (front-end and server-side) on a different framework/platform, which is not a desirable situation to be put in. That said, headless has its trade-offs. Building a storefront is not trivial. For many merchants it may not make sense. But for a certain class of use-cases it is a massive advantage. It should also be noted that "headless e-commerce" has also graduated into buzzword territory, so you might get an inflated impression of the relative importance or use of it. Even Magento & Shopify are leaning into "headless" despite their clear interest in the monolithic model which is relied on by the majority of their marketplace offerings currently. Other platforms (e.g. Saleor, Sylius) which started off as non-headless have recently re-branded as headless. Ultimately there is definitely hype in this area, but there is also genuine value too. Source: I've been developing a headless e-comm framework for the past 3 years (vendure.io)
- 5y ago

RileyJames 5y ago

Great landing page. Love the focus on integrations, tho I immediately wanted to know more. None of those logos are clickable, and I was impatiently waiting for the logos to scroll to see if there was an accounting integration. I also don’t recognise all the logos. I’d suggest this deserves its own page, and from experience, this will draw in users / customers via search / seo. I found a repo for your admin panel which talks about a ‘Medusa Cloud’ account, but I can’t find any other details about this. There a couple of models with integrations, you can build them as open source, but then you have to maintain them. Or you can have 3rd parties build and maintain them as Saas offerings. Either works, they both have significant positives and negatives. Either way it’s a significant opportunity for revenue generation. If you’re interested in Xero / accounting integration reach out. I could work with you to build your own, or could connect you with folks that would build out such services around your product. Minor: Copy under ‘SEO Friendly’ header is duplicated from another header. ‘Get Started’ doesn’t go anywhere.

thenberlin 5y ago

Heads up that the landing page appears broken in Safari v14.0.3 -- the header logo and top-nav links are floating over the main hero image like halfway down it, and when I scroll I can see that the hero collapses, but the header remains, as does the big blue area behind it, taking up 50+% of the viewport. Otherwise looks like an interesting project and I'll keep an eye on it!

ngellner 5y ago
Sorry about this problem - we are aware and are working to get it fixed soon! Until it is fixed, the best solution will be to use a different browser :-)

gdsdfe 5y ago

I've never understood why people use nodeJs for more than a hobby projects or small internal tools

jimmyspice 5y ago
If it's well written, customers won't be able to tell
- gdsdfe 5y ago
  By customers I guess you mean shoppers, yeah they never care nor they should. Merchants on the other hand will loose money if the solution don't scale affordably.
  - XCSme 5y ago
    What's the issue with scaling Node.js? From my experience it's pretty easy if you build your application correctly.

kasbah 5y ago

I'm wondering if this could be used for building a crowd-funding platform or if there are headless solutions someone might recommend for that.

fblp 5y ago

Is there any way i can sponsor or support this! So needed! Thank you!

zakariaelas 5y ago
fblp Thank you very much for the kind words! Similar responses are really the best kind of support. Feel free to follow us on twitter @medusajs and drop a star on the Github repo. We'd also love to have you on our discord server!

iddan 5y ago

A big differentiator you can have over Shpofiy is support for RTL websites. Many businesses in Israel pass on Shopify because of its lack of RTL support

papertokyo 5y ago
What is the missing mechanic here exactly? Theme implementation of RTL? Dashboard? Or something else...

tomnipotent 5y ago

Really love that you have starter kits for both Gatsby and Nextjs. I was just looking at Nacelle the other day. Some thoughts below after spending about an hour going through the docs and repo (from the position of an e-com CTO). Metadata - this is a killer Shopify feature for anyone that's done serious integration, and is the secret sauce to a lot of UI customization. I only see it for orders and not products. Really appreciate the versatility of this across multiple types. Payment Providers - needs top-level docs visibility, seems to be hidden under "Regions" right now. Same provider/account often used for multiple countries. Swap - rename this to Exchange, because this is how employees will talk about it internally. Customer service training will be all that harder if it has language like "Swap", and "Exchange" is already an understood industry term. It will help communicate expectations with readers better. To a head of operations, it's just part of a larger RMA process and will be number-crunched accordingly. Swap Difference - love that you have this out of the box. Many e-commerce companies use 3rd party returns/exchange services because Shopify has shit internal support and this "difference" comes up right away because retailers want to support any transaction that lets them keep customer money even if the exchange is for a less expensive product. Claims - aka RMA. Technically this is still a Return, but a return can also trigger a replacement/exchange/repair. I also see "Claim Fulfillment", which seems redundant with the replacement Orders Fulfillment. Curious how all the data interplays to record this business process. Return Reasons - nested support is important. For example, "Wrong Size" leads to "Too Small/Too Large" but I don't necessarily want to show the later upfront. This also aligns with how the business will want to report on them internally, and break them down for analysis. Gift Cards - it's REALLY important that I can understand how these are used for accounting and bookkeeping. I need to know if a gift card was purchased and tied to cash, and not just created out of thin air. Accountants will do accruals to manage gift card revenues vs. liabilities, while marketing will create free gift cards to hand out at events or give to vendors, and customer service will create gift cards for customer gratuity or exchanges. It WILL get messy. Discounts - another important accounting gotcha, because the tool will be abused by staff to get their job done. Some discounts will be actual discounts, and treated on the books as such. Other discounts will be marketing-driven and an accountant will manually group them up in Excel and charge them to correct accounts. Having a field similar to "product type" will go a long way to letting the team manage discount reporting (Discount Category). Very impressed with everything so far, I will definitely be trying it out more and looking forward to your roadmap.

gitgud 5y ago

Is there any plan to charge for premium features or something? The landing page looks like it's trying to sell me a product, but the Github says it's MIT licensed...

ngellner 5y ago
The plan is first and foremost to build a community platform that allows even small to midsized merchants to build headless. The landing page is a bit more "marketed" in the communication style, but indeed it is a free to use our solution

rsstack 5y ago

Clicking on the logo at the top of the page (mobile) leads to a 404. The product looks great! The homepage doesn't explain pricing or what is a "large enough company" to require a paid license/subscription.

dhruvkar 5y ago

This looks fantastic! What I haven't found is a similar open-source project for distributors who work B2B. Their (our) customers also need to browse products, have invoice history, place product on hold, get notified when we have get stock, get delivery updates etc. There are enough minor differences that Shopify (or Medusa) can't be used for small/mid sized distributors, which makes me think there is a market for a product like that. If I'm missing some software that fills this need, HN please enlighten me!

imwillofficial 5y ago

Seriously, what a breath of fresh air

schmappel 5y ago

Hey owjuhl, just a friendly heads up that the Github and LinkedIn icons in the footer don't have URLs yet, just hashtags.

known 5y ago

Looks cool; I'll subscribe;

mirrormaster 5y ago

Why do you have to request for a demo, if this is an open source product. Just let me see the demo!

prakashn27 5y ago

The homepage is not loading properly in my iPad

waskip 5y ago

Alternative to Shopify? Sorry but the title is click bait. Doesn’t even have a demo. This sounds like more a MVP at best as others have said it lacks a lot of features. Pricing is confusing, open source with a button ‘get started for free’?

ngellner 5y ago
Medusa is indeed an alternative to Shopify, it just comes with a widely different value proposition. No doubt that Shopify has a broader ecosystem and feature set at the moment - but with Medusa you get the opportunity to shape the platform much better to your needs Our open source solution is free to use = get started for free. We just put it in a language that even non-tech merchants can understand

dayjaby 5y ago

Looks great. Do you have any plans of not being misused for fake shops? Just got hit by one recently.

ngellner 5y ago
This is a difficult variable to control for - especially as it is an open source solution. My hunch would be that many scam sites will use some straight out-of-the-box setups instead of more sophisticated tools like Medusa. But we would definitely address it should this become a problem in the future