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Show HN: Medusa – Open-source alternative to Shopify

medusa-commerce.com

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Re: Show HN: Medusa – Open-source alternative to Shopify

#31

Post by ukyrgf »

dewey wrote: post #28
ukyrgf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Show HN: Medusa – Open-source alternative to Shopify

#32

Post by dewey »

ukyrgf wrote: post #31
dewey wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I was more referring to the dedicated and feature rich frameworks like Drupal and Magento than the WordPress plug-ins.

Re: Show HN: Medusa – Open-source alternative to Shopify

#33

Post by s_severus »

mariushn wrote: post #18

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 ? (another nodejs solution, with included Admin panel and storefront) 3. How do you plan to monetize?

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

Re: Show HN: Medusa – Open-source alternative to Shopify

#34

Post by pelasaco »

s_severus wrote: post #33
mariushn wrote: post #18

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 ? (another nodejs solution, with included Admin panel and storefront) 3. How do you plan to monetize?

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 cont…

> 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/?

Both are definitely great projects!

Re: Show HN: Medusa – Open-source alternative to Shopify

#35

Post by mbesto »

I've kept a list of headless ecommerce providers:

https://saleor.io/

https://www.swell.is/

https://www.vuestorefront.io/

https://www.elasticpath.com/

https://boldcommerce.com/

https://nacelle.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.

Re: Show HN: Medusa – Open-source alternative to Shopify

#36

Post by boringg »

ngellner wrote: post #15
jazzyjackson wrote: post #13

i’ve gotta ask, why name it Medusa?

Great question! If you check how the Greek Medusa ended her life then you might see some linkage with building headless ;-)

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?

Re: Show HN: Medusa – Open-source alternative to Shopify

#37

Post by rambambram »

s_severus wrote: post #33
mariushn wrote: post #18

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 ? (another nodejs solution, with included Admin panel and storefront) 3. How do you plan to monetize?

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 cont…

I really like your landing page! In love with the little triangles everywhere, haha. I'm not the target group for a headless e-commerce solution, but I think your landing page makes it more clear to visitors what your software is about. In contrast to the main article, which left me wondering what Medusa exactly is.

Re: Show HN: Medusa – Open-source alternative to Shopify

#38

Post by s_severus »

mbesto wrote: post #35

I've kept a list of headless ecommerce providers: https://saleor.io/ https://www.swell.is/ https://www.vuestorefront.io/ https://www.elasticpath.com/ https://boldcommerce.com/ https://nacelle.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 ful…

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)

Re: Show HN: Medusa – Open-source alternative to Shopify

#39

Post by thenberlin »

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!

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