Show HN: Medusa – Open-source alternative to Shopify

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.

It’s important to note the centralisation going on in e-commerce. “Side hustle” sellers are mostly not able to afford stock at the moment (too many have lost their main jobs), letting those with the capital to keep trading dominate.

Those sellers have different options as far as building storefronts go.

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.

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

Regarding your last comment, not sure if you’ve seen the info on this yet but you were incredibly close to having loads of upvotes. I think the current threshold for getting to HN’s front page is between 4 and 5 rapid upvotes. Once you clear it you suddenly get a very large set of eyeballs on your post and lots of new herd effect upvotes. It’s a little silly and sometimes frustrating but depending on how you posted it you could try again with a Show HN thread. Those have a separate section and have an even lower threshold to get onto the front page. I launched a few (mostly unsuccessfully) side projects on HN with this info. Hope it is helpful to you.

P.S.: don’t try to create fake accounts to upvote your posts. They don’t work well due to solid voting ring detection built into HN and will likely just devalue your posts/upvotes in the future.