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Web


SHOPIFY ALTERNATIVE: USE MEDUSA TO BUILD CUSTOMIZABLE AND FLEXIBLE ECOMMERCE
SOLUTIONS

Shahed NasserJuly 12, 2022
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This article introduces Medusa, an open-source, developer-focused alternative to
Shopify that allows for customization and scaling as needed.

Shopify is an ecommerce platform that provides merchants with an easy and quick
way to set up their online store. It’s a popular choice among businesses who
don’t want the technical complexity of other platforms when creating their
online store.

However, it’s well known that Shopify has limits to its scalability and that
trying to build more custom logic into it can be a dreadful experience for
developers.

Medusa is an open-source Shopify alternative that was built to solve some of
these scaling problems.

Out of the box, Medusa provides similar core ecommerce functionalities as
Shopify, but its open and composable architecture allows for more flexibility
and a better developer flow when building custom logic or integration with
third-party services.

This article covers Medusa’s advantages over Shopify and how to get started
using Medusa.




MEDUSA’S ADVANTAGES

Let’s take a closer look at what Medusa offers to developers.


A DEVELOPER-FOCUSED PLATFORM

Medusa is built for developers, and its main focus is providing a great
developer experience. It’s built with abstraction layers that make it highly
extendible if any customization is needed.

Adding integrations is also hassle free due to its headless and abstract
architecture. Developers don’t need to worry about using workarounds to make the
platform work with other services and tools. They can extend the existing
abstract layers to create any integration.

As a developer-focused Shopify alternative, Medusa provides detailed
documentation that’s constantly being improved to allow developers to build
their ecommerce platform following simple steps.


MEDUSA’S HEADLESS ARCHITECTURE



Headless is the concept of decoupling the frontend from the backend. For the
backend, this means that it’s free from the shackles of any presentation layer.
The backend is only responsible for handling the data and logic of the system.

The backend exposes a set of APIs that allows any frontend or presentation layer
to interact with it.

This decoupling gives developers the freedom to choose which language or
framework to use for the frontend. Developers can use Jamstack frameworks like
Gatsby and Next.js. They can also integrate different types of channels such as
mobile apps or marketplaces.

Medusa is composed of three components: the headless server, the storefront, and
the admin panel. Although Medusa provides two starter storefronts — one built
with Next.js and another with Gatsby, and an intuitively-designed admin panel —
developers have the full freedom to build these components with any other
frameworks from scratch. All they need to do is interact with the REST APIs.

This allows the developers working on the frontend to focus their efforts on
providing a unique and good user experience without the storefront being tightly
knit to the backend.


AN OPEN-SOURCE SHOPIFY ALTERNATIVE

A big disadvantage of proprietary solutions is that you’ll never have full
ownership of your tech stack. No matter how many customization capabilities
you’re given, you’ll always be limited in your choices of functionalities or
tools.

An open-source solution like Medusa, on the other hand, allows you to have full
ownership of your tech stack. You can use Medusa as is for your ecommerce store,
but you can also completely customize the core and adapt it to any specific
need.

This flexibility guarantees that businesses can have a platform that completely
caters to their use case. Additionally, their platform can grow with their
business needs with time.

Whether they need to add more features and customizations in the future or
ensure that the platform can scale with them over time, this can be done with
Medusa with no limitations.


FLEXIBILITY FOR DEVELOPERS AND MERCHANTS

The flexibility that the advantages above lead to means that both developers and
merchants have full freedom in their choice of services and tools to use within
their Medusa ecommerce platform.

For example, for rich CMS functionalities, merchants can choose to integrate
Strapi, Contentful, or any other service they want.

There are no restrictions on what tools or services can be used. This is even
more important when choosing local payment and fulfillment providers.

All integrations are accomplished through plugins. You can either choose from
ready-made plugins or create your own.

Plugins are installed on your Medusa server in a plug-and-play manner. They run
within the same process as the Medusa server, so you don’t need to allocate
extra server space or infrastructure.


ADVANCED ECOMMERCE FEATURES

Putting aside all technical advantages, Medusa also comes with many advanced
ecommerce features out of the box, including the following.

MULTI-CURRENCY SUPPORT

A big problem that Shopify businesses run into is supporting multiple currencies
in their store. This feature requires special conditions depending on what
country you operate in or what plan you have.

However, even with this feature enabled, it still doesn’t provide businesses
with the flexibility to format and set pricing per product.

The lack of availability of this feature and its limitations lead businesses to
set up and manage multiple stores for each currency. This causes a lot of extra
manual work and human errors.

Medusa, on the other hand, provides multi-region support out of the box, and
without limitations. You can add as many regions as you want, specify the
currency for these regions, and manage the pricing of each product for each
currency individually all from the same admin dashboard.



This eliminates the need for the extra manual work that comes with managing
multiple stores and prevents human errors that occur with it.

AUTOMATED RMA (RETURN MERCHANDISE AUTHORIZATION) FLOWS

According to statistics by UPS, 73% of shoppers say their return experience
affects whether they purchase again from the retailer in the future or not. So,
it’s essential to provide your ecommerce store with an easy and hassle-free
return experience.

Medusa provides fully automated return, swap and claim processes that can easily
be handled from the Admin dashboard — starting from the customer’s request to
return the items from the storefront to the items being marked as returned.

Items can also be swapped or exchanged in the same manner. This will also be
automatically reflected on the integrated accounting systems and can all be
managed easily from the admin dashboard.

PROMOTIONS APIS AND GIFT CARDS



Medusa provides an advanced Promotions API with many customization capabilities.
Merchants have the standard use cases from this promotions API that you’d find
on all platforms — such as setting free shipping discounts, fixed-amount
discounts, or discount percentages.

Additionally, merchants can specify discounts specific to customer groups,
products, number of redemptions, and much more conditions.

Furthermore, gift cards can easily be added and managed into Medusa through the
admin dashboard, and they’re handled differently from other products on
purchase. Gift cards also have their own advanced conditions and customizable
settings that can be specified from the admin dashboard.

MULTI-VENDOR SUPPORT

There’s a growing need for platforms that enable the creation of online
marketplace ecommerce platforms. Medusa’s extensibility makes it a great
platform to create your online marketplace.

A community plugin called Medusa Extender makes this even easier to achieve.
This plugin gives you even more customization capabilities to fully extend the
core and modify it for a marketplace use case.

Medusa also has a tutorial series that introduces the basics of creating a
marketplace — including linking different entities like users and products to
stores, managing orders per store and globally, and managing users within their
store and their permissions.

OTHER FEATURES

Medusa comes with many APIs and ecommerce features that provide developers and
merchants with advanced functionalities.

The Tax API, apart from the settings it provides out of the box, is implemented
with abstraction to allow integrating third-party services and tools to handle
advanced taxes.



The PriceList API provides many pricing conditions for products related to
discounts, customer groups, and more.



All these settings and functionalities available in the headless server can be
easily managed from the intuitive admin dashboard built with Gatsby.

Medusa is also working on more features such as bulk import and export of
products, sales channels, multi-warehouse support, and more.


COMMUNITY AND SUPPORT

As a developer-focused platform and as an open-source solution, Medusa is
focused on working closely with the community and providing any support needed.

Developers can join Medusa’s community on Discord, where they can join in
discussions, showcase their work with Medusa, and get help whenever they run
into trouble while using Medusa.

Developers can get help from the community and from the core Medusa team almost
instantly. All they have to do is ask a question on the #need-help channel and
someone will guide them through the solution — often within a few hours.

Developers can also report bugs, contribute to Medusa, and join discussions on
the GitHub repository.




HOW TO GET STARTED WITH MEDUSA

This section gives a general overview of how to install a Medusa server, the
Medusa admin, and the Gatsby Storefront.


PREREQUISITES

To use Medusa, you need Node.js with at least version 14 installed.


HOW TO SET UP A MEDUSA SERVER

Start by installing the Medusa CLI tool:

npm install -g @medusajs/medusa-cli


Then, run the following command to create a new Medusa server:

medusa new my-medusa-store --seed


This installs the Medusa server in the my-medusa-store directory, which is also
created. The --seed option creates and seeds an SQLite database in the
my-medusa-store directory.

Finally, change to the directory of the Medusa server and start the server:

cd my-medusa-store
medusa develop


The server runs on port 9000 by default. You can test it out using the REST
APIs, or you can follow along with the rest of this section and see it in action
when connected to the Medusa admin and storefront.

It’s also recommended that you install a storage plugin to handle storing
product images. You can use either MinIO, S3, or DigitalOcean Spaces.


HOW TO INSTALL THE MEDUSA ADMIN

In a separate directory, run the following command to clone the Admin GitHub
repository and change to the newly created directory:

git clone https://github.com/medusajs/admin medusa-admin
cd medusa-admin


Then, install the dependencies with npm:

npm install


Finally, make sure that the Medusa server is still running and start the Medusa
admin server:

npm start


The admin typically runs on localhost:7000. Open it in your browser and you
should see a login screen.



To log in, you can use the demo user credentials with the email
admin@medusa-test.com and password supersecret.

On the admin dashboard, you can add products, manage orders, manage store
configurations, and much more.




HOW TO INSTALL THE GATSBY STOREFRONT

Install the Gatsby CLI if you don’t have it installed:

npm install gatsby-cli -g


Then, in a different directory than the previous ones, run the following command
to install the Gatsby storefront:

gatsby new my-medusa-storefront https://github.com/medusajs/gatsby-starter-medusa


Then, change to the newly created directory and rename .env.template to
.env.development:

cd my-medusa-storefront
mv .env.template .env.development


Finally, while the Medusa server is still running, start the Gatsby server:

npm start


The storefront runs on port localhost:8000 by default. Open that in your
browser. You should see some demo products from the Medusa server. You can add
those products to your cart, go through the checkout process and place an order.
You can also create an account and check out customer profile features.






NEXT STEPS

That’s it for this introduction to Medusa, a viable Shopify alternative for
developers looking for more freedom and flexibility in setting up an ecommerce
store.

After setting up your Medusa server, admin, and storefront, you can explore more
of what you can do with Medusa, including:

 * Integrate payment methods such as Stripe or PayPal.
 * Integrate search functionalities with Algolia or MeiliSearch.
 * Check out the API reference to learn more about what you can do with the
   Medusa server.
 * Learn how to deploy the Medusa server to Heroku.

Should you have any issues or questions related to Medusa, feel free to reach
out to the Medusa team via Discord.


SHARE THIS ARTICLE

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Shahed Nasser

I am a full-stack developer passionate about learning something new every day,
then sharing my knowledge with the community.

Medusashopify



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