This is the second of a four part series on Medusa and their e-commerce platform offering. Part one gave an introduction to what Medusa is and why it is relevant in the space, and this part will give a more in depth view of their vision, history and product. Parts three and four will deep dive further into Medusas commerce modules and the Medusa admin.

Vision

Medusa is built on the idea that there is something inherently wrong with the tools available to developers in the e-commerce space today. With a fast-evolving market and an increasing need for custom solutions, the traditional platforms are too rigid and require constant workarounds to meet demand.

The vision of Medusa is to enable businesses and developers to create their envisioned commerce experiences in a quick and reliable way, without degrading future possibilities of customization.

Medusa aims to achieve this by offering commerce building blocks. This means they provide commerce modules that can be consumed collectively or as separate entities depending on the business needs. All modules are open source to enable full developer flexibility.

Product

Using a modular architecture, Medusa provides the backend building blocks for commerce logic, such as carts and payment, product and order management, inventory and multi-stock locations, discounts, multi-currency, and much more. All of it can be managed from the Medusa admin, which is shipped as an npm package. Medusa is built in Javascript/Typescript and is entirely open source. All modules are made available to developers for free on npm.

Key differentiators

Traditional platforms such as Shopify or WooCommerce provide monolithic all-in-one solutions. This provides businesses and developers with a quick out-of-the-box solution that allows e-commerce websites to be up and running very fast, but it comes with the trade-off of high rigidity and limited customization options.

A solution like Medusa requires more developer involvement and has a less extensive app library. However, it does provide much greater flexibility due to its modular architecture. For complex businesses with higher customization needs, a solution like Medusa is an excellent alternative, as it gives developers a better prerequisite for incorporating custom logic and integrating with third-party systems.

History of Medusa

Medusa first became an idea when Medusa founders, Sebastian Rindom and Oliver Juhl were working on the e-commerce platform of Tekla during 2018. Tekla used WooCommerce but needed a more flexible architecture to scale their e-commerce offering further. While figuring out the best platform for Tekla, Oliver and Sebastian quickly realized that most of the traditional solutions would require too many hacky workarounds to scale efficiently. They therefore decided that a deeper rebuilding of the architecture to something more flexible and completely customizable would be more future-proof. This became the foundation of Medusa.

In 2021, Sebastian and Oliver teamed up with Nicklas Gellner to raise money in a pre-seed round for the solution built for Tekla that they had since open sourced as one of a few JS-based backend e-commerce projects on GitHub. The project quickly gained traction and became one of the fastest-growing projects on GitHub during its first year. In the Summer of 2022 they raised a $8M seed round and today, they have a community of +5,000 developers and between 10,000 to 30,000 weekly downloads.

Plugins

Flexibility and extensibility are key aspects of Medusa. Since Medusa is built to allow developers the freedom to choose the services or features they want to implement, plugins are a key part of that. Plugins allow developers to implement custom features through third-party services into the Medusa backend.

Medusa recently introduced a library of pre-built plugins supporting a solid amount of third party solutions such as payment, notifications, search, shipping, CMS and storage. They currently have solutions made for (among others) Klarna, Paypal, Mailchimp and Contentful, and more are being added continuously.

The pre-built plugins allow developers to get started quickly, while it as also possible to create custom made plug-ins directly in the Medusa backend or use community made plugins.

Community & supporting environment

Medusa has a large community of 5k+ currently active developers. This is a big plus, since it makes it easy to get support when needed:

• Discord: a place to chat with fellow Medusa developers, ask for help or share your builds. The Discord is moderated and maintained by community members.
• GitHub: a place for more in-depth discussions of issues, features etc. The core Medusa team is present on GitHub and often sharing their view when needed.

Aside from the community forums, Medusa has extensive documentation for developers to get started with the project.

To learn more about the commerce modules and features they offer, read the next article: