Creating a robust eCommerce solution at the enterprise level of complexity and required performance can be a formidable challenge. At this scale, the tolerance for subpar infrastructure is almost non-existent. Enterprises need solutions that can handle vast amounts of data, provide seamless user experiences, and integrate effortlessly with other systems.
This is where traditional eCommerce solutions can fall short. When needs grow beyond popular software as a service (SaaS) models, businesses turn to solutions that can be tailored more precisely. It's the best way to ensure their eCommerce operations remain competitive and future-proof.
This is the short version of why we've started to recommend Medusa as one of the most compelling choices among the new breed of eCommerce engines. Read on to learn about the whole story of how we’ve arrived at this point, our reasoning for choosing this particular solution, and the benefits that it brings to our clients.
When you’ve outgrown SaaS
Historically, many businesses favored SaaS eCommerce engines. Of course, they still make a lot of sense. The provider is fully responsible for managing and upgrading the infrastructure, which means that such engines require almost no maintenance from the user. As a result, businesses are able to focus on their core activities with little concern for the technology that supports them. However, while these advantages are significant, the SaaS model also presents some drawbacks that you need to take into consideration.
Above all else, SaaS can be limiting in certain scenarios. Local development, if even possible, is cumbersome and often requires a plethora of custom tools that complicate the process. On top of that, local development environments can only exist through separate instances that need their own licenses. This can skyrocket the costs.
SaaS solutions typically offer some level of customization but, again, often only within specific pre-defined areas. For instance, it's impossible to make deep modifications to the core logic without building a custom layer on top of the existing engine. For some companies, as they grow bigger and more complex, there comes a time when this becomes too constraining. Paradoxically, the simplicity that’s the key benefit in some implementations becomes the main obstacle in others.
Why Medusa?
In response to the challenges mentioned above, Medusa has recently emerged as a powerful open-source alternative to established eCommerce engines. Despite its short tenure on the market, it’s already become one of eCommerce developers’ favorite tools to work with.
We share the enthusiasm and are starting to choose Medusa as the preferred engine in some of our custom implementations. Why is that, and what exactly makes it such an attractive choice?
Open source
The open-source nature is unquestionably one of Medusa’s main selling points. With the whole global economy facing uncertain times, hardly any client would gloss over the savings that come from eliminating the licensing fees of competitors. The money saved in this way can be allocated toward expanding the eCommerce platform’s functionality, refining its user experience (UX) and design, or simply kept as a safety cushion.
"Open source” is also practically synonymous with “transparent.” The platform’s repository serves as an important but underappreciated additional touchpoint with customers and their technical teams. It gives them the chance to take a peek under the hood at an early stage of the project.
Community
From an eCommerce company perspective, there’s also a less tangible, but just as important factor: developers tend to be nerds in the best way possible. Working on a project based on an open-source framework means that they get to engage with its community. They get to actively participate in discussions and take part in the evolution of the entire platform, not just a specific product. This tends to be a more fulfilling experience for developers, who get a say in determining where the platform heads next. It also ensures that the platform continually adapts to meet the diverse needs of its users.
Source: Medusa blog
Despite its young age, Medusa already boasts some impressive numbers related to the community. It’s currently the top open-source project on GitHub with over 23 thousand stars, 10 thousand community developers on Discord, and over a million npm downloads. With its active community, developers can quickly get help with any problems they face during development.
Customization and extendability
As technologies evolve, businesses take advantage of new opportunities to stand out and reflect their individual vision and offering. Simply put, customization and extendability are in high demand.
Due to its modular architecture, Medusa tends to be a great answer to this need. When working with this engine, each module can be added, removed, and customized independently of others. Examples of such independent modules include pricing, cart, and payment among others.
In addition to a completely decoupled architecture, the engine also offers a fully-fledged back-end framework that‘s built-in for powerful customizations. This opens an almost infinite potential to craft a fully one-off and purpose-built infrastructure to fit unique business needs.
Core customization
When working with Medusa, developers have the freedom to extend or override core modules, such as carts and discounts. They can also introduce entirely new ones designed for specific functionalities. As a result, they have complete control over the whole business logic and purchasing flow built around it.
Imagine a business requiring an extra step between the cart and checkout. This might be some kind of product customization or an approval process that we often see in B2B eCommerce. This type of requirement would stump most cookie-cutter eCommerce engines. They’re built to support the standard “cart to checkout” process, and there’s no room for variations. Medusa makes it possible in the first place and offers fairly easy implementation thanks to its framework tooling.
Plugins
Medusa supports a robust plugin system and library. It’s a great way to seamlessly introduce new functionalities without altering the core code. Developers can also leverage this to quickly test ideas without spending precious time developing them from scratch.
Source: Medusa plugins
Its modular architecture also makes it easy to use custom integrations and third-party systems. Using workflows, companies can completely own the way data flows between systems. This can happen, for example, by creating custom inventory syncs with the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system or by updating product information directly through a third-party product information management (PIM) platform.
Events
Medusa's architecture is event-driven, allowing developers to hook into core processes of the engine. When they do that, it facilitates custom workflows and reactions to specific actions within the eCommerce flow. This, in turn, ensures that businesses can tailor their operations to real-time data and interactions, enabling stores to react to certain events quickly and in nuanced ways.
For instance, a typical store changes the stock level of a given product only when a customer completes the checkout process. A solution like Medusa, on the other hand, can make a change like this in real time. Adding the product to the cart can become the trigger that changes the stock level. This way, the store can “reserve” the product for this particular customer. An approach like this can be especially useful in high-traffic situations like sales and other special occasions, which pose a real threat of customers “competing” for products.
Composability
When designing a high-performing and future-proof eCommerce infrastructure, the composable approach is often the right way to go because it guarantees nearly endless scalability, customizability, and room for innovation. Simply put, the idea of composability comes down to breaking down an eCommerce ecosystem into a core engine, front end, and extra functionalities connected via the application programming interface (API).
Medusa's architecture neatly fits into this puzzle. It functions independently of the storefront used, giving complete freedom in selecting one that best matches our clients’ needs. When no pre-built solutions suffice, there’s always the option to build a fully custom front end on Nuxt, Next.js, or Vue.js. For those in a hurry, there’s also the third way to go: a capable dedicated starter template built on Next.js.
The solution is just as capable when it comes to connecting additional features, such as marketing automation, integrations with shipping providers, or analytics. This is largely thanks to the event-driven approach mentioned before. Medusa’s API provides solid foundations to interact seamlessly with other software. This enables businesses to build a fully customized eCommerce ecosystem with best-of-breed providers for each function.
Source: Envato Elements
With its new decoupled architecture and independent modules, Medusa takes composability one step further. The solution offers 17 independent modules with separate data models. This allows companies to choose what modules they want to use and enables incremental adoption of parts of the eCommerce setup when migrating from other solutions.
In short, the biggest promise of composable architecture is longevity. This level of flexibility ensures that infrastructures built on systems like Medusa can adapt to changing operational needs and technical environments of businesses. It can foster innovation and efficiency for years to come.
Support for multiple providers
An often-overlooked advantage of composable architecture is the freedom to support multiple providers of the same functionality at once. There’s no limit to how much you can hook into an API, so you don’t need to be locked into a single provider. You’re free to switch or add them as needed without significant rework or disruption to their operations. By providing this level of flexibility, composable eCommerce architecture empowers businesses to remain agile and responsive to both market demands and technological advancements.
Payment systems are the prime example. Customers appreciate the ability to choose from PayPal, Stripe, and other providers, and you might lose the sale if their preferred provider isn’t supported by your store. A composable approach means that nothing stops you from adding all of these options to your checkout process. It also makes it easy to adapt to regional payment methods and trends and ensures a global reach and compatibility with different markets.
Developer experience
As mentioned before, developers tend to be enthusiastic about working with Medusa, and the reasons go beyond its open-source business model.
A major advantage of working with this kind of system is its support of cloud-agnostic tools such as PostgreSǪL and Redis. They facilitate local development environments without the need for complex cloud-based setups, which means that developers can run the entire application on their local machines. As a result, they can test features end-to-end in an environment that closely mirrors production. This approach simplifies the initial setup and makes the entire stack easier to understand and work with.
Source: Envato Elements
In short, local environments allow developers to focus more on innovation and less on overcoming infrastructure hurdles, leading to faster development cycles and more robust applications.
Further, Medusa’s framework tooling allows developers to easily build advanced features using primitives for custom data models, workflows, UI extensions, scheduled jobs, and subscribers. This allows developers to quickly build features and integrations that would otherwise take months to accomplish.
Infrastructure flexibility
In the section above, we discussed the benefits of hosting an eCommerce engine locally during the development process. However, you can also deploy it anywhere else. Medusa’s infrastructure is highly adaptable and provides almost complete freedom in deploying the solution on your server of choice, from public clouds like AWS or Azure to a virtual private server (VPS). This gives you almost endless scalability. As business and its technical demands grow, an eCommerce platform can be easily migrated to a more powerful infrastructure.
In the near future, Medusa will also offer its own cloud solution based on a platform as a service (PaaS) infrastructure. Teams will maintain complete control over their back-end repository, while Medusa will supply tailored infrastructure and DevOps tooling to simplify the testing and deployment of future builds. This will be a good option for teams that want to focus on building new features instead of managing hosting.
Enterprise-grade performance
Even though it’s not typically expected from open-source solutions, Medusa excels in enterprise-grade implementations. Its scalable architecture supports rapid growth and high traffic volumes and ensures consistent performance even as demand increases.
On top of this, enterprises can quickly adapt to changing business needs and integrate with a wide array of tools and platforms. All in all, the engine provides solid foundations for a cohesive and efficient technology ecosystem.
On a technical level, the system's API-first approach and modular design make it highly connectable and easily implementable with other software. It supports REST APIs that facilitate smooth integration with existing systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, ERP, and marketing automation tools.
Additionally, its flexible architecture supports all types of complex enterprise needs. That includes advanced pricing logic, unique discounts and promotions for B2B stores, multi-region support, complex marketplace set-ups, order management platforms, and more. Combined with its cloud-native setup and easy integration capabilities, the engine can cater to any scale and level of customization needed in an enterprise context.
Future-ready eCommerce is here
SaaS eCommerce engines are still a solid choice, but no product is for everyone. Some companies get so big or complex that the one-size-fits-all approach no longer works, and they need to look for other, more flexible solutions. Powerful platforms like Medusa fulfill these needs for extensive customization and scalability.
Ultimately, embracing the new breed of systems signifies a forward-thinking approach to eCommerce development. It empowers businesses to innovate rapidly while maintaining a high degree of control over their infrastructure and data. When customer expectations rise day by day, flexibility and robust performance ensure that enterprise-grade eCommerce stays on top of the game.
This article was prepared in collaboration with Nicklas Gellner of Medusa, which is one of our strategic partners.
Published July 30, 2024
