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Alex Spinov
Alex Spinov

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Medusa Has a Free Open-Source E-Commerce Platform That Replaces Shopify

#medusa #ecommerce #node #opensource

Shopify charges $39/month + transaction fees and locks your data. Medusa is a headless e-commerce engine that's open source, self-hosted, and gives you complete control over your storefront and data.

What Medusa Gives You for Free

  • Headless commerce engine — API-first, build any frontend
  • Product management — variants, options, collections, categories
  • Order management — fulfillment, returns, exchanges, claims
  • Multi-region — currencies, tax rates, shipping per region
  • Payments — Stripe, PayPal, and custom providers
  • Admin dashboard — beautiful React admin panel
  • Plugin system — extend with custom logic
  • Self-hosted — own your data, no transaction fees

Quick Start 

npx create-medusa-app@latest
cd my-store
npx medusa develop
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Architecture 

┌─────────────────┐     ┌──────────────────┐
│   Storefront     │     │   Admin Panel     │
│   (Next.js)      │────▶│   (React)         │
└────────┬────────┘     └────────┬─────────┘
         │                        │
    ┌────▼────────────────────────▼────┐
    │      Medusa Backend (Node.js)    │
    │      REST API + Event System     │
    └────────────┬────────────────────┘
                 │
    ┌────────────▼────────────────────┐
    │   PostgreSQL + Redis             │
    └─────────────────────────────────┘
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API Usage 

// Storefront API
const products = await fetch('http://localhost:9000/store/products')
  .then(r => r.json());

// Create cart
const cart = await fetch('http://localhost:9000/store/carts', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' },
  body: JSON.stringify({ region_id: 'reg_01...' })
}).then(r => r.json());

// Add item
await fetch(`http://localhost:9000/store/carts/${cart.id}/line-items`, {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    variant_id: 'variant_01...',
    quantity: 1
  })
});
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Next.js Storefront 

// app/products/page.tsx
export default async function ProductsPage() {
  const { products } = await fetch(
    `${MEDUSA_URL}/store/products`,
    { next: { revalidate: 60 } }
  ).then(r => r.json());

  return (
    <div className="grid grid-cols-3 gap-6">
      {products.map(product => (
        <ProductCard key={product.id} product={product} />
      ))}
    </div>
  );
}
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Custom Plugins 

// src/services/loyalty-points.ts
import { TransactionBaseService } from '@medusajs/medusa';

class LoyaltyPointsService extends TransactionBaseService {
  async addPoints(customerId: string, points: number) {
    // Your custom logic
  }
}

export default LoyaltyPointsService;
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Medusa vs Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Saleor

Feature Medusa Shopify WooCommerce Saleor
Price Free $39+/mo Free (hosting) Free
Transaction fees 0% 0.5-2% 0% 0%
Headless Native Via API Plugin Native
Self-hosted Yes No Yes Yes
Admin panel Included Included Included Included
Language TypeScript Liquid PHP Python
Data ownership Full Shopify owns Full Full

The Verdict

Medusa is Shopify for developers who want control. Open source, headless, no transaction fees, and you own your data. If you're building a custom e-commerce experience, Medusa is the modern choice.

Need help building production web scrapers or data pipelines? I build custom solutions. Reach out: spinov001@gmail.com

Check out my awesome-web-scraping collection — 400+ tools for extracting web data.

Top comments (2)

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dbartalos profile image
David Bartalos •

Great article, I recently went through the journey of setting up Medusa backend and I felt that it was really powerful! (with some quirks...)

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0012303 profile image
Alex Spinov •

Which quirks? Genuinely asking rather than rhetorically. That post is a survey of the platform rather than an account of running it, and the gap between those two is exactly where quirks live.

The ones I would most want written down are the boring operational ones: what broke on a version bump, what the migration story actually looked like, and how long the first real deploy took against what the quickstart implies. Those almost never make it into a write-up, and they are what decides whether a self-hosted stack survives contact with a real store.