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E-commerce

Medusa.js

Medusa | MedusaJS

Portrait of Lukas Horvath, co-founder of Roelu Studio
Lukas HorvathCo-founder

What is Medusa.js?

Medusa.js is an open-source, headless commerce platform that provides the back-end for an online store — products, cart, orders, customers, payments, fulfilment — exposed through APIs. Brands self-host Medusa or run it on Medusa Cloud, and they build the storefront separately in Next.js, Astro, or any framework. MedusaJS is modular, extensible in TypeScript, and designed for teams that want full control over their commerce stack.

Why it matters

Most commerce platforms make the easy 80 percent of features fine and the hard 20 percent expensive or impossible. Medusa.js inverts that. Because it is open-source and self-hosted, every part of the system can be customized — pricing logic, checkout flow, fulfilment rules, custom data models — without waiting for a vendor roadmap. There are no per-transaction platform fees. Data lives in the brand's own database. The trade-off is you need senior engineering to run it, which is exactly the trade-off Roelu's buyers are equipped to make. For brands that have outgrown Shopify's ceilings, Medusa is the most credible exit.

How it works

Medusa runs as a Node.js application backed by a PostgreSQL database. Brands deploy it on their own infrastructure — Cloudflare, Vercel, AWS — or use Medusa Cloud. The admin dashboard lets merchants manage products, orders, customers, and promotions. The storefront, built separately in Next.js or Astro, talks to Medusa through its Storefront API. Payments connect via plugins to Stripe, Adyen, or Klarna. Fulfilment integrates with carriers or a 3PL. Because everything is code, teams extend the data model — add custom product attributes, build region-specific checkout, integrate with a PIM — without forking the platform. Updates ship as npm packages.

Related terms

  • Shopify

    E-commerce

    A hosted e-commerce platform that runs your storefront, payments, and checkout in one subscription — fast to launch, easy to use, and increasingly hard to…

  • BigCommerce

    E-commerce

    A hosted e-commerce platform built for mid-market and enterprise brands, with strong native B2B features, an open Storefront API, and fewer per-transaction…

  • Headless Commerce

    E-commerce

    An e-commerce setup where the storefront is built separately from the cart, checkout, and product engine, so the brand controls design and speed without ever…

  • Composable Commerce

    E-commerce

    An e-commerce strategy of picking specialized tools for each job — cart, search, payments, content, analytics — and stitching them together with APIs, instead…

  • Self-Hosted Commerce

    E-commerce

    Running your e-commerce platform on infrastructure you control instead of a vendor's cloud, so the data, the customizations, the uptime, and the costs are all…

  • Open-Source E-commerce

    E-commerce

    E-commerce software whose code is freely available to read, modify, and self-host — no per-transaction platform fees, no vendor lock-in, full control in…

  • Storefront API

    E-commerce

    The set of endpoints an e-commerce platform exposes so a custom front-end can fetch products, manage carts, and run checkout without ever using the platform's…

  • Vendor Lock-in

    Business & Strategy

    When switching away from a platform becomes so painful, slow, or expensive that you stay even after the platform has stopped serving you well — the silent tax…