Medusa is indeed an alternative to Shopify, it just comes with a widely different value proposition. No doubt that Shopify has a broader ecosystem and feature set at the moment - but with Medusa you get the opportunity to shape the platform much better to your needs
Our open source solution is free to use = get started for free. We just put it in a language that even non-tech merchants can understand
This is a difficult variable to control for - especially as it is an open source solution. My hunch would be that many scam sites will use some straight out-of-the-box setups instead of more sophisticated tools like Medusa. But we would definitely address it should this become a problem in the future
On the last point on the adoption vs. hype question. Indeed there has previously been some strong buzz-word tendencies around headless architecture probably way ahead of the relative use of such solutions. Nevertheless, I also believe that the demand of such solutions from the merchants' side has been steadily increasing recently due to:
* increased ecom competition; making it more important to differentiate through enhanced performance (page-speed + SEO); better UX; advanced analytics and tools to create differentiated customer journeys - all areas that are better catered for with a headless solutions
* more advanced merchant use cases; more B2B companies coming into the ecom market with complex needs or social commerce solutions not covered by existing solutions - these all need a specialised setup which is better build from a headless foundation
* more digital-first/digital-only merchants coming to market with a strong ecom focus and not willing to make setup compromises which you often will have starting with a monolithic structure
That being said, there is still a long way to making headless the preferred way of building commerce - but the tailwind seem to be there!
Sorry about this problem - we are aware and are working to get it fixed soon! Until it is fixed, the best solution will be to use a different browser :-)
s_severus think you covered this one well. Also think what you have build with Vendure is a really strong solution and we have deep respect for what you have been able to set up almost on your own!
Three short comments on the functional differences:
- Admin interface: We have made our admin open source as well (happened this week) so this will be part of a Medusa setup when you launch our OS version
- On multi-regional support: We have built this into Medusa's core to make it easy to shift between currencies, shipping options etc. across different markets
- On Multi-tenant functionality: This feature will come soon; we will launch a concept called "Stores" in the near future to enable you to control multiple shops/branches from one place
s_severus, we should take an offline chat soon. Think we could learn a great deal from each other!
That sounds really interesting! We are working on getting to a demo to showcase it a bit better on out dotcom as well, but we would be happy to give you a personal walk-through of the solution if you could be interested
Just reach us on Discord and we can set up a session either in the weekend or next week :-)