Comment by Reubend | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Reubend | Hacker News Reader

Congrats, this is one of the best landing pages I've seen this year. It looks really nice, and I love the idea of a headless ecommerce platform, especially one that comes with a nice backend GUI for managing inventory, etc.

I took a quick look through the documentation as well, and was pleasantly surprised by the maturity of the features that it has. This provides pretty much all of the basics I think one would need to manage a medium sized store. One area I do think could be improved perhaps is in the internationalization; it seems to me that every product has a single string to be the description, a single string to be the title, etc. with no easy way to localize the text across different regions.

I also am curious about the pricing; the landing page mentions that you can get started for free, and "start building for free", but is there some component that costs money down the road? I don't see any pricing page on the website so for now I'm assuming it's 100% open source.

Many thanks for the kind words Reubend!

And the feedback for internationalization is on point; it is in our roadmap to add a localization element to the core. Though, not in the very near future, since this is more a nice-to-have feature compared to a lot of other things in these early stages.

You are correct in regards to pricing. We are 100% open source, and are soon to release an easy `npx` command to get you up and running with everything in a matter of seconds.

Until then you can find our admin and other simple starters under our Github organization.

What did you use to build the landing page? Also the GitHub and LinkedIn buttons don’t work on it

Specifically the GitHub button at the bottom of the page, the GitHub button at the top does work and leads to: https://github.com/medusajs/medusa

A word of caution: every project I have ever worked on that added i18n “later” has strongly regretted it. I18n is much easier to tackle early than as a refactor.

My biggest problem is there is zero discussion on why this is better/worse then the other 500 options available.

WooCommerce, Craft Commerce, Drupal Commerce, Magento, Vendura, etc all offer APIs to build a headless ecommerce platform.

Why is this better/worse?

I mean right off the bat it means not having to maintain WordPress, Craft, Drupal, Magento. I've maintained all of those at some point over the years and I'll probably have nightmares tonight now that you reminded me of them. Don't know Vendura.

Isn't it just a matter of time until this one also becomes hard to maintain? These other platforms are complicated for a reason and that is that ecommerce isn't easy. Localizations (Medusa doesn't seem to have a proper system for that yet according to the top comment), deep support for taxes in various countries, changing tax rates, b2b and b2c price rates etc.

I'm sure it could become hard to maintain, but it is built as an ecommerce platform. Plugins like Woocommerce are just one of innumerable amounts of plugins that WordPress has to attempt to not break.

I was more referring to the dedicated and feature rich frameworks like Drupal and Magento than the WordPress plug-ins.

at the mere utterance of "Magento" thousands of souls to cry out in terror

Also OpenCart. I've had nightmares about that too, although it is just a shopping cart.

It renders almost unusably for me in Safari 14.

https://a.uguu.se/khPaNnDA.png

Sorry - my bad! Will fix that immediately. Thanks for showing it.

It seems to be a Safari + Webflow issue, so using a different browser would be the best solution right now :)

Your main logo (top left hand corner) directs to a bad url btw.

Could be an issue with content blockers and safari. The page works fine with safari for me.

While we're at it, the "Open Positions" page needs some work.

I see that the page is hosted on notion.io so this might be a review of their process, not yours, but it will certainly affect you if you depend on it for acquiring talent. Clicking the links under the "Open Positions" heading simply opens a small text popup repeating the name of the position. In fact, these are not even links so non-mouse-users cannot target them.

Here's your screenshot, tested on Firefox 91 on Kubuntu with and without an ad blocker. https://i.imgur.com/jOEYsei.png

Something about the landing page invoked Team Treehouse visual style: https://teamtreehouse.com/

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