Testing out Medusa for shiba swag store

• There are 3 components to a Medusa store:

  • The headless backend is a node server.
  • The Admin UI, a gatsby application creates a UI for the headless backend. Live demo admin UI here.
  • The Storefront. This can be any UI framework you want and Medusa has a comprehensive JS API to communicate with the backend. There is a Next.js starter.

• create-medusa-app is a handy tool to scaffold up all three components quickly.

• Looks like there is a Printful integration already - https://github.com/olivermrbl/medusa-printful. EDIT, doesn’t work…

• Looking into creating my own medusa plugin to integrate with the medusa platform, this could be a powerful workflow…

• Conclusions after research today. Medusa provides utilities for aspects of an eCommerce store. the bits I’m most interested in is :

  • The admin store for organising orders and payments.
  • Unified SDK API for stripe and PayPal
  • Its just node API server which is extensible. Includes a bunch of bells and whistles like cron jobs. batch jobs

• The main challenges come around syncing back and forth between Printful and Medusa.

  • what happens when 1 item changes? do all products from the Medusa DB need to be wiped and updated or is there a tidy way to incrementally updated?
  • webhooks to update things? Need to understand how the Medusa events service API works in more detail.
  • payments are just generally very confusing.