E-Commerce

Self-hosted e-commerce platforms give merchants control over their storefront, customer data, and transaction processing without platform fees that eat into margins. Open source alternatives to Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce include Medusa, Saleor, and Vendure -- headless commerce engines that separate the storefront from backend logic, enabling teams to build custom shopping experiences with any frontend framework. Medusa has gained strong developer adoption with a modular architecture, plugin system, and built-in support for multi-region selling, tax calculation, and inventory management. The financial argument for self-hosted commerce is direct: Shopify charges up to 2% transaction fees on non-Shopify Payments orders plus monthly platform fees that reach $2,000+/month for advanced plans. Self-hosted platforms eliminate these recurring costs entirely, with merchants paying only for their infrastructure and payment processor fees. Beyond cost, self-hosted e-commerce provides the flexibility to implement custom checkout flows, loyalty programs, and pricing logic that SaaS platforms constrain to their templating systems. Customer purchase history, browsing behavior, and payment information represent high-value data that regulations like PCI DSS and GDPR require careful handling of -- self-hosting simplifies the compliance surface area. Modern headless commerce platforms deploy via Docker and provide GraphQL or REST APIs that frontend teams consume with Next.js, Remix, or any framework. When evaluating self-hosted e-commerce, focus on payment gateway integrations, inventory management capabilities, multi-currency support, and the quality of the admin dashboard for non-technical merchandising teams.