wtf is medusa?

Medusa is an open-source e-commerce platform built with TypeScript. Rather than offering a rigid, pre-built storefront, Medusa is structured around modular commerce primitives, independent building blocks for things like cart management, inventory, promotions, fulfillment, and customer accounts, that developers can assemble and customize to fit exactly the shopping experience they want to build. At its core, Medusa provides a Node.js backend that manages commerce logic and exposes APIs. It ships with official modules covering products, orders, payments, regions, tax calculation, shipping options, and more. Each module can be swapped or extended. The platform also includes a ready-made admin dashboard for managing the store, and it integrates with popular payment providers and fulfillment services. The frontend (the actual customer-facing storefront) is intentionally separate. Medusa provides a Next.js starter storefront as a reference implementation, but teams are free to build their own frontend in any framework, since the backend is headless and communicates over REST and GraphQL APIs. When to use it: Medusa is the right choice when a team needs the flexibility of a custom-built commerce stack but does not want to build basic commerce infrastructure from scratch. It suits developers who need full control over the checkout flow, data model, or third-party integrations, use cases where platforms like Shopify are too rigid. It handles both simple and complex scenarios: a single-product store, a multi-region marketplace, a digital goods shop, or a B2B platform. The tech stack is Node.js and TypeScript on the backend, with PostgreSQL as the database.