Ecommerce

Lemon Squeezy is a payments platform for software businesses that acts as the merchant of record. That means the company is the legal seller of record for each transaction, and it takes on the obligations that follow: sales tax and VAT registration, collection, and remittance in the jurisdictions where a customer buys. For a small software business selling internationally, that is the whole proposition. Instead of registering for VAT in the EU, the UK, and elsewhere as revenue grows, the seller handles one counterparty. The platform provides checkout, licence keys, subscription management, and a customer portal, and it pays out on a schedule. The cost is a higher percentage per transaction than a plain payment processor, because the merchant-of-record role absorbs tax and compliance work. Businesses with high volume sometimes move to a processor and handle tax themselves once the fee difference exceeds the cost of doing so.

Saleor is a headless commerce platform with a GraphQL API as the primary interface. The backend is written in Python on Django, which matters to teams whose existing services and hiring are in that ecosystem. The product covers the commerce domain: catalogue with variants and attributes, checkout and orders, payments through a plugin interface, warehouses and stock, and multi-channel selling where one catalogue serves several storefronts with different currencies and pricing. The dashboard is a separate application that consumes the same API. Compared with a hosted commerce product, Saleor leaves hosting and the storefront to the team, though a cloud offering exists. It suits organisations that want a GraphQL commerce backend they can extend in Python and operate themselves; it is a heavier starting point for a small store that only needs a working checkout.

Vendure is a headless commerce framework for TypeScript teams. It is built on NestJS with a GraphQL API, and its plugin system is the same module system the framework itself uses, so extending it means writing a NestJS module rather than working around a closed extension point. The commerce domain covers products with variants and facets, carts and checkout, orders, payments, promotions, and multi-channel selling. The admin dashboard is an Angular application that consumes the same API and can be extended with custom UI components. Vendure is a framework rather than a hosted product. A project owns the deployment and the storefront, and upgrades require attention because the plugin API is part of the application. It fits teams already invested in TypeScript and NestJS who want commerce primitives they can shape in code.

OpenSea is a marketplace for non-fungible tokens. A seller lists an item by signing an order, and the transfer settles on-chain when a buyer accepts, which means the marketplace itself never holds the asset. The product is organised around collections. A collection groups tokens that share a contract and a theme, and its page shows floor price, volume, and listed items. That structure is what makes a large set of individually distinct tokens navigable, and it is why the marketplace became the default place to look up a collection's activity. The tradeoffs are the marketplace's and the asset's. Listing is free because it is only a signature, but settlement costs gas, and a listing can be bypassed if the same asset is sold elsewhere. Fees and royalty enforcement have changed repeatedly, which matters to creators whose income depended on secondary sales.

Medusa is an open-source commerce backend for teams building a storefront that does not fit a hosted platform's model. The core is a modular Node.js server that exposes commerce primitives - products, carts, orders, customers, regions - through an API. The architecture is the differentiator. Commerce capabilities are modules with defined boundaries, so a team can replace the default implementation of one area without forking the whole system. A custom pricing module or a custom fulfillment integration plugs into the same interfaces the defaults use. Medusa is headless: it provides the backend and the API, and the storefront is a separate application. The project publishes a starter storefront alongside the server, but the server does not assume a particular front end. That separation is what lets a team use it with a custom storefront, a mobile app, or a marketplace model.