Shopify

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.