Medusa V2 — product research

Young, 2026-10-18: add Medusa to the products research under Projects/vhost, with templates, POS, payments, and features.

1. What Medusa is

Medusa v2.x — open-source commerce platform (MIT core, open-core model). The fastest-growing open-source commerce platform on GitHub (36.7k stars). Core modules: Cart, Products, Orders, Regions, Pricing, Promotions, Tax, Inventory, Customers, Payments, Fulfillment.

Licence: MIT for core. Enterprise Edition (RBAC, SSO, audit logs) requires a commercial agreement — we are not using it.

Cost to us: $0 (self-hosted, MIT). Medusa Cloud is optional and bills per seat ($30/seat/mo) — we self-host on our prod node.

2. Starters (templates) — from medusajs.com/starters

Which we use:

• B2C Starter → Yukon IT storefront (P2)
• POS Starter (Agilo) → in-store POS (P3)
• B2B Starter → future B2B tier (Shop+)

3. POS — the Retail POS Starter (Agilo)

• Stack: React Native + Expo (iOS + Android)
• Features: barcode scanning (camera), cart, payments, customers, inventory
• Gap: no integrated payments yet (manual-payment path now; terminal roadmap)
• Gap: no offline mode
• Our fork: Agilo medusa-pos-starter (MIT) — we fork and extend

4. Payments

Medusa supports payment providers via modules. Key ones:

Our rule: pass-through processing (no GMV cut). Stripe is the default; manual payment is the POS fallback until terminal integration ships.

5. Key features (what Medusa gives us for free)

6. Admin dashboard

• Built with: Vite v7, React Router v7
• Access: http://localhost:9000/app
• Customisation: widgets and routes only — no layout/design/content changes
• Medusa UI package: ready-made components for consistent design
• Admin SDK: @medusajs/admin-sdk for extending

Limitation: cannot restyle the admin. For commerce ops this is fine. For tenant-specific branding, we build a separate Nuxt UI portal (see admin-backend-decision-medusa-vs-nuxtui.md).

7. How it fits our stack

Per-tenant Docker compose (Tam's design):
  Medusa server (port 9000) + worker + Postgres + Redis
  + Next.js storefront (B2C starter, port 8000)
  + POS (Agilo, React Native, connects to Medusa API)
  + EVE agent (self-hosted, Apache-2.0)

• Medusa = the commerce engine (products, orders, payments, inventory)
• EVE = the AI receptionist (per-tenant memory, tenant-tuned persona)
• Nuxt UI portal = the operator dashboard (EVE, KB, domain, O365, billing)
• POS = in-store sales (manual payment now, terminal later)

8. Licence summary

Our licence profile: clean. MIT core + MIT admin + MIT POS + Apache-2.0 EVE. No competing-use restriction, no per-seat metering, no GMV cut.

9. Medusa feature matrix — what we get vs what we build