Ecommerce Website Breakdown: Using Medusa as a Case Study
Tags: medusa, ecommerce, opensource
Published: 2022-10-18 12:17:59

# Introduction

If you want to own an eCommerce store and have been facing challenges in choosing the best eCommerce platform to build your store on, this article will walk you through selecting the best eCommerce platform to work with.

In this article, you’ll learn the key concepts of an eCommerce platform, the different types of eCommerce and an overview of eCommerce platforms. You’ll learn how to start up your own store, the benefits of using Medusa eCommerce Platform, and why you should use Medusa.


# What is eCommerce?

eCommerce, the short form for Electronic Commerce, enables the buying and selling of goods and services or sending data and funds via the internet.

eCommerce simply is a place where we can buy or sell different items. Today, we have many eCommerce platforms; examples include Medusa, Shopify, Amazon, Alibaba, eBay and others.


# Types of eCommerce Websites

As said earlier, we have many eCommerce websites, and they fall into different categories, including:

1. Business to Business (B2B)
2. Business to Consumer (B2C)
3. Consumer to Consumer (C2C)
4. Consumer to Business (C2B)
5. Business to Administration (B2A)
6. Consumer to Administration (C2A)

### Business to Business (B2B)

B2B is a process where the transaction of goods and services is done between two companies or business owners, i.e. selling to another (as wholesale services). This process does not involve the end user yet (consumer).

### **Business to Consumer (B2C)**

B2C involves the consumer itself, i.e. selling products and services to the consumer. This model is the most popular today across different countries. Examples are McDonald’s, Walmart, Amazon, and many others.

### **Consumer to Consumer (C2C)**

C2C involves the selling goods between two consumers. Let’s say you bought pizza from McDonald’s, and after getting home, you found out that you were given beef pizza instead of the chicken pizza you requested. You then decide to sell it to your friend since he or she enjoys eating beef pizza. That whole process is called C2C, it can also be done through platforms like [eBay](https://www.ebay.com/) ****and more, where you have to put the goods online for other consumers to see.

### **Consumer to Business (C2B)**

C2B is the opposite of Business to Consumer (B2C). This involves the transaction between a consumer and business owners and companies. For example, rendering your service as a photographer, graphics designer, or web developer to a company or business owner to buy or use.

### **Business to Administration (B2A)**

B2A transaction occurs between companies and public administration or government bodies. The products and services rendered to them are social security, employment, legal documents, and so on.

### **Consumer to Administration (C2A)**

C2A is the opposite of B2A, but products or services are rendered by individuals to government bodies or public administration. This type of eCommerce applies in the areas of health, education, social security, and so on.


## What is Medusa?

[Medusa](https://medusajs.com/) is an open-source composable commerce engine that enables developers to create amazing digital commerce experiences.

As an open-source eCommerce platform, you can contribute to it and customize certain things based on your preference. Medusa can also be used by beginners (developers), not just experienced developers.


## Why Should You Use Medusa?

Medusa is a free, developer-friendly, open source, eCommerce website. Unlike other eCommerce websites that have so many limitations and are not free, Medusa gives you the full authority, power, and access, to control, customize, and modify every line of code in your store however you want it.

Medusa is so flexible that your business can grow with it. As your business grows over the years, you may feel the need to add some new features or change some things in your store. Medusa makes it very easy for you to write some lines of codes to achieve what you want.


## **How Medusa Works**

Medusa functions as a Headless commerce engine, its headless architecture makes it easy for third-party integrations such as Payment providers, Analytics, Notification providers, Search integration,  CMS, and storage integration.

Medusa has a pre-built [Admin Panel](https://docs.medusajs.com/admin/quickstart), [Nextjs Storefront](https://docs.medusajs.com/starters/nextjs-medusa-starter), and [Gatsby Storefront](https://docs.medusajs.com/starters/gatsby-medusa-starter), which make it easier for building. It is easy to set up a Medusa eCommerce store using all pre-built codebase and third-party integrations.


# **How to Get Started with Medusa**

Getting started with Medusa eCommerce website is as simple as cloning an open source codebase from a GitHub repository.

Medusa has a well-written documentation, which makes the setup easier. Medusa eCommerce website can be completely integrated with a few lines of commands as stated in the [Quickstart Guide Documentation](https://docs.medusajs.com/quickstart/quick-start).

For more details on how to use Medusa, visit the [documentation website](https://docs.medusajs.com/).


## **Benefits of Medusa over other eCommerce Platforms**

## 1. Medusa Flexible Backend

Medusa as an open source headless commerce engine, which has  similar feature as other ecommerce platforms. But the Medusa backend is built such that developers can easily study, understand and  write new codes depending on what the developer intends to achieve.

## 2. Medusa Site Performance

Medusa decouples the frontend from the backend and also decouples the admin panel from the backend, i.e Medusa frontend, backend and admin panel stand on a separate codebase.
The frontend only fetches and posts data to backend as well as the admin panel, which makes Medusa site performance to be faster.

## 3. Medusa Supports Multi-currency

With Medusa, there is no need to create or have multiple stores just to handle multiple currencies. Medusa lets you do it all from one admin dashboard. You can create multiple regions in the same store and select the currency of the region. Then, you’ll be able to set the price of the product differently for each currency.

Read: [How Medusa resolved Multi-currency issue](https://dev.to/medusajs/how-an-open-source-platform-resolves-shopifys-multi-currency-issues-47lg).

## 4. Medusa supports Integration

As an eCommerce platform, medusa supports any third-party integrations, unlike other eCommerce platforms that only support a few third-party integrations.

It only requires a basic understanding of Medusa code-base to enable you integrate any third-party service.


# **Conclusion**

Medusa remains the best platform for developers; its characteristics of being open source, developer-friendly, and free are very interesting and something you must try. To set up your own medusa store visit [Medusa Quickstart Guide](https://docs.medusajs.com/quickstart/quick-start).

Always remember to reach out to the Medusa team via [Discord](https://discord.gg/y6s5QggZBT) if you need more clarity on any issue you are facing.