H1 2022: Product roadmap

We believe that part of being open source is to share our processes, plans and roadmaps into the open. We are therefore thrilled to reveal the expected roadmap for Medusa over the next six months.

The roadmap is expected in the sense that we might shift priorities a bit (as all other startups), but this is a clear reflection of our expectations for the new functionality to come during the next 6 months.

As you can see, the focus will be dedicated towards core functionality, although we will do a few side projects on starters and similar (e.g. a starter for Vue Storefront 🎉).

If you have inputs, comments, suggestions or similar, then please jump to our GitHub for discussions.

What is Medusa?
If you’re not familiar with Medusa, we are the open source Shopify alternative. We are building an open source headless commerce platform that is focused on solving the developer pain points that we have ourselves experienced building with monolithic proprietary ecommerce platforms. The aim for us is to make it easy for developers and merchants to build headless and to give them a platform that is easy to customize and can scale with the business.

Q1: Strengthen core functionality

✅ Admin Redesign and clean up - Jan/Feb

The admin redesign will bring a new look and feel to the admin dashboard. The flows and features available in admin will mostly remain the same but will be more thoroughly tested with improved control and trust. We are doing the last bug fixes at the moment, but the final result for this one was presented in our Product Hunt launch.

Tax API - Feb

The new Tax API will enable the ability to have more granular control over taxes on different products and shipping options, across regions. Furthermore, the API will introduce support for using 3rd party tax tools like Avalara and TaxJar to handle rooftop specific taxes in regions like the US, but also to support things like duty estimation and tax liability control.

Promotions API - Mar

The current promotions module allows discount codes for free shipping, fixed amounts and percentage amounts. Furthermore, there is the option of controlling scheduling and product availability. The new Promotions API will increase the control available to the store operator and will also introduce the notion of customer roles that can be assigned to customers and used in promotions.

Bulk Import/Export - Mar

The new import/export feature will make it easier to make bulk updates to products and will make it possible to generate export files for different entities in Medusa such as Products, Orders, Customers and Gift Cards.

Introducing strategies - Mar

The new strategy pattern will allow developers to override core logic in Medusa in cases where such overrides are necessary. For example, if a merchant wants to apply custom logic when generating line items in a cart; a strategy can be overridden to accommodate this. We will be introducing strategies throughout the core where opinionated implementations have been made. The current implementation will be moved into the default strategy, but now you will have the option of modifying the behavior if necessary.

Q2: Improved API support

GraphQL API - Apr

To enhance the developer experience we will add GraphQL support for the API. To begin with we will only add GraphQL for fetches, but the plan is to support mutations down the line.

Extend Product API - Apr

We will add support for custom fields, stronger publishing control, enhanced price lists, product images, search conditions and more.

Extend Order API - May

We will add support for more order controls like:

• requesting a new payment from a customer
• editing placed orders
• better inventory control in RMA flows

Sales Channel API - May

Sales Channels will introduce a taxonomic level for store settings that will allow merchants to differentiate the shopping experience across multiple channels. This can, for example, be used to change product availability and pricing between different channels.

Multi-warehouse Support - May/Jun

Multi-warehouse support will make it possible to add multiple stock-keeping locations to a Medusa instance. Furthermore, settings will be added to specify how stock should be depleted across regions, channels, etc.

Conclusion

Medusa is an ever-growing platform with the help of our team and our community. We always listen to our community’s input and include them in our development and release processes.

If you are interested in learning more about Medusa, then feel free to join our community here.