[RFC] Ecommerce Plugin

[paulpopus]

In an attempt to create a fresh slate going forward and a single point for discussions around ecommerce, the plugin and the ecommerce template I made this discussion and will close the rest.

We've released in [beta] the ecommerce plugin and template and we're looking for further feedback and comments on the state of the API and needs in order to support a large variety of projects and features.

Features

Here's a pre-emptive list of feature ideas, it's not guaranteed what will be added as part of the beta

Shipping

Would need an adapter to integrate with 3rd party services here, may not apply to certain goods

Taxes

Similar to shipping, most would use a 3rd party service here for calculations - there's a Stripe tax api that relies on products being categorised

Shipping methods can also be subject to taxes

Gift cards

There was a community PR already to support this in some way, the ability to purchase a card and then use the funds available on it

Discount codes

Quite a common request and need

Bundles

Some products may need to be sold in bundles, this could also be achieved with the products collection

Subscriptions

Arguably one of the more important patterns to figure out here, providing enough utils to make subscriptions easy to setup and manage, would also depend on the payment adapter

Hooks

Pricing calculation hook

This could allow devs to modify the total in a transaction to support bulk discounts and other promotions.

Deployments

As we're in beta right now we will not commit to support Vercel and Cloudflare 1-click templates, however as soon as it's out of beta we can look into it.

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We'll update this RFC with information as it arises, thank you everyone!

[diboune]

This may sound like plugin inception, but I’d design it so that features like subscriptions and bundles are themselves plugins that can be added to the core e-commerce plugin. Not every store needs subscriptions or bundles, and most that do usually realize it later on.

[pulines]

I agree that not every store needs subscriptions or bundles.

However, as long as they are in the ecommerce template rather than core plugin, I think developers can easily remove related code if they don't need them.

I am building a saas website based on the ecommerce template, I would love to have out-of-box subscriptions support 😅

[mnstry]

Paul's list looks great. The main things in my case are:

1. Subscriptions
2. Discount codes
3. Shipping

Inventory management would also be important if Payload CMS were to become a go-to e-commerce solution.

I was just banging my head against figuring out how to leverage Medusa in terms of a multi-tenant setup as well as an integration with Payload CMS. The multi-tenant setup is particularly vital for my application. And this is where Payload CMS really shines, other than some challenges in the Stripe integration. I finally resolved to using Payload CMS, at least for the MVP. This request for comments is incredibly encouraging to me as it seems that PayloadCMS may evolve to become my long-term solution. Thank you very much for your hard work. It's quite exciting to see that the Figma acquisition is already showing great promise.

[columk1]

Shipping is an important one.

Currently the only way I can see to add an additional charge like tax or shipping to an order is to override the adapter. An exposed option to add an additional charge would be nice to start with if dynamic shipping is far away on the horizon.

Stripe's checkout session API would also be nice to have as an option since it takes an array of shipping rates and is really simple to customize. It would make bootstrapping a small online store really easy.

[6TELOIV]

Exposing taxes and shipping in a way where arbitrary generic fees can be applied seems like a smart way to go about it. This would help cover insurance and any other arbitrary regulatory fees. I think a good way to implement it would be via a hook, like, given an order (and maybe expose previously computed fees as well in a separate param), you can compute the fee desired. Helps because some are flat rate, some are perecentages, and sometimes it's a minimum fee or a percentage if above an amount, etc.