When clients come to us with an eCommerce project, one of the first questions they ask is: "Should we use Shopify?" It's a fair question. Shopify is everywhere, it's well-known, and it's easy to get started with. But after 13+ years of building digital products and shipping dozens of online stores, we've learned that easy to start and built to scale are two very different things.
At Codyviaa, we made a deliberate decision to build our headless eCommerce stack around MedusaJS and Next.js. Here's the full reasoning behind that choice — and why it consistently delivers better outcomes for our clients.
The Platform Fee Problem
Shopify charges between $39 and $399/month for its plans, and that's before you factor in transaction fees. On the Basic plan, you're paying 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction through Shopify Payments. Use a third-party gateway and you're hit with an additional 2% fee on top. For a store doing $50,000/month in revenue, that's easily $1,500+ in monthly platform and transaction costs alone.
With MedusaJS, the platform cost is $0. It's fully open-source. You host it on your own infrastructure — a simple VPS or a managed cloud provider — and your total hosting cost typically lands between $20 and $80/month depending on scale. The savings compound fast, especially as your store grows. That money goes back into marketing, inventory, or product development instead of platform fees.
PageSpeed: Where Most Shopify Stores Fall Short
We've audited hundreds of Shopify stores, and the pattern is consistent: bloated themes, excessive JavaScript, third-party app scripts layered on top of each other. The result? Mobile PageSpeed scores in the 30–50 range. That's not a minor inconvenience — it directly impacts conversion rates. Google's own data shows that a 1-second delay in mobile load time can reduce conversions by up to 20%.
Our MedusaJS + Next.js stack consistently delivers 95+ PageSpeed scores on both mobile and desktop. We achieve this through server-side rendering, static generation for product pages, optimised image delivery, and zero third-party script bloat. Every page loads in under 1.5 seconds. The performance difference isn't marginal — it's transformational for conversion rates and SEO rankings.
Customisation Without Limits
Shopify's Liquid templating language is functional, but it's a walled garden. Want a custom checkout flow? You need Shopify Plus at $2,000+/month. Want to restructure your product data model? You're working within Shopify's metafield system and its constraints. Need a unique multi-vendor marketplace? You're bolting on third-party apps and praying they play nicely together.
MedusaJS gives you the full source code. Every entity, every workflow, every API endpoint is yours to extend, modify, or replace. We've built custom product configurators, multi-region pricing engines, and bespoke checkout flows — all without fighting the platform. When a client has a unique business requirement, our answer is always "yes, we can build that" rather than "Shopify doesn't support that natively."
API-First Architecture for the Modern Web
MedusaJS was designed from day one as an API-first platform. Every feature — products, orders, customers, discounts, inventory — is accessible through clean, well-documented REST and JavaScript APIs. This architecture means your storefront, mobile app, and any future touchpoint all consume the same backend.
This is headless commerce done right. Your Next.js storefront talks to MedusaJS through APIs. Your mobile app can do the same. A kiosk in a physical store? Same API. You build once on the backend and deploy everywhere on the frontend. Shopify's Storefront API exists, but it's a read-heavy layer on top of a monolithic platform — it wasn't the foundation, it was an afterthought.
Developer Experience That Accelerates Delivery
Our engineering team works faster with MedusaJS because the developer experience is genuinely excellent. It's built on Node.js and TypeScript — the same stack we use for our Next.js frontends. There's no context-switching between languages. The plugin system is clean, the migration tooling works, and the community is active and growing rapidly.
Shopify development, by contrast, involves Liquid templates, a proprietary CLI, theme constraints, and the constant overhead of navigating app review processes. For a team that values speed and clean architecture, MedusaJS removes friction at every step.
When Shopify Still Makes Sense
We're not ideologues. If a client needs a simple, small-scale store with minimal customisation and wants to launch in a weekend, Shopify is a reasonable choice. But the moment the requirements involve custom logic, performance targets, multi-channel selling, or long-term cost efficiency — MedusaJS wins convincingly.
The Bottom Line
Choosing your eCommerce platform is one of the most consequential technical decisions a business makes. It affects your speed, your costs, your ability to differentiate, and your long-term flexibility. We chose MedusaJS because it aligns with how we believe modern commerce should work: fast, open, flexible, and owned by you.
If you're exploring headless eCommerce for your next project, we'd love to walk you through our approach and show you what's possible. Learn more about our Headless eCommerce solution and see how we can help you build something exceptional.