How to Build a Next.Js E-Commerce Website with Medusa

Introduction to the Medusa Toolkit and how to build a full-stack Next.js e-commerce website with Medusa

Victoria Lo
2 min readSep 1, 2023

E-commerce solutions have become essential in today’s digital era, as they provide businesses with the ability to reach a global audience, streamline operations, and enhance the overall shopping experience for customers.

In this guide, we will explore how to build a robust and user-friendly e-commerce Next.js website using Medusa, empowering you to create a seamless online retail platform that meets the demands of modern consumers.

Introduction to Medusa

Medusa is a flexible and adaptable open-source e-commerce framework designed to streamline the development of modern online retail platforms.

By providing a customizable architecture and a rich set of features, Medusa empowers developers to create unique, scalable, and high-performance e-commerce solutions tailored to their specific needs.

Medusa Architecture

Medusa architecture consists of a core API layer, plugins, storage adapters, and frontend integration. The Medusa backend allows you to easily connect to a database such as PostgreSQL and plugins such as commerce, products, or sale modules provide powerful, out-of-the-box functionality and act as building blocks of the e-commerce website.

In this article, we’ll learn how to build a full-stack Medusa-powered website. We will first set up a Medusa backend and admin dashboard, and then create a storefront to display and sell items.

Prerequisites

  • Intermediate knowledge of JavaScript and databases
  • Basic understanding of React or Next.js
  • Node.js v16+ installed (if you haven’t installed, click here)
  • PostgreSQL installed (if you haven’t installed, click here)

If you need a more detailed guide on how to install PostgreSQL, this video would be helpful.

Step 1: Create backend with Medusa App

First, install the Medusa backend with the following command:

npx create-medusa-app@latest

You will then be asked to name your project and connect to a Postgres database. Finally, you create an email for your Medusa admin dashboard. This dashboard helps you to create new products, view all your orders and manage them.

Once the Medusa app is successfully created, you will be redirected to a window.

Continue the full article on my website.

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Victoria Lo

A nerd in books, tea and programming. I publish weekly on my personal blog: https://lo-victoria.com/