?What’s a developer-first ecommerce stack when Shopify and Webflow no longer fit your agency?

On Indie Hackers, Nicklas Gellner wrote about how Medusa started as exactly this situation. His team was running an agency and kept hitting Shopify limits: We had oftentimes been in situations where there was a need to “hack” our way to a feature which made us frustrated. One agency client, TEKLA Fabrics, wanted to leave WooCommerce for something more scalable. They needed a custom storefront for them to own their brand identity and the entire user experience plus a flexible backend plus a multi-regional setup allowing them to operate in multiple different markets in multiple different currencies through a single platform. The team built a bespoke solution for TEKLA, then realized the same gap existed for every agency in their position. Two years later they open-sourced it as Medusa — 5,000 GitHub stars in three months. Pattern: when an agency repeatedly hacks around the same platform limit, the hack becomes the real product; the agency’s actual leverage is in the layer underneath, not in another Shopify theme.

On Hacker News, the founder of small agency Zenpexal posted Ask HN: What would a developer-first alternative to Shopify look like? with almost identical framing: Over the past few years I’ve been working with e-commerce businesses through my small agency, Zenpexal. Most of the projects involve building or optimizing online stores using platforms like Shopify or custom stacks. While Shopify has made it incredibly easy for people to start online stores, working with it as a developer sometimes reveals a few recurring limitations. Some patterns I’ve noticed: Heavy reliance on third-party apps for even basic functionality, performance issues when stores grow... Pattern: this is a structural complaint, not a personal taste issue. Multiple agencies hit the same wall in the same year, which is a strong signal — but also why no one default-jumps to a single developer-first Shopify replacement: the migration cost for each existing client is too high to coordinate. Worth checking the HN thread for what the other agency owners in the comments actually moved to.

On Medium’s Build with Shopify publication, developer Shahzaib Ali Hassan wrote about why he switched from Liquid themes to headless Shopify with Hydrogen: I initially developed Shopify stores using Liquid templates and themes, but switched to Headless Commerce when clients requested faster, more dynamic, and app-like experiences. The setup uses Shopify Hydrogen and the Storefront API — separating frontend from backend, building the storefront in modern frameworks like React or Next.js while Shopify keeps handling payments / inventory / fulfillment. Pattern: agencies don’t have to choose between all-in on Shopify and ditch Shopify entirely. Headless lets you keep the boring infrastructure (PCI compliance, tax, shipping rails) while taking back the parts the client actually sees and feels — branding, performance, UX. The Partner commission still applies, but the visible-Shopify-branding problem dissolves.