SaaS is static, the future is dynamic

Medusa is a commerce platform with a built-in framework for customization, but you may be asking yourself—why does that need to exist and who is it for? The answers to these questions are found in our broader goal of further expanding the size and variety of digital commerce.

We started Medusa after recognizing that the SaaS platforms that dominate today are inherently incapable of lifting this mission.

From day one Medusa was built for a future where commerce takes many shapes and where companies can innovate and operate more efficiently. With a new computing paradigm in AI, our recent release of Medusa 2.0, and the launch of Medusa Cloud, we believe this future is coming fast.

SaaS platforms are static sets of workflows

Over the past decade, SaaS platforms have done a remarkable job of making it easy to start an e-commerce store. The SaaS model has the advantage of not requiring customers to install and maintain software on their own hardware. Instead, they get access via the internet, everyone is on the same software version and updates happen automatically. A perfect model for eliminating IT overhead and speeding up the time to market.

Yet, the SaaS model’s advantage is the very reason SaaS cannot ensure the continued expansion of digital commerce. SaaS platforms are designed around static workflows. For example, on a SaaS platform, every checkout flow has to be the same except for some minor configuration options. When you understand the SaaS model it is easy to see why. A customer base with many different workflows would result in SaaS companies accounting for more edge cases, which leads to long test cycles, slows down product development, and ultimately diminishes the SaaS model’s advantage of continuous updates. For this reason, SaaS companies discourage customization within their platform.

DTC startups with simple e-commerce flows have benefited greatly from the standardization SaaS platforms have created. But in operationally heavy use cases, customization becomes necessary. B2B commerce, for example, cannot be encapsulated in a static set of workflows. Complex negotiations, advanced pricing models, and custom integrations with ERP and PIM systems stretch SaaS tools too far. The result is that B2B companies still rely on email threads, spreadsheets, phone calls, and a blend of other software systems, forcing businesses to juggle tasks across multiple tools and limiting scale and efficiency. Marketplaces, subscription- and service-based commerce, and other commerce verticals outside of traditional DTC all share similar pains.

From static to dynamic workflows

In response to the rigidity of SaaS platforms, many companies have tried different workarounds. Some attempt to extend existing SaaS platforms through custom integrations, while others adopt a “composable” architecture, stacking multiple SaaS services together to achieve the workflows they need. Both approaches aim at more flexibility and customization, hoping to adapt the commerce experience to fit their requirements.

The problem is that separate systems demand careful orchestration. Data needs to be synchronized, inventory updated, orders routed, and customers managed across a web of services. Without a dedicated set of tools to ensure consistency, each system ends up drifting out of sync, and this drift compounds over time. To manage this complexity, companies therefore build and maintain a constellation of internal tools just to keep everything running smoothly.

Maintaining these tools requires large engineering teams who just write glue code. These developers are not focusing on new features or enhancing the customer journey—they are stuck doing infrastructure and maintenance work that does not drive business growth or differentiate the company they work for. This is expensive and frustrating. Even more frustrating is the fact that there is seemingly no solution to this problem. While SaaS helped get everyone online, it never offered a straightforward way to orchestrate the diverse workflows that will power the next wave of digital commerce adoption.

This is why we built Medusa, a commerce platform, a framework for customization, and scalable infrastructure. Medusa equips you with ready-made tools and infrastructure to implement any workflow you need. The time that was spent on internal tools and infrastructure maintenance can be spent figuring out how to grow your business instead.

Some of the companies that have built commerce applications with Medusa include:

• Heineken: Built a B2B distributor platform that powers thousands of daily orders.
• Viessman: Created a marketplace for short-term rentals of surplus heating units to serve construction and emergency scenarios.
• Makro Pro: Migrated from Shopify to orchestrate thousands of orders across hundreds of outlets with an emphasis on reliability and integration with existing tools.
• EKI: Europe’s largest foam and rubber producer integrated their existing ERP to scale sales of highly customized foam solutions.

For these organizations, Medusa gives their developers the power and speed to create workflows that replace and automate manual coordination or patchwork solutions. Now, their tech stack and workflows are integrated, allowing sales teams to focus on strategic accounts rather than operational busywork, and customer service to provide a better experience. Finance and leadership gain a single source of truth that supports data-driven decision-making.

AI accelerates dynamism

Our mission is not just to offer a better way to run e-commerce today. We set out to digitize the commerce still stuck in offline processes to continue digital commerce’s expansion. To continue ensuring this happens we will develop our toolkit, making it even easier to build custom commerce workflows. This includes leveraging AI.

SaaS providers are thinking about AI in a very direct, “point solution” way. They might take a familiar workflow—say, a customer support ticket escalation—and drop an AI “agent” in the middle of it to make decisions or create a dynamic chat-like interface. In other words, many are using AI to add a decision-maker at a particular step or to present information in a conversational format without changing the underlying structure of how the process works.

With the flexibility of the Medusa framework, we unlock a different approach. We believe the real transformative power of AI does not come from sprinkling it on top of existing workflows, but from using it to design, build, and continuously refine the workflows themselves. Think of it this way: many companies know what they want their processes to look like, but struggle with the nuts and bolts of actually turning that vision into working software. Sometimes it is because the workflow is too small or too specialized to justify hiring a developer. Other times, the challenge lies in understanding how a new workflow fits into the bigger picture of everything else the company is doing.

This is where LLMs come in. AI models can quickly and cost-effectively “write the code” for these specialized workflows, making it easier and cheaper to automate complex business processes. They can also reason across a wide range of existing workflows, understanding dependencies and suggesting improvements that would be hard to see otherwise.

Already today, developers are more efficient with Medusa. Unlike tools built internally, Medusa’s framework is understood by IDE co-pilots making code completion possible when building customizations. But we can take this interaction even further by allowing non-technical members to create and adjust commerce applications with natural language. Imagine an operations manager building a page to view at-risk SKUs based on historical and upcoming orders, all by describing the logic in natural language. The page has a button to create draft purchase orders with recommended quantities and an at-risk report is sent out every Monday. With Medusa’s infrastructure, flexibility, and ability to combine data and actions across your systems, this becomes possible while accounting for data permissions and other business rules.

Other platforms will struggle to provide this experience because they are merely participating in custom workflows. Medusa, however, is where your custom workflow lives and where other systems are orchestrated. As businesses embrace this new wave of tools, the future of commerce will be shaped by a dynamic interplay of customization, integration, and adaptability—realizing the promise that started it all: to make commerce more efficient, accessible, and ready for whatever comes next.

In short

Our strategy is simple: build tools for creating custom commerce applications, make these tools easy to use, and continue unlocking new possibilities. Medusa 2.0 delivers a flexible framework for innovation. Medusa Cloud takes care of the infrastructure so you can focus on growth. With this foundation in place, we are building a digital commerce platform that adapts to any workflow. As AI makes it possible to leverage this dynamism with unprecedented velocity, businesses stuck in static, one-size-fits-all workflows will be left behind.