Welcome to the premiere episode of Vendure Voices, where we dive deep into real-world stories of how Vendure is powering today’s innovative digital platforms.

In this episode, join Kevin Mattutat, CTO and Co-Founder, alongside our CEO and Co-Founder, David, as they explore the journey of creating a cutting-edge peer-to-peer marketplace using Vendure. 

Building a marketplace on Vendure

Building a peer-to-peer marketplace | Ep. #1

Vendure Voices Ep. 1: Building a peer-to-peer marketplace

Vendure is an open-source platform for building ambitious commerce applications, and we are happy to announce that the next feature release of Vendure - version 2.2.0 - is now available!

Vendure 2.2.0 updates every major dependency to the latest versions. Most significantly, a major update to our data-access layer has resulted in massive improvements for applications with a very large number of products, customers, and orders.

As background, we use the TypeORM library to allow your Vendure application to connect to a wide range of SQL databases. Due to a particular bug, we had been stuck on an old version that was released in 2022. The good news is that this bug was finally addressed, unblocking our upgrade path. Still - the upgrade was not plain sailing. The data access layer is one of the most complex parts of Vendure, and any changes must be made carefully. In this case, we were upgrading 

, and on a code base the size of Vendure - a lot of things broke!

Luckily we have a couple of superpowers that ultimately allowed us to succeed:

Eugene is an engineer working on a huge multi-national marketplace app which has millions of products over multiple sales channels and multiple languages. Theirs is one of the largest, most demanding Vendure applications I have come across, and their performance requirements really pushed things to the limit and beyond. 

Here are the results from testing v2.2 against their huge dataset:

If you are working with smaller data sets, then the performance gains will probably be less dramatic - but you can now rest assured that even as your data grows (which it always does!) then Vendure is well-prepared to handle it.

From the getting started experience to the documentation to the carefully-designed APIs, we are 

obsessed with making your life as a developer easier

. Building e-commerce applications should 

 be a confusing, laborious process that requires months of training.

In our last release we introduced a CLI tool that was able to scaffold a basic empty plugin. It used a template-based approach which could generate new files, but could not make any modifications to your existing code. This approach severely limited the types of tasks it could do, so we needed a new approach.

With v2.2, we have completely re-written the CLI using a much more sophisticated architecture which is able to 

analyze and understand your project's source code

 down to the level of every individual variable, class and function. Using this advanced analysis we can intelligently modify your code to add new entities, services, API extensions, job queues, and more! 

With our new CLI, developing your next feature will not only be radically faster - you'll also have the assurance that the code follows the best practices we have established over many years of building real-world Vendure applications.

Watch our intro video for a demonstration of how the CLI will turbo-charge your productivity!

Vendure is already unmatched in its ability to extend to satisfy virtually any commerce use-case. This release introduces several major new capabilities that allow you to take things even further. 

A long-requested feature is the ability to duplicate products. Many shops have similar products so the ability to duplicate an existing product makes the process of creating a new one much more convenient for administrators. 

With v2.2 we finally tackled this. But as always, we thought about how we could design a general-purpose API to support the duplication of 

 entity - including your own plugin-defined custom entities. 

. By default we ship duplicator for Products, Collections and Promotions. 

Duplication is also deeply integrated into the Admin UI - you can even specify user-configurable parameters which will render as UI inputs, and the values can then be used inside your duplication logic. 

Two of Vendure's most powerful features: custom entities allow you to extend the default data model. Need to support blog posts, organizations, product reviews? Define a custom entity for that. 

Custom fields on the other hand allow you to extend existing entities with custom data, including powerful features like validation, automatic UI generation, filtering and sorting. 

Now you can combine the two: define custom fields on both built-in and custom entities. 

This unlocks a whole world of possibility when it comes to developing plugins that can be extended by other users. Picture this: you develop a Blog plugin and use it across multiple Vendure projects. However, in addition to the common fields like "title" and "content", each project needs to store project-specific data on the 

adding custom fields in the same way as with 

Vendure ships with a powerful and extensible role-based access control system. You can now use the 

permission system to control access to custom fields

 field on the Product entity to enable sync with an external system. You probably don't want all admins to be able to access and potentially change that field. You can now limit that field so that only specific admins can access it. Admins who lack permissions will neither be able to access the value nor will they even see the field in the admin UI.

Our admin UI features an alerts area in the top bar that highlights important actions to the administrator. We've now added a new API that allows you to 

The API is flexible enough to take alerts from any source, even external systems, and can likewise trigger any kind of custom logic when the alert is clicked. 

For instance, you could define an alert for orders that require approval in a custom order process plugin, or an alert when unusual customer behavior is detected in a security plugin. 

Every list and detail view in the Admin UI can now be 

 which appears in the top right of the action bar. 

This is perfect for custom actions which, while not a primary call-to-action, nevertheless need to be easily accessible to the administrator. 

For example, an invoice Generation plugin could add the "Print invoice" button in the drop down menu of the order detail page. 

override any of the built-in routes of the Admin UI

 app with your own custom implementation. For example, you might have a very custom requirement for the order detail page which cannot be handled through our existing customization methods. Now you'll be able to define your own custom page component with React or Angular and have it seamlessly appear in place of the default. 

A complete listing of all changes can be found in the 

. If you are using it, you should switch to a version which is maintained, or to a different package manager such as npm or pnpm.

We would like to thank our incredible community for your support, suggestions, bug reports, and direct code contributions to this release. Our community comprises developers from all over the world, working for companies of all sizes - small owner-operated businesses, fast-growing startups, to Fortune 500 enterprises. This diverse set of experience and insight enables us to continuously evolve a rock-solid, versatile feature set.

The following users contributed directly to this release:

Akshit Bhardwaj, Aleksander Bondar, Alexis Vigoureux, Casper Iversen, Eugene Nitsenko, Fred Cox, Gautier Darchen, HausTechTeam, HoseinGhanbari, Lacey Pevey, Marensius Bae Pettersen, Martijn, Pieter Doms, Serge Morel, armitjs, casperiv

Announcing Vendure v2.2

The idea for Developer Day started in our Discord server, when a couple of community members suggested an in-person meetup. We decided to make a full-day event out of it, and with less than two months to prepare, we got to work organizing a venue, speakers, and a full program! Honestly, with such short notice we weren't sure what we would be able to put together, but the way things came together exceeded our wildest expectations! From the world-class speaker lineup, the venue and catering, to the sheer enthusiasm of our community. 

I opened the proceedings with a look back at the Vendure journey so far, charting our milestones from the first commit in 2018 to the present. Actually, the story started much earlier than that, with my first static brochure sites and then forward to my monstrous PHP4-era custom shop with its 5,000+ line "functions.php" file. After that came the spark that grew into the Vendure project, followed by our first users, first live websites, first major version and forward to the present day.

With the release of Vendure v2 earlier this year, we laid the foundations for our long-term vision as a platform on which you can build any kind of commerce application. But what's still missing? I outlined a couple of key areas that we are already starting to address: first is the ecosystem - plugins and integrations. This is a key point when choosing a commerce platform, and one where we can do a lot better. Secondly, while our core data model and low-level APIs provide support for a huge range of commerce use-cases, we need to provide higher-level guides and examples on how an implementation would look in the real world.

The high-level targets for the next versions of Vendure are twofold: make Vendure 

 - improving & evolving APIs, expanded CLI workflows, more extensibility points, and 

 - further improving the UX of the Admin UI, eliminating frustration for admins, supporting common flows like duplicating products.

How can we improve our ecosystem? Well, we already do have quite a rich set of official and community plugins. It has just been difficult to discover them. All of that changes with our brand-new 

. This is a central directory where you can quickly find high-quality plugins from our core team, trusted partners, and the wider Vendure community.

With the release of our new directory, I also announced two brand-new core integrations: 

 is an open-source application monitoring platform which can track & report runtime errors across your stack, from storefront to server. Our new 

 allows you to get rapidly set up with Sentry and start gathering insights into exactly what errors are occurring in your app, which API operation was called, and which line in your source code is responsible.

 is an edge cache for your Vendure GraphQL API - reduce the load on your Vendure server, bring response times down to as low as 50ms, and proof your store against traffic spikes. Our 

 will take care of ensuring your cache is never stale by reacting to changes to products & collections and automatically purging 

Both of these plugins have been extensively tested in production and can immediately benefit virtually any Vendure application.

Our CEO David delivered the second keynote, this time covering our ambitious plans for the coming year. Vendure is evolving from being simply an open-source project to becoming a fully-fledged open core company which consists of the open-source core plus a range of commercial products and services built around it. The trick is to balance these parts in such a way that everybody wins: our community enjoys a well-supported, sustainable set of open source packages, while our customers and partners benefit from a richer ecosystem that allow them to bring their vision to reality in a minimum of time.

To achieve this goal, David outlined three strategies we will be rolling out over the coming year:

The Vendure Hub is a our upcoming marketplace for high-quality plugins and integrations. Building on the foundations laid by our new integrations index announced above, the Vendure Hub will also support paid plugins, allowing our partners to distribute and earn from their work. Our goals with the Vendure hub are to provide a revenue stream for both Vendure and our partners as part of our vision of a self-sustaining open core business, as well as to allow our users to focus on their core features rather than building everything they need from scratch. 

, the Vendure Hub will launch with a selection of first-party plugins built by the Vendure core team as well as a selection of third-party plugins from trusted partners. A key focus for us will be quality over quantity - all third party paid plugins will be reviewed by us, and will be subject to a strict QA process including automated compatibility tests with new Vendure versions.

With Vendure Cloud we will solve the pain of DevOps once and forever with our own cloud solution. Building on the knowledge we have gathered over the years of running Vendure in production, we will be offering two products: Vendure Cloud PaaS (platform as a service) and Vendure Cloud SaaS (software as a service).

, you'll be able to simply connect to your existing repository and deploy your Vendure server in a tailored environment exactly matching your needs. No more complex configurations for high availability, auto-scaling, backup schedules, connecting services and configuring pipelines. Think Vercel, but for your Vendure server. This is ideal for use-cases that require a high level of customization.

, you'll be able to spin up a Vendure instance via a web interface and configure things using a low-code/no-code approach. This is ideal for brands that have basic requirements and want to focus on building an outstanding storefront.

Best of all, since the SaaS product is built directly on top of the PaaS platform, it means that you can start simple with SaaS, and later when your business grows and requirements grow more complex, you can move over to the PaaS, take control of your own repo, and continue building without limitations!

Our estimated launch for Vendure Cloud is 

With our new Partner Program we will build a network of skilled and innovative partners around the globe. We explored the idea of a partner program last year but soon realized we were missing something. The interest was there - we have over 70 partners already lined up! - but we lacked the resources on our side to build a program that truly fit our vision of what such a program should look like. In our view, a partnership is more than just a badge - it means providing real mutual value to the benefit of our partners and the broader Vendure community.

As part of our new Partner Program we're also planning the Vendure Academy which will consist of high-quality videos for developers at any level; interactive workshops to help you apply what you learned; and interactive coding challenges that test your skills in real-world scenarios.

 Our estimated launch of our Partner Program is 

As well as the keynotes delivered by David and I, the Developer Day featured presentations from leaders in both the Vendure developer community as well as the broader tech industry. Here's an overview:

, a venture studio that helps startups build outstanding products. Goroid made a bet on Vendure way back in our pre-1.0 days, and in that time has gained a lot of experience with building highly custom & complex commerce apps at massive scale. Of particular interest were the insights shared by Laszlo in building out the new platform for 

surplus food platform serving over a million users with tens of thousands of outlets across multiple central & eastern European countries.

, where he helps companies manage and scale their codebase using the power of the monorepo. His talk focused on how Nx can be particularly useful with full-stack code bases as in a typical Vendure project - where you have a server, multiple plugins, a storefront and ui extensions all located in a single repo. Many of our developers already use Nx, but Miro covered aspects that you might not yet have got to grips with, such as graph analysis, distributed task execution, and code constraints. In closing he teased what a potential Vendure Nx plugin might look like... watch this space! His slides are available 

As well as contributing to Vendure core & our Remix storefront, Daniel works for 

, an open-source backend platform for building any kind of data-driven application. He impressed upon us the importance of owning your data - a value also shared by Vendure itself. Moreover, he demonstrated that having full ownership of your data unlocks some really amazing opportunities. In this case, he did a live demo where he connected Directus directly to a Vendure database and exposed Vendure data in a CMS-like way to allow content editors to build rich landing pages.

, a consultancy that works with some of the best-known tech companies to optimize their applications. He has spent a long time diving deep into what makes an application fast, and we were happy that he shared a small part of his knowledge with us! He gave a primer on the main metrics that make up Core Web Vitals, as well as plenty of practical (and hard-won) tips on how to speed up any storefront.

, a global edge cache for GraphQL APIs. Fittingly, on the day of the release of our official Stellate plugin, Max gave a real-world demo of not only how 

 the Stellate cache makes your storefront, but how 

it is to set up. Indeed, he did so live on stage - adding a Stellate cache in from of a live production Vendure server API, and showing how response times were immediately and drastically reduced!

. Qwik is a groundbreaking new technology which is uniquely well-suited to e-commerce applications, where speed and start-up time are paramount. We met a couple of years ago at a conference in Berlin and after seeing one of his demos, it was clear that Qwik would become an important technology for commerce.

Joining us remotely from California, Miško guided us through some mind-blowing demonstrations of new programming patterns that are enabled by Qwik's advanced code splitting compiler, as well as answering questions from our audience.

Last but not least, it was the Vendure community which really secured the success of our inaugural Developer Day. Despite the short notice we were blown away to learn that developers had travelled from Germany, Portugal, Hungary, Poland, the UK and even the USA just to attend our event. 

In my years of running the open source community via GitHub, Slack and then Discord, it has been one of the pleasures of my role to be able to interact with interested and enthusiastic developers from all over the world on a daily basis. But chatting on Discord is a world away from actually meeting in person. Gathering together in the same room, sharing the day, hearing about what amazing things you are all building with Vendure - it was unforgettable!

And since we were in Vienna and it's December, we of course had to visit the famous Viennese Christmas markets! For many of you this was your first time in Vienna, and we were happy that we could build not only new professional connections, but new friendships too.

Vendure Developer Day 2023 Recap

Vendure Developer Day 2023

Vendure is an open-source platform for building ambitious commerce applications. Since our groundbreaking 

 back in June, we've been hard at work on some huge new features which we are excited to share in today's announcement.

: new languages, new framework support, new documentation. Let's take a look at what's new!

It all starts with the docs. If developers can't learn it, they won't use it. The Vendure documentation comprises over 700 pages of source-generated API docs and hand-written guides. Up till now we've been using a custom solution built on Hugo. While Hugo is an excellent, lightning-fast site generator, the golang templating made customization slow and frustrating. As a result, the design was rarely updated, and we lacked features such as dark/light mode and full-text search. Moreover, after surveying our community we found that our docs were sometimes lacking context and high-level explanations of the main concepts, as well as step-by-step, practical guides for specific common tasks. Hearing stories of developers struggling to understand Vendure was painful!

We decided to fix all of this and more and embarked on a complete re-write of our documentation. We spent over 200 hours building, writing, and illustrating the 

, which is a much better fit for our TypeScript-based codebase and community. Content-wise, we have nearly 

, covering core concepts, developer guides, how-to guides; ranging from introductory articles to in-depth explorations of our API. We now have over 100 diagrams and illustrations, and - best of all - we've included 

 throughout the docs. The search experience has also been massively upgraded - we now have a lightning-fast full-text search built on 

All of this is aimed at making Vendure more accessible for both new and seasoned Vendure developers to rapidly find, learn, and understand our APIs.

Our Admin UI features a powerful extension mechanism allowing developers to define custom routes and components which expose new functionality. In v2.1 we have worked hard to make it even easier to create extensions by radically simplifying the extension APIs as well as adding native support for components authored in React.

This is a big one! Our Admin UI is built on Angular - a solid, performant and maintainable framework that has served us well for many years. But it is clear that the majority of developers are more familiar with React, so the requirement to author UI extensions in Angular has long been a source of friction for some Vendure developers. With v2.1, 

you can now build your custom components in React

. And those React components will run directly and seamlessly in the UI app - no iframes - and therefore have access to the full range of internal services (e.g. notifications, data fetching) that Angular components enjoy.

Furthermore we have introduced a set of dedicated React 

 to allow you to build seamless integrations. 

Our new documentation includes examples in both Angular and React now. Here's an illustration showing a component implemented in both frameworks:

Whether building in Angular or React, our APIs for extending the Admin UI have been vastly simplified. Previously, there was a lot of boilerplate required around setting up multiple Angular modules, with internal implementation concerns leaking out into our public APIs. This made even simple extensions - such as adding a new navigation item - much more complex than necessary. In v2.1 we set out to distill these APIs down to their essentials, and remove the need to understand anything about the underlying Angular module system.

This was made possible by recent advances in Angular - notably their new 

 approach - which means you no longer need to use Angular modules at all. If you are building UI extensions in React, you will not need to touch any Angular APIs whatsoever. We've encapsulated all of the underlying implementation details behind a set of simple, coherent functions.

Any existing UI extensions will still work as before, but you can start to migrate to the new APIs by following 

Our powerful data table component drives all this list views in the Vendure Admin UI. With v2.1 you can now provide custom components - written in either Angular or React - to render any column. For instance, you could render a product slug as a link to your storefront url, or render a colour-coded status badge for a custom field. 

, which feature sorting & filtering out of the box, this unlocks some 

 powerful possibilities for modelling and interacting with custom data. 

Vendure is a global platform. Developers from all over the world use our native localization support to build applications that serve customers across multiple languages, locales and currencies. Part of that is making our Admin UI accessible to as many people as possible via our community-contributed translations.

Thanks to our wonderful global community, we have expanded our range of translations of our Admin UI to include four new languages: 

, bringing the total to 17 and making our Admin UI newly accessible to around 250 million more people. This was more than just a new set of translation files though: Arabic, Hebrew and Persian are right-to-left languages, which means we also had to implement right-to-left support in the UI. This means that most of the visual idioms of left-to-right layouts get reversed - the main menu moves to the right of the screen, breadcrumbs are reversed, etc. 

Here's a comparison between a left-to-right layout in German, and the same screen in Arabic:

The powerful filtering capabilities of our UI data tables allow users to find the exact set of data they need. With v2.1 we've added the ability to save any combination of filters as a preset, which then allows you to instantly switch to those filters in a single click. 

We've also added the ability to filter by relative date, as in "show me all orders placed in the past 7 days". With these new features, you can for instance create a "Recent orders" preset like this:

Last but not least, we're excited to announce the release of a 

 to boost your productivity when building Vendure apps. This initial release includes an automation for the most common yet time-consuming task: scaffolding a new plugin. No more copy-paste-rename tedium. Just one command, a handful of prompts, and boom! You have a new plugin set up following best practices, all wired up and ready to be filled out with your custom business logic.

In future we'll expand the range of tasks that the CLI can perform. Let us know what we should handle next!

Here's a non-exhaustive list of other cool stuff in this release:

Although this is a minor release, and no breaking changes have been made to the public Vendure APIs, the upgrade of Apollo Server from v3 to v4 may be a breaking change in the rare case that you have defined a custom ApolloServerPlugin in your app. Those changes are covered in the 

 to be performed. You should not need to do any manual migration work - it is a straightforward addition of a field to a table.

In the Admin UI, the "stock locations" list and detail views have been moved from the "catalog" module to the "settings" module. Also, the menu item & breadcrumb for "inventory" has been renamed to "products". This is an end-user breaking change rather than a code breaking change. Any UI extensions that link to a 

 route will still work as there is a redirect in place to 

 now defaults to a "warning" rather than "error" log level. Previously this was causing too much noise in logging services and the new level better reflects the severity of the error.

Lastly I'd like to personally thank everyone who contributed to this massive release. From issues and pull requests, to feedback on our new docs, to expertise in implementing RTL support, to supporting one another in our 

 - Vendure would simply not be what it is today without our community.

In particular I'd like to acknowledge the following people who made direct code contributions to this release: 

Alessio M, Alexis Kobrinski, Alexis Vigoureux, Andreas Sonnleitner, BeepLoveKarki, cdiban, Daniel Biegler, Denis, Dushko Jordanovski, Eusebio Trigo, Gautier Darchen, Giosue Delgado, Goro, Hiago Alves, Hosein Ghanbari, Jacob Frantz, Jean-Baptiste Alleaume, Kolja Martens, Martijn van de Brug, Mizan3050, oidt, Patrick A Lima, Pieter Doms, PKarics, Sagi Rorlich, Serge Morel, Tarik, yasserlens

Announcing Vendure v2.1

, a similar process has been taking place, fractal-like, within software itself as closed, proprietary solutions have been increasingly replaced by open source software (OSS) alternatives.

What's driving this shift towards open source?

 might have conjured up images of clunky desktop tools with ugly UIs, impenetrable command line tools, compiling binaries from source, and getting help via mailing list. OSS has moved beyond this stereotype and now rivals - and in many cases eclipses - closed solutions in areas like usability, documentation and features.

As a developer, when was the last time you encountered a problem and reached for a proprietary library or framework?

Developer tooling was once dominated by closed platforms & tools. This might be hard to believe for a young developer who didn’t see it first hand. Over time everything shifted to OSS. Yes, even those closed proprietary tools are themselves almost universally built on top of OSS.

This same shift is now happening for businesses.

Why would a business choose open source over closed alternatives?

A coherent suite of tools from a single vendor can be a great way to efficiently solve a whole set of business problems. But what happens when something goes wrong? And by “goes wrong” we could be talking unexpected price hikes, gradual deterioration of the product, sudden shut-down of a critical part, or even the appearance of a much better alternative. All of these happen, and often.

Extracting this vendor from your workflows can be more trouble that it is worth, so you may opt to suffer on with a host of tools that no longer serve you. That's lock in.

OSS offers an alternative to getting locked in. Typically it is free, so price hikes don't apply. You aren't subject to sudden shut-downs since you own and fully control the solution. A popular project with a healthy community will see continual improvement.

The platforms you use to run your business - be that e-commerce platforms, customer relations, ticketing systems - are aggregating and managing lots of data. This data itself, as well as the related processes and business logic, is an asset of your company - or should be. Closed platforms get to dictate what data you get access to. Poor, incomplete APIs and the inability to extract that data means you have no real control over it. With OSS, you own the data. It’s yours and you can do what you want with it. Let’s take e-commerce as an example - a shop doing a few hundred orders per day will soon build up a huge trove of data about buying habits, top sellers, products that get bought together, and so on. This data is valuable - 

there are entire closed businesses which have the sole purpose of collecting and monetizing such data

! With an OSS commerce platform, you own this data. It’s right there sitting in an SQL database which you also own.

OSS projects are typically aimed at developers and as a result tend to prioritize things like good documentation, examples, and readily-available resources. If the OSS project has significant traction in the developer community, you’ll likely be able to hop into a chat server or forum and get help from other enthusiastic developers. That’s not to say that closed platforms can’t also have great docs and community - but there are still too many examples of closed platforms which have no public docs, and developers are expected to work from outdated pdf files.

For a business, building on popular open source technologies also means you have a wide pool of expertise from which to hire.

If you build your business around a closed platform which shuts down or deteriorates to the point that it’s no longer fit for purpose, you have no option but to completely re-evaluate and migrate to something new. Unfortunately, this happens - and can cost years of effort to get out of. With OSS, an analogous risk is that the primary maintainers decide to radically change the direction of the project, fail to properly maintain it, or decide to change the licensing. Given a sufficiently large community, it becomes likely that the project can be successfully forked and thus mitigate the risk of a disruptive re-platforming effort.

Forking an OSS project is hardly trivial, but it can and does happen successfully.

OK so “OSS is the way to go”, says the co-founder of an OSS-based company. Let’s discuss the tradeoffs otherwise you’re just reading another marketing listicle.

First of all with OSS you need to do things yourself. You might need a developer to build things and you definitely need someone to manage the hosting & operation, and maintenance. This is the flipside of the ownership coin. Yes - you own your data and your infrastructure, but now you gotta 

So while you might be saving tens or hundreds of thousands on licensing fees vs that closed platform, you need to weigh this against the cost of running things yourself. Small businesses may reasonably conclude that their resources are best spent on their core business tasks, rather than running a service that can be handled by a SaaS vendor, for instance.

But running things yourself is only getting easier. With the rise of technologies like Docker and cloud platforms that increasingly focus on taking the pain out of operations, setting up an OSS replacement can be as simple as pointing your cloud host at a docker image and hitting “deploy”.

Tooling around this will only improve over time, and (let me get an AI angle in here) the rise of AI language models could conceivably lower the barrier to the point that even smaller businesses with limited technical resources are able to handle this.

Another concern is the "bus factor" - how many maintainers need to be hit by a bus before the OSS project is dead too? Open source funding is a whole topic in itself, but suffice it to say that there are proven ways an OSS project can reach a point of stable sustainability, whether via a foundation, corporate sponsorship or the various commercial open source models.

More recently, dedicated funds have emerged that specifically fund commercial open source companies. Two prime examples being 

In conclusion, OSS has reached the point where every business needs to seriously evaluate the pros and cons of going with closed vs open solutions. And more and more are choosing open.

We’re building Vendure as a modern OSS alternative to closed commerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, Commercetools, SAP Commerce Cloud and others, allowing businesses to own their data and technology stack, and making developers enjoy building ecommerce apps again.

Why Open Source Is Winning

Why Open Source is Winning

The first commit to Vendure was 5 years ago in May 2018. I was scratching my own itch as I set out to build something that simply didn't exist yet: an ecommerce platform built on a 

The first stable release came in May 2021, and since then Vendure has come to be used by thousands of developers in hundreds of projects of all sizes, from small shops to billion-dollar startups to Fortune 500 enterprises. Last year my co-founder David and I formed a company around Vendure to ensure the continued growth of the platform, to better support our growing base of large business users, and to provide a foundation for ambitious plans we have for the future.

Over the past couple of years we have listened to the feedback from our growing community and learned the common pain points and limitations that people have run into with version 1. Many of these limitations arise once you try to move beyond the typical retail use-case. Building an app to sell t-shirts is pretty simple - but how about building a crowd-funding platform or a marketplace?

The Business-Model-Agnostic Commerce Platform

With Vendure 2, we are casting aside these limitations and presenting you with the most flexible and extensible commerce platform in the world. Now you can build anything, for any business use-case, no matter how complex: 

; Vendure provides the underlying APIs and plugin architecture that you can extend in any way you need - 

no matter what business model you need to support

 - is very deliberately chosen. Over the past two decades, people have grown accustomed to buying things online. In response to this, platforms have evolved to the point that there are now 

 good options for building a typical business-to-consumer e-commerce application. B2C as a business model is served well by all the major commerce platforms, both SaaS and open source.

But what about B2B? Now we're getting into some significant complexity - and many of the big platforms will have trouble accommodating your requirements. Or how about if you want to build a multi-vendor marketplace, a rental service, or a crowd-funding app? Good luck finding 

 that fits your requirements! And building from scratch will be a truly onerous undertaking. You need a commerce platform that can work with 

With the carefully-planned changes to our core data model and the addition of new APIs in version 2, 

. It will enable you to build anything - and actually have fun while doing so!

Here’s a rundown of the major new features we are releasing today:

The Admin UI is used by shop administrators to manage inventory, orders, customers, and all other aspects of the shop. It is the thing people interact with when they use Vendure. Our existing UI was lacking features, had some areas of poor usability, and kinda just looked "meh". While we were giving Vendure developers an A+ experience with our TypeScript & GraphQL APIs, end-users who interacted with our UI only got a B- treatment.

So we set out to transform the experience into something much more powerful, slick, and easy to use. We also now take full advantage of Vendure's powerful GraphQL API with our new data tables, which allow full control over 

The Admin UI is also much more customizable - not only fully themeable via CSS custom properties, but also 

: add your own components, routes, form controls, menu items, dashboard widgets, page tabs. You can even create completely new routes using 

, all the while being deeply integrated with the rest of the UI app!

While Vendure v1 was already one of the most extensible platforms out there, there was one type of app that lots of teams wanted to build that was just not well supported: multi-vendor marketplaces. Think eBay, Etsy, Amazon or any variation where customers place orders containing items from multiple individual sellers. This kind of application introduces a significant amount of complexity over and above the typical ecommerce use-case: splitting orders so sellers only see the part that belongs to them; splitting shipping and payments; managing multiple shipping methods and fulfillments on a single order; handling platform fees and commissions.

Attempting to build marketplace apps on Vendure v1 was challenging to say the least. What was needed were some fundamental changes to our data model, as well as a set of APIs that allow Vendure to handle all the extra complexity that marketplaces bring. So that's what we've built in to Vendure 2.

No more need to hack together your own method of splitting orders - we now have built-in support. Likewise with shipping, payments and platform fees. And of course, all of this is supported out-of-the-box by our new Admin UI!

Since the specific requirements of each marketplace app are varied, we are providing a 

 which you can then customize to your needs, as well a 

Vendure's stock management capabilities can now extend to multiple locations: set up a location for each warehouse and set the stock levels for each. Then when a customer places an order, use the new 

 to select which warehouse should provide the stock. This could be based on available stock levels, geographical proximity, or something even more sophisticated. The Admin UI is also set up to allow you to quickly view and update stock levels at each location.

In Vendure v1, each channel could only have a single currency, and to support more currencies involved setting up a new channel for each supported currency. While channels are an incredibly powerful feature (they form the basis of our multi-vendor marketplace support), they come with overhead.

In Vendure 2 you can now support multiple currencies without needing to set up additional Channels. Instead, you just specify which currencies you want to support, and add new prices to each product variant. Your storefront can then select the best price based on any logic you like, using our new 

In combination with our existing built-in localization support (which has been extended further in v2), 

Vendure is now the clear choice for commerce applications that sell across multiple markets and regions

In addition to the headline features covered above, there are over a hundred new features in Vendure 2, as well as dozens of fixes and performance improvements. You can see all of these in the changelog, but I want to highlight some of the most impactful features here:

 Vendure has always featured very advanced workflow customizations for orders, payments and fulfillments. However, there were still some hard-coded assumptions baked in to these processes that made certain use-cases challenging to accurately model. Now, we have extracted all of this hard-coded logic into a set of fully-replaceable "default processes" which you are free to use, modify or replace entirely as you require. This change makes it possible to finely tune these key business processes to exactly fit the needs of your project. See our extended docs on 

 Orders containing hundreds or even thousands of items are not typical in retail, but in wholesale scenarios can be common. Vendure v1 made support for very large orders difficult due to the way we stored order items - essentially the time taken to perform operations on an order such as adding an item to the cart would increase linearly with the number of items in the order. With thousands of items this became too slow to be practical. For v2 we redesigned this aspect of the data model, resulting in constant-time operations. On our testing with 5,000 items, we saw a 

 Vendure has always supported both signed-in and guest checkouts. However, once a customer had registered with a given email address, they could no longer perform a guest checkout. In v2 we've introduced the 

 which gives you full control over how a customer is able to check out.