Vendure

The Developer

Products, variants, promotions and coupon codes are core, guest checkout runs through the storefront API, and named community payment plugins exist for Stripe, Braintree and Mollie; customer-specific and contract pricing, per-channel currencies and a configurable order process push this well past a basic shop. I found no public information on bundles or configurable products, abandoned-cart recovery or buy-now-pay-later, which is what holds it below the top band. 1 5 6 7 12

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The Developer

Tax zones and rates are core concepts, tax-line calculation is a replaceable strategy that can call a third-party tax API, and the vendor documents VIES checks on EU VAT numbers plus a named EU reverse-charge strategy — though that reverse-charge page itself sits behind a Console sign-in, which I read as a closed door I would want open before trusting the integration. I found no public information on invoice issuance from orders, e-invoicing formats like XRechnung or ZUGFeRD, or the German checkout requirements around order button wording, withdrawal and price indications. 3 5 8 9

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The Developer

This is the closest thing to a platform I would actually maintain for five years: a GPLv3 core I run anywhere, plugins as npm-packaged NestJS modules that declare framework compatibility as a semver range, a CLI to scaffold them, GraphQL shop and admin APIs extendable independently, and upgrades documented so extensions sit beside the framework rather than as a fork I reapply. Theme versioning as a named concept and CI guidance are undocumented, which is the only notch off the top. 4 5 10 11

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The Developer

Orders, fulfilments with state transitions, refunds, modifications with a dry-run option, draft orders and cancellation with stock correction are all documented, with a job queue on a separately scalable worker for the heavy lifting. Interfaces to ERP, PIM and CRM systems are described only as a category with APIs to build the connection yourself, and I found no public information on returns handling, multi-warehouse stock, carrier label printing or a maintained DATEV-style accounting link. 1 5 12 13

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The Developer

Ownership here is structural rather than promised: the framework is GPLv3 and free to self-host, the database is mine (PostgreSQL, MySQL or MariaDB on my own infrastructure, migrations included), and moving between self-hosting and the vendor's cloud is documented as a data and configuration cutover in both directions rather than a re-platform. The captured pages document import tooling thoroughly, including a documented path migrating in from another platform, but say little about a defined export format on the way out, which is what keeps it from a perfect score. 3 4 5 14

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The Developer

The contracting entity is Elevantiq GmbH in Austria with full commercial register details, a data processing agreement is offered for support and future cloud hosting, and the privacy policy names its subprocessors including the US and UK ones with their transfer mechanisms — while self-hosting, air-gapped deployment included, puts the shop runtime entirely under the merchant's control. We found no public information on EU hosting for the vendor's own cloud services or a published certification, and several named subprocessors are US companies, which is what holds it below the sovereign-end-to-end band. 2 3 4 5

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The Developer

Starter at €199 a month, Growth at €599/mo and Scale at €2,499/mo are published with the twelve-month term, VAT treatment and trial conditions, and the vendor states plainly that there is no fee on order value, orders or users — alongside the refreshingly honest position that a team can run a real commerce business on the free framework alone and never pay anything. Cloud overage rates and the Enterprise tier are not priced publicly, so the real annual cost of a cloud deployment cannot be fully computed from these pages. 1 4 5

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