Scaling Optician Storefronts With Medusa

How AK Media Agency Is Helping Scale from One Storefront to Hundreds — With Medusa at the Core

When you think of contact lenses, you probably picture your local optician — the familiar face who helps you choose the right product and keeps track of your prescriptions. But behind many of those local shops stands a global contact-lens distributor with partners across the world.

The mission is simple: empower opticians to deliver the best possible eye care. But achieving that mission online was far from simple.

Each optician wanted their own online shop — with their branding, their products, and their customers. At the same time, a central platform was needed to manage it all, while ensuring that every customer payment went directly to the right optician.

That’s where we at AK Media Agency came in. Drawing on our track record of building diverse online products, as external experts, we assumed a product stewardship role — partnering with our customer to define the vision, roadmap and user experience for a platform that could serve as the digital backbone for their partner network. And from the very beginning, we knew Medusa was the perfect foundation.

The Vision: A Storefront for Every Optician

Our shared goal was ambitious: enable every partner optician to have their own branded storefront — without building and maintaining hundreds of separate shops.

With Medusa’s flexible, headless architecture, we turned that vision into a scalable reality:

• A global storefront network: Each optician now has their own online shop, all powered by a single Medusa backend. There’s virtually no limit to how many storefronts we can launch.
• Direct payments, simplified: Through Stripe Connect, every transaction goes straight to the correct optician account — eliminating revenue-splitting headaches and simplifying accounting.
• Effortless onboarding: What used to require weeks of manual setup is now an automated workflow that takes hours.
• Seamless subscriptions: Customers can now subscribe to recurring contact lens deliveries directly from their optician’s storefront, creating predictable revenue streams and a smoother customer experience.

Leveraging insights from our experience across multiple e-commerce projects, we co-designed key features — such as vendor dashboards, subscription workflows and user onboarding flows — ensuring the platform met both the customer’s requirements and best practices we’ve learned from other industries.

Why the Previous Platform Was Holding Them Back

The customer’s existing e-commerce setup had served them well for years — but it was never designed for the scale and complexity of a modern, multi-partner business model. As the network of opticians grew, so did the challenges:

• No storefronts or customer portals: The previous system didn’t support individual shops at all. Customers couldn’t browse products or manage orders online.
• Platform built for a different purpose: The payment service provider was optimized for a few large merchants handling very high traffic, not for hundreds of independent opticians.
• Complex and lengthy onboarding: Bringing new partners online was a slow, manual process with multiple steps and dependencies.
• Limited payment options: Customers could only pay via direct debit, with no support for modern payment methods or flexible checkout experiences.
• Brand limitations: Opticians lacked the ability to customize their presence and build a distinct online identity.

It was clear that a simple “platform upgrade” wouldn’t solve these issues. A completely new architecture was needed — one designed from the ground up for growth.

Building the Solution: Medusa + Stripe Connect

Acting as external product leads and architects, we designed and built the solution — shaping the product vision, defining the user journeys and orchestrating development of a multi-tenant, composable commerce platform powered by Medusa. Our approach was centered around flexibility, scalability, and long-term sustainability.

Here’s how it works today:

• Multi-storefront architecture: Medusa powers a virtually unlimited number of storefronts. Each optician gets their own domain and unique customer experience — all managed from a single backend.
• Payments that just work: Stripe Connect ensures every payment is routed to the correct optician. Splits and payouts happen automatically, with full compliance and detailed reporting.
• Custom vendor roles: Each partner has their own dashboard with pricing, product management, and order tracking, all fully isolated and secure.
• Full tech ownership: Because Medusa is open source, our customer retains complete control over its stack. We can continuously evolve the platform without being locked into any vendor.
• Subscription engine: Integrated subscription features allow customers to receive recurring contact lens deliveries — directly managed by their optician.
• Deep integrations: We connected the platform with the customer’s ERP system and AWS SES, ensuring smooth inventory management, automated communications, and a unified backend workflow.

Throughout the project, we didn’t just execute on requirements — we guided the product strategy alongside our customer. As external experts, we worked side by side with their team, we prioritised features, iterated on feedback, and co-designed elements like vendor dashboards, subscription workflows and onboarding flows. Our broader experience with diverse e-commerce products ensured that every decision balanced the customer’s needs with industry best practices.

The Journey: Quality Over Speed

This wasn’t a weekend project — and that was by design. From the outset, we focused on building a robust, future-proof solution rather than rushing to launch.

We started with a small group of pilot opticians to validate the concept, gather feedback, and refine the onboarding flow. Over time, we iterated on payment handling, subscription logic, and backend integrations — ensuring every part of the system worked seamlessly at scale.

One of the most complex challenges was payment orchestration. Each optician needed to be onboarded to Stripe, complete KYC verification, and receive payouts without errors. Medusa’s composable architecture — combined with Stripe Connect’s flexibility — allowed us to build a payment flow perfectly tailored to the business model.

The Results: A Platform That Scales With the Business

Today, the commerce platform does far more than just support online sales — it enables a completely new way of working with opticians:

• Built for scale: The platform is now live with the first storefronts and built to seamlessly scale to hundreds as the partner network grows.
• Seamless onboarding: New opticians can go live in hours instead of weeks.
• Predictable revenue: Subscription-based ordering gives partners a steady, recurring income stream.
• Better customer experience: Payments flow directly to the right optician, increasing trust and reducing disputes.

What started as a complex challenge — “how can we build one platform for hundreds of businesses?” — has become one of the customer’s competitive advantages.

What’s Next

And this is only the beginning. With a strong composable foundation in place, all is set to expand the partner network, launch new product lines, and scale digital services — without major infrastructure changes.

For us at AK Media Agency, this project is proof of how powerful the right combination of technology and strategy can be. When you pair Medusa’s open architecture with a clear business vision, you don’t just build an online store — you build an ecosystem that grows with your business.

We will continue to guide and support the product strategy as an external partner, iterating on the platform and drawing on our experience from other online products. Our role as product stewards doesn’t end at launch — we’re committed to evolving the ecosystem so it grows with our customer’s business.