A Medusa storefront brief must describe how customers find, evaluate and order products. Simply asking for a frontend on Medusa leaves too much open. The commerce backend, management environment and visible store have different responsibilities. Make explicit which customer journeys the storefront supports and which data and business rules must be available for them.
Describe pages as tasks
A list of a homepage, product page and checkout is a start, but it does not yet define sufficient scope. For each page type, describe what the visitor needs to decide. On a collection page, that may be comparing products; on a product page, finding the right version. Identify the information needed. This creates a brief in which content and behaviour are designed together.
Consider a fictional office lighting store. The product page must explain light colour and mounting options. The shopping cart must clearly identify the chosen version. The brief therefore covers more than a product title, image and button. Include a representative example for each important product family, so the developer does not design solely around simple demonstration data.
Make the boundary with Medusa clear
Medusa explains in its storefront development documentation that a storefront is built separately and works with the backend through APIs. Translate that separation into ownership: which data does Medusa provide, which content comes from a CMS, and which presentation is managed by the frontend team? A new backend feature may require additional storefront work.
Also define who decides what happens when information is missing. A product without an application photo may need an alternative image. An incomplete selection calls for a clear customer message. These states must be part of the design. Otherwise, they appear during development as isolated technical messages that do not fit the rest of the store.
Include content editing and devices
Decide which components staff can change themselves and which are managed in code. Ask an editor to change a product introduction or advice block in the proposed environment. The experience after launch depends heavily on these decisions. A storefront can be visually flexible yet require a developer for every minor text change if content management has not been deliberately arranged.
Describe the main mobile tasks as well. A comparison that uses three wide columns on desktop needs a different approach on a phone. Test with real product names and realistic amounts of information. Include keyboard use and understandable field labels in the design review. This makes usability part of the brief, rather than a separate final check.
Define a complete acceptance test
For each acceptance example, specify who reviews the content. A developer can check that a variant loads correctly, while a product specialist must establish whether the explanation of that version is accurate. The two checks complement each other. Without this division, a working screen may be approved even though it still creates the wrong expectation about the product.
A suitable test starts with a specific visitor task and ends with a recognisable order in the management environment. Check the selected products, variants and entered information along that entire journey. Also agree which content must be ready and who reviews it. An empty template with a working technical connection is not a fully configured product experience.
For online store development this brief helps prevent important details from falling between design and technology. For unusual selection or ordering processes, the business logic should be treated as a separate but connected work package. The result is a storefront scope that makes clear what customers can do, how the team manages content and what evidence is required at handover.