Commerce

Commerce is the bundle of modules that sells: products, orders, deliveries and the storefront, on top of the marketing site every store has. You get a public site, an admin, and an assistant in each, and on the paid tier a branded mobile app.

What you get on day one

• A public site at your own subdomain, and at your own domain once you register it: a home page built from sections you can reorder, a services listing, an enquiry form, and the shop.
• A shop: collections, product pages with variants, filters built from the options your products actually carry, search, a cart, and checkout. Prices display VAT-inclusive from the rates in force on the day.
• An admin for the catalog, orders and deliveries, with grids you can configure column by column and forms whose surface you choose, per module.
• Your copy, your colour: every label on the site is yours to reword in place, and the palette is a theme you pick and adjust.
• An assistant in the admin that captures your catalog from a spreadsheet, an invoice photo, another store's feed or a description in your own words, and reshapes your site by chat. Everything it writes lands as a draft you approve.

Two ways to run the shop

Your storefront runs on one of two stacks, switched by a setting rather than a rebuild.

Own store is the choice when the value is elsewhere: per-tenant isolation, a domain that is not commerce-shaped, or a gateway of your own so there is no platform surcharge on top of the gateway's fee. Shopify is the choice when commerce operations are the whole job; you keep the site, the admin, the assistant and the app around it, and Shopify keeps the checkout and the order.

Where an order comes from

Every order, whichever stack, lands in one record: a quote that becomes a sale that becomes an invoice, a credit note or return pointing at what it reverses, the VAT split frozen per line on the day. A checkout order is written by the gateway's paid webhook and never by the redirect, so a dropped connection cannot lose a sale. A field rep can also capture a replenishment order on a store's behalf, which is confirmed server-side against live prices, stock and the store's credit limit.

The two agents

A shopping agent on the storefront finds products and reads one product's choices for a shopper. It never adds to the basket and never pays; the shopper does both.

A merchant agent in the admin captures your catalog, manages collections, imports and exports people, reshapes the site's sections, rewrites copy, changes the theme and configures your grids and forms. It produces data; one database function owns each write, every write is attributed and reversible, and a generated row is a draft until you approve it.

What is not built

• Discounts and coupons: the field exists, nothing computes one yet. On Shopify, Shopify's promotions apply.
• Shipping rates and zones, and inventory decrement on sale.
• Transactional email beyond the enquiry form: no order confirmation, shipping or refund mail yet.
• Embedded on-site checkout; payment pages are hosted redirects.
• Cross-border VAT.

Going further

Own store, dedicated hosting and your own payment keys are one tier: holding any live secret moves you onto your own deployment. See hosting.