# Commerce (/solutions/commerce)



Commerce is the bundle of modules that sells: [products](/product/modules/products), [orders](/product/modules/orders), [deliveries](/product/modules/deliveries) and the [storefront](/product/modules/storefront), on top of the [marketing site](/product/modules/marketing) 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                                                          | Shopify                                                  |
| -------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------ | -------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Catalog**    | Your database                                                      | Shopify's                                                |
| **Cart**       | The same cart                                                      | The same cart                                            |
| **Payment**    | Your gateway: Stripe, or PayFast for cards and Instant EFT in rand | Shopify-hosted checkout                                  |
| **The order**  | In your database                                                   | In Shopify, mirrored back to your database for reporting |
| **Fulfilment** | Your deliveries worklist and carrier                               | Shopify's                                                |

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](/product/infrastructure/hosting).