Intro to storefronts

A storefront is any place customers can browse and purchase your products where you control the experience. This could be a website, app, chatbot, game, or physical point of sale. Since Swell is headless, a single store can power multiple storefronts, and anywhere you can use our APIs, you can sell. Whether you are using one of our themes or building your own frontend, you have complete control over the customer experience including checkout and post-purchase.

There are endless ways to implement a storefront as well as endless ways to host them.

no-code low-code

Swell has Next.js and Nuxt.js starter kits built with Tailwind CSS. Git repositories for these are available on GitHub.

code required

This ecommerce starter kit features everything developers need to start creating their storefront. Next.js Commerce comes fully styled with all UI elements built-in and supports a number of features for performance optimization. Read more

code required

Created by Swell partner Commit Studio, this Next.js ecommerce starter kit includes navigation, hero category gallery, featured products, promo section, email subscription, and custom portal sections. View on GitHub

no-code low-code

Builder.io is a visual interface that uses your Swell data when creating your storefront. Along with its powerful visual editor, builder.io also offers analytics tools to inform your design decisions. This is another great no-code (or low code) storefront option. Read more

code required

Aside from the above solutions for storefronts, implementing a custom option is just as simple with Swell. Go beyond the web with your storefront solutions, use an existing website, or expand into multiple storefronts to grow your brand's reach and presence. Swell accommodates any sales channel with API availability. Our platform also supports a wide range of hosting services and offers our own. Depending on your desired framework, Swell offers a JavaScript SKD and Frontend API to help jumpstart your custom build.

Our Backend API provides full control over your store's data, which inherently makes it unsafe to use in public contexts like browsers or applications that can be decompiled. To work around that and make it easier to get something live, we have Swell.js—a dedicated API and SDK for implementing the most common features you'd want in a storefront application. We recommend this as your starting point for custom solutions, augmenting it with additional endpoints or services for functionality that can't be achieved via webhooks.

See the Frontend API reference

Building a robust, optimized checkout experience is hard. If you're a solo developer or a small team, it's often not worth the effort required—especially if you have a tight deadline. That's why every cart has a checkout_url field, which links to our hosted checkout flow. While it covers the needs of most people, if you want a totally custom experience you can build out and implement your own checkout as well.

Moving beyond storefronts, we'll take a look at products, their features, and considerations for modeling them. Swell offers a variety of ways to organize, sell, and configure your store offerings—with variants, options, collections, and more.