Overview

Swell Storefronts are customer-facing websites that can serve a wide range of use cases such as direct-to-consumer catalogs, subscriptions, digital products, B2B, and more. Swell Apps are used to power storefronts by providing hosting and functionality for any given use case. A storefront app may be implemented to support custom themes, custom settings, or connected to an external website platform that uses Swell’s API to create a seamless experience for users.

Combined with Swell App functions, data models and APIs, there’s no limit to what developers and merchants can build to serve customers in unique and creative ways.

Our flagship storefront app, Proxima, is an open source example of how storefronts work and how they interact with the Swell platform. In addition, developers can create their own storefront apps and deploy them to the Swell Apps marketplace for merchants to get started quickly.

Themes are used to separate presentation from backend logic, and works with the Swell Theme Editor allowing merchants to visually create and manage their online store. You can build themes for any storefront app that supports them, such as Proxima. Themes may be structured differently depending on the storefront app they are built for, however all themes share some elements in common.

Storefront apps provide the logic and structure of a customer-facing application. They are fully hosted by Swell on top of the Cloudflare Workers environment, and may take any form and function the developer chooses. Storefront apps bring together the advantages of a headless storefront with a fully managed platform, eliminating the typical overhead of a one-off codebase. These apps support their own themes, or implement feature settings to simplify merchant customization.

Headless storefronts are externally hosted applications that use Swell's Backend or Frontend APIs to display products and take orders. A headless storefront may be a preferred approach to integrate Swell into an existing site, or with a proprietary technology stack.

Origin and Horizon are two original headless examples that you can explore and use as a starting point for your own applications.