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Every Shoppex storefront runs in one of two lanes: Easy, a visual ThemeDocument you edit in the Builder, or Advanced, your own React and Vite project.

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Easy or Advanced

If you are not sure which lane to pick, start Easy. The two lanes do not mix inside one storefront, so switching from Easy to Advanced replaces the ThemeDocument with a new source project.

Set up an Easy theme

Edit pages and blocks in the Theme Builder, then preview and publish.

Set up an Advanced storefront

Bring your own React and Vite source, or import an existing project.

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Installable themes

Open Store → Themes to install one of five active themes: default, starlight, pulse, clean-minimal, and classic. Each one creates a ThemeDocument you can edit in the Builder right away.
If you are not sure which theme to start from, use default.
Five older themes are retired: apex, nebula, phantom, shadow, and vault. An existing storefront on one of these keeps rendering, and you can still export and import it. You cannot create a new theme on a retired scheme.

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Easy: the ThemeDocument contract

A ThemeDocument splits ownership across four layers. Every block has a stable ID, a registered type, a visibility flag, and typed settings. An unknown block type or an invalid setting fails validation. Shoppex does not fall back to a different block or a guessed value in its place. The backend supplies request data such as products, collections, locale, and currency. A theme setting never calculates a final price, a stock level, payment eligibility, or a checkout rule. Those stay server-side, on every theme. See Visual themes for the editing workflow itself.

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Choosing a runtime or SDK

A storefront hosted by Shoppex, Easy or Advanced, includes the platform commerce runtime automatically. A block does not start its own cart SDK or duplicate checkout logic. A storefront you host yourself imports @shoppexio/storefront and owns its own rendering and deployment. It still calls Shoppex APIs for the official commerce data and buyer actions.

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How storefronts serve

Shoppex resolves your domain at the edge and renders the published document or artifact from there.
  • Publishing a ThemeDocument creates a new document revision. That revision never changes again.
  • Publishing an Advanced storefront creates a new build. That build never changes again.
  • A renderer update ships on its own revision, independent of your document.
  • Public assets use versioned URLs, so a given URL always returns the same file.
  • Custom domain routing and cache purges are a Shoppex responsibility, not yours.
  • A protected download or a private draft never appears through the public asset path.
If a shop has no valid published document or artifact, the storefront returns the normal unavailable response. Shoppex does not fall back to another theme or an older source.