Selling on your site
Products, checkout, shipping, orders, and getting the money to your bank.
Overview
Selling turns a site that describes your business into one that takes money for it. Products get their own pages, a cart sits in your header, and checkout hands the payment to Stripe and the order to you.
Two things have to be true before a customer can buy: your site needs the Store plan, and your Stripe account needs to be connected. This guide starts there and works through to the money arriving.
Cart and plan are separate switches, which trips people up. You can turn the cart on without the Store plan — visitors will be able to fill a basket but not check out. The settings page tells you when the two disagree.
Switching selling on
Both switches live in the same place, one card apart.
- In the side navigation go to Sites, click your site's action button (the ⋯), and choose Settings.
- Under Selling, open the Store card and turn the shopping cart on. That's what puts the cart in your header and lets checkout take orders.
- Go back and open the Payments card, then start the Stripe setup.
- Check your plan under Selling → Plan. If you're on Trial or Starter, you'll need to move to Store before anyone can actually pay.
Every template can sell — the cart isn't a feature of some designs and not others. It's off by default so a site that isn't a shop doesn't grow a cart it never uses.
Getting paid
Payments run through Stripe, and the setup opens Stripe's own flow. Your business details, identity documents, and the bank account your money lands in go straight to Stripe — none of that is held here, which is rather the point of doing it this way.
When you come back, two badges tell you where you stand. Charges means your store can take money. Payouts means Stripe can pass it on to your bank. Stripe often switches one on before the other, and it sometimes comes back later asking for more information — when that happens a prompt appears on the Payments card and payouts pause until you answer it.
Your customers' card details never touch your site or ours. Checkout happens on Stripe's own page, which is also why you don't have to think about card security compliance.
Adding products
Products live under Inventory in the side navigation. A product carries its own price, stock, photos, and — the setting that decides most of the rest — how it reaches the buyer.
- Shipping — a physical thing you post. Collects an address at checkout and charges a shipping rate.
- Pick-up — a physical thing collected from one of your locations. No address, no shipping cost, but still something to hand over.
- Neither — services and downloads. Nothing to pack, so these orders never sit in your “to fulfill” pile.
The first image is the thumbnail used everywhere else on your site, so put your best photo first. Products can also be imported and exported as a spreadsheet, which is far quicker than typing in a hundred of them.
Options, variants, and stock
A product with no options has one price and one stock number. Add options — Colour, Size — and every sellable combination becomes a variant with its own price, stock, and code.
Once a product has variants, the price on the product itself stops being used. If a change to the headline price isn't showing on your site, that is almost always why.
Leaving stock empty means you're not counting it, and the product sells indefinitely. That's exactly right for made-to-order, and a nasty surprise if you meant to track it.
Categories and filters
Two tools that look similar and do opposite jobs.
A category is somewhere a shopper goes. It's navigation — it gets its own page, its own card image, and a place in your menus. A facet is how they narrow what they're already looking at, the checkboxes down the side.
The test: if you'd put it in a menu, it's a category. If you'd put it next to a checkbox, it's a facet.
Within a category you can arrange products by hand. Anything you don't place follows on alphabetically, so putting your three best sellers at the top is enough — you don't have to order the whole list.
Shipping rates
Rates are worked out at checkout from what's in the basket, and the customer picks one on the payment page — so there are no surprises at the door. Set them on the Store card, under Selling.
A rate is either a flat charge or a set of bands, and bands can go by order total or by weight. You can also set a total above which delivery is free, which is the single most reliable way to lift an average order.
Weight bands need a weight on each product — anything without one drops to the lowest band, which is usually not what you meant. Digital and collection-only products are never charged delivery at all.
Sales tax
Sales tax is opt-in and has its own page, listed under Selling, so the setting sits with the report it drives. Switch it on and choose the states you collect in; from then on tax is worked out at checkout from the buyer's shipping address, including local rates.
Individual products can be marked exempt. Taxable is on by default, so the work is un-ticking the things that shouldn't be.
The report gives you the figures a return asks for, broken down by state and month. It does not file anything for you, and it can't tell you where you're obliged to register — that's a question for your accountant.
Orders and fulfillment
Orders arrive under Commerce the moment they're placed, each with a reference and a timeline of everything that's happened to it. The thing worth understanding is that an order carries two statuses, and they move independently:
- Payment — Pending, Paid, Partially refunded, or Refunded. Worked out purely from money in and money back.
- Fulfillment — Unfulfilled, Partly fulfilled, Fulfilled, or Not required, the last for downloads and services that never ship.
Reading those two as one thing is the usual source of confusion. An order can be paid and unfulfilled, or fulfilled and refunded. Each order also has a tracking page you can send the customer — a link that works without them making an account.
Refunds and cancellations
Refunds are issued from the order itself, not from the Payments card. You can refund the whole thing, a portion, or a percentage, and sales tax comes back proportionally — a half refund returns half the tax, which is what keeps your tax report honest rather than over-reporting what you owe.
Cancelling and refunding are different acts. Cancelling stops the order; the money only goes back when you refund it.
Every refund is recorded as its own entry, so an order refunded twice shows both rather than one merged figure.
Frequently asked questions
The Store plan — $35 a month, or $300 a year, which works out at $25 a month. It's everything in Starter plus the full shop: products and inventory, cart and checkout, shipping, and order management.
No. Your sales go to your own Stripe account and we take no commission on them. Stripe charges its own processing fee per transaction, and your plan is a flat monthly cost regardless of how much you sell.
Almost always one of two things: your site isn't on the Store plan yet, or Stripe isn't finished connecting. Check the Payments card — the Charges badge tells you whether your store is allowed to take money.
That's Stripe's schedule, not ours, and it's usually a couple of days once payouts are enabled. Payout timing, balances, and disputes all live in your Stripe dashboard, which is linked from the Payments card.
Yes — every template supports the cart. It's off by default so sites that aren't shops don't grow one, and you turn it on from the Store card in Settings.
Use bands rather than a flat rate — by order total or by weight — and set a threshold above which delivery is free. The customer picks their option at checkout.
Check whether the product has variants. Once it does, the price on the product itself is ignored and each variant carries its own.
Yes — products import and export as a spreadsheet, which is much faster than typing in a large catalogue. Export first to see the column layout the import expects.
Yes. Refund a set amount or a percentage from the order itself, and the sales tax comes back in proportion automatically.
A category is navigation — somewhere a shopper goes, with its own page and a place in your menu. A filter narrows what they're already looking at. If you'd put it in a menu it's a category; if you'd put it beside a checkbox it's a filter.