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.
The plan comes first. Until a site is on Store, its Settings don't list the Store or Payments cards at all, so there's no cart to switch on and no Stripe to connect. Move to Store under Selling → Plan and both appear.
Switching selling on
Three cards, all under Selling in your site's Settings, in this order.
- In the side navigation, open Home, click the gear button below View site on the Home panel, and choose Settings.
- Under Selling, open Plan and move to Store if you're on Trial or Starter. The other two cards appear once you have.
- 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.
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 the whole 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 — its Fulfillment, which is how it reaches the buyer.
- Requires shipping — a physical thing you ship. Collects an address at checkout and charges a shipping rate.
- Customer pickup — a physical thing picked up from one of your locations. No address, no shipping cost, but still something to hand over.
- None — services and downloads (checking “Deliver as a digital product” sets it for you). 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. Write with AI can draft the description, the search listing and photo alt text from your photos and notes, ready for you to edit. And a whole catalog can come in from a spreadsheet — a Squarespace or GoDaddy export works as is, photos included — which is far quicker than typing in a hundred products.
Options, variants, and stock
A product with no options has one price and one stock number. Add options — Color, Size — and every sellable combination becomes a variant with its own price, stock, and code.
Once a product has variants, its own price field goes away and each variant row carries the price instead. Set all prices gives every variant the same one in a click.
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 cart, 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, in the Shipping section, from the top down:
- Ship to — the countries you deliver to. Leave it empty to ship within the US only, or pick up to 60 countries from the list.
- Free shipping over — an optional cart total above which delivery is free, which is the single most reliable way to lift an average order. If you ship to more than one country, you choose where it applies.
- Shipping options — each one a flat charge or a set of tiers by order total or by weight, with a delivery estimate if you want one. An option can cover every country you ship to or only some, which is how a destination gets its own prices: Standard and Express for the US, say, and one International option for everywhere else.
When your options differ by country, the cart asks shoppers where their order is going before checkout, and the payment page then offers only that country's options — five at most, free shipping included. Weight tiers need a weight on each product; anything without one drops to the lowest tier. Digital and pickup-only products are never charged delivery at all.
Discount codes
Codes live under Commerce → Discounts, and shoppers type them into the cart before they check out. Each one takes a percentage or a set amount off, or makes shipping free, and can carry a minimum order, a limit on how many times it's used, and start and end dates.
One code goes on an order, and codes don't apply to subscriptions.
A new code starts as a Draft, which nobody can use — set it to Active when it's ready. Its dates run midnight to midnight in your business timezone, so a code that ends on the 30th works until the end of the 30th where you are.
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 unchecking the things that shouldn't be.
The report gives you the figures a return asks for, broken down by state and month, and its filing calendar rolls them into the periods you file, with a reminder email before each due date you enter. 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, Partially fulfilled, Fulfilled, or No shipping, the last for downloads and services that never ship. A pickup order says the same in its own words, from Not ready to Ready for pickup.
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. Pick the items to refund — a whole line or just some of it — and the sales tax on them comes back with them, which is what keeps your tax report honest rather than over-reporting what you owe. You can refund the shipping too, and add an amount or a percentage on top; that extra returns money but not tax.
Canceling is only for an order that was never paid, like a checkout that didn't go through. Once an order is paid, a refund is how the money goes back.
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 to $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 because Stripe hasn't finished connecting. Check the Payments card — the Charges badge tells you whether your store is allowed to take money. If the site has moved off the Store plan, the cart is hidden until it's back on Store, and your cart setting is kept for when it is.
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 tiers 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.
Yes. Add those countries under Ship to, then limit each shipping option to the countries it's for — a domestic option for the US and an international one for everywhere else, for example. The cart asks shoppers where their order is going, and checkout shows only that country's options. An option left on All countries costs the same everywhere you ship.
The product has variants now. Each variant carries its own price, sale price, stock and code in the variants table, and Set all prices fills every row at once.
Yes. A Squarespace or GoDaddy product export imports as is, photos included. From anywhere else, download the sample from the Import window, add a row per product (or per size or color), put links to the photos in an Images column, and upload it. You can export your products as a spreadsheet anytime, too. Starting a new site? Start from my current website brings over the products your current site shows publicly — up to 250, with their photos if you choose — for you to check first. They arrive with their prices, options, and descriptions, visible or hidden as they were, except any priced in a currency other than US dollars or sold as a download, which arrive hidden. Stock counts don't come over — a sold-out product arrives with none, the rest with no limit — so set your stock before you sell. Editing and selling them needs the Store plan.
Yes. Refund some of the items and their sales tax comes back with them automatically. Or add a set amount or a percentage, which returns money without touching your tax figures.
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.