Payload E-Commerce Template

This is the official Payload E-Commerce Template. Use it to power e-commerce businesses and online stores of all sizes. This repo includes a fully-working backend, enterprise-grade admin panel, and a beautifully designed, production-ready website.

This template is right for you if you are selling:

• Physical products like clothing or merchandise
• Digital assets like ebooks or videos
• Access to content like courses or premium articles

Core features:

• Pre-configured Payload Config
• Authentication
• Access Control
• Shopping Cart
• Checkout
• Paywall
• Layout Builder
• SEO
• Website

Quick Start

To spin up this example locally, follow these steps:

Clone

If you have not done so already, you need to have standalone copy of this repo on your machine. If you've already cloned this repo, skip to Development.

Method 1 (recommended)

Go to Payload Cloud and clone this template. This will create a new repository on your GitHub account with this template's code which you can then clone to your own machine.

Method 2

Use the create-payload-app CLI to clone this template directly to your machine:

npx create-payload-app@latest my-project -t ecommerce

Method 3

Use the git CLI to clone this template directly to your machine:

git clone -n --depth=1 --filter=tree:0 https://github.com/payloadcms/payload my-project && cd my-project && git sparse-checkout set --no-cone templates/ecommerce && git checkout && rm -rf .git && git init && git add . && git mv -f templates/ecommerce/{.,}* . && git add . && git commit -m "Initial commit"

Development

1. First clone the repo if you have not done so already
2. cd my-project && cp .env.example .env to copy the example environment variables
3. yarn && yarn dev to install dependencies and start the dev server
4. open http://localhost:3000 to open the app in your browser

That's it! Changes made in ./src will be reflected in your app. Follow the on-screen instructions to login and create your first admin user. To begin accepting payment, follow the Stripe guide. Then check out Production once you're ready to build and serve your app, and Deployment when you're ready to go live.

How it works

The Payload config is tailored specifically to the needs of most e-commerce businesses. It is pre-configured in the following ways:

Collections

See the Collections docs for details on how to extend this functionality.

• Users (Authentication)

  Users are auth-enabled and encompass both admins and customers based on the value of their roles field. Only admin users can access your admin panel to manage your store whereas customer can authenticate on your front-end to create shopping carts and place orders but have limited access to the platform. See Access Control for more details.

  For additional help, see the official Auth Example or the Authentication docs.

• Products

  Products are linked to Stripe via a custom select field that is dynamically populated in the sidebar of each product. This field fetches all available products in the background and displays them as options. Once a product has been selected, prices get automatically synced between Stripe and Payload through Payload Hooks and Stripe Webhooks. See Stripe for more details.

  All products are layout builder enabled so you can generate unique pages for each product using layout building blocks, see Layout Builder for more details.

  Products can also restrict access to content or digital assets behind a paywall (gated content), see Paywall for more details.

• Orders

  Orders are created when a user successfully completes a checkout. They contain all the data about the order including the products purchased, the total price, and the user who placed the order. See Checkout for more details.

• Pages

  All pages are layout builder enabled so you can generate unique layouts for each page using layout-building blocks, see Layout Builder for more details.

• Media

  This is the uploads enabled collection used by products and pages to contain media like images, videos, downloads, and other assets.

• Categories

  A taxonomy used to group products together. Categories can be nested inside of one another, for example "Courses > Technology". See the official Payload Nested Docs Plugin for more details.

Globals

See the Globals docs for details on how to extend this functionality.

• Header

  The data required by the header on your front-end like nav links.

• Footer

  Same as above but for the footer of your site.

Access control

Basic role-based access control is setup to determine what users can and cannot do based on their roles, which are:

• admin: They can access the Payload admin panel to manage your store. They can see all data and make all operations.
• customer: They cannot access the Payload admin panel and can perform limited operations based on their user (see below).

This applies to each collection in the following ways:

• users: Only admins and the user themselves can access their profile. Anyone can create a user but only admins can delete users.
• products: Everyone can access products, but only admins can create, update, or delete them. Paywall-enabled products may also have content that is only accessible to only users who have purchased the product. See Paywall for more details.

For more details on how to extend this functionality, see the Payload Access Control docs.

Shopping cart

Logged-in users can have their shopping carts saved to their profiles as they shop. This way they can continue shopping at a later date or on another device. When not logged in, the cart can be saved to local storage and synced to Payload on the next login. This works by maintaining a cart field on the user:

{
  name: 'cart',
  label: 'Shopping Cart',
  type: 'object',
  fields: [
    {
      name: 'items',
      label: 'Items',
      type: 'array',
      fields: [
        // product, quantity, etc
      ]
    },
    // other metadata like `createdOn`, etc
  ]
}

Stripe

Payload itself handles no currency exchange. All payments are processed and billed using Stripe. This means you must have access to a Stripe account via an API key, see Connect Stripe for how to get one. When you create a product in Payload that you wish to sell, it must be connected to a Stripe product by selecting one from the field in the product's sidebar, see Products for more details. Once set, data is automatically synced between the two platforms in the following ways:

1. Stripe to Payload using Stripe Webhooks:

   • product.created
   • product.updated
   • price.updated

2. Payload to Stripe using Payload Hooks:

   • user.create

For more details on how to extend this functionality, see the the official Payload Stripe Plugin.

Connect Stripe

To integrate with Stripe, follow these steps:

1. You will first need to create a Stripe account if you do not already have one.
2. Retrieve your Stripe API keys and paste them into your env:

   STRIPE_SECRET_KEY=
   NEXT_PUBLIC_STRIPE_PUBLISHABLE_KEY=

3. In another terminal, listen for webhooks (optional):

   stripe login # follow the prompts
   yarn stripe:webhooks

4. Paste the given webhook signing secret into your env:

   STRIPE_WEBHOOKS_SIGNING_SECRET=

5. Reboot Payload to ensure that Stripe connects and the webhooks are registered.

Checkout

A custom endpoint is opened at POST /api/create-payment-intent which initiates the checkout process. This endpoint totals your cart and creates a Stripe Payment Intent. The total price is recalculated on the server to ensure accuracy and security, and once completed, passes the client_secret back in the response for your front-end to finalize the payment. Once the payment has succeeded, an Order will be created in Payload with a stripePaymentIntentID. Each purchased product will be recorded to the user's profile, and the user's cart will be automatically cleared.

Paywall

Products can optionally restrict access to content or digital assets behind a paywall. This will require the product to be purchased before it's data and resources are accessible. To do this, a purchases field is maintained on each user to track their purchase history:

{
  name: 'purchases',
  label: 'Purchases',
  type: 'array',
  fields: [
    {
      name: 'product',
      label: 'Product',
      type: 'relationship',
      relationTo: 'products',
    },
    // other metadata like `createdOn`, etc
  ]
}

Then, a paywall field is added to the product with read access control set to check for associated purchases. Every time a user requests a product, this will only return data to those who have purchased it:

{
  name: 'paywall',
  label: 'Paywall',
  type: 'blocks',
  access: {
    read: checkUserPurchases,
  },
  fields: [
    // assets
  ]
}

Layout Builder

Create unique product and page layouts for any type fo content using a powerful layout builder. This template comes pre-configured with the following layout building blocks:

• Hero
• Content
• Media
• Call To Action
• Archive

Each block is fully designed and built into the front-end website that comes with this template. See Website for more details.

Draft Preview

All pages and products are draft-enabled so you can preview them before publishing them to your website. To do this, these collections use Versions with drafts set to true. This means that when you create a new page or product, it will be saved as a draft and will not be visible on your website until you publish it. This also means that you can preview your draft before publishing it to your website. To do this, we automatically format a custom URL which redirects to your front-end to securely fetch the draft version of your content.

Since the front-end of this template is statically generated, this also means that pages and products will need to be regenerated as changes are made to published documents. To do this, we use an afterChange hook to regenerate the front-end when a document has changed and its _status is published.

For more details on how to extend this functionality, see the official Draft Preview Example.

SEO

This template comes pre-configured with the official Payload SEO Plugin for complete SEO control from the admin panel. All SEO data is fully integrated into the front-end website that comes with this template. See Website for more details.

Redirects

If you are migrating an existing site or moving content to a new URL, you can use the redirects collection to create a proper redirect from old URLs to new ones. This will ensure that proper request status codes are returned to search engines and that your users are not left with a broken link. This template comes pre-configured with the official Payload Redirects Plugin for complete redirect control from the admin panel. All redirects are fully integrated into the front-end website that comes with this template. See Website for more details.

Website

This template includes a beautifully designed, production-ready front-end built with the Next.js App Router, served right alongside your Payload app in a single Express server. This makes is so that you can deploy both apps simultaneously and host them together. If you prefer a different front-end framework, this pattern works for any framework that supports a custom server. If you prefer to host your website separately from Payload, you can easily Eject the front-end out from this template to swap in your own, or to use it as a standalone CMS. For more details, see the official Custom Server Example.

Core features:

• Next.js App Router
• Stripe
• GraphQL
• TypeScript
• React Hook Form
• Payload Admin Bar
• Authentication
• Publication workflow
• Shopping cart
• Checkout
• Customer accounts
• Dark mode
• Pre-made layout building blocks
• SEO
• Redirects
• Paywall

Cache

Although Next.js includes a robust set of caching strategies out of the box, Payload Cloud proxies and caches all files through Cloudflare using the Official Cloud Plugin. This means that Next.js caching is not needed and is disabled by default. If you are hosting your app outside of Payload Cloud, you can easily reenable the Next.js caching mechanisms by removing the no-store directive from all fetch requests in ./src/app/_api and then removing all instances of export const dynamic = 'force-dynamic' from pages files, such as ./src/app/(pages)/[slug]/page.tsx. For more details, see the official Next.js Caching Docs.

Eject

If you prefer another front-end framework or would like to use Payload as a standalone CMS, you can easily eject the front-end from this template. To eject, simply run yarn eject. This will uninstall all Next.js related dependencies and delete all files and folders related to the Next.js front-end. It also removes all custom routing from your server.ts file and updates your eslintrc.js.

Note: Your eject script may not work as expected if you've made significant modifications to your project. If you run into any issues, compare your project's dependencies and file structure with this template. See ./src/eject for full details.

For more details on how setup a custom server, see the official Custom Server Example.

Development

To spin up this example locally, follow the Quick Start. Then Connect Stripe to enable payments, and Seed the database with a few products and pages.

Docker

Alternatively, you can use Docker to spin up this template locally. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Follow steps 1 and 2 from above, the docker-compose file will automatically use the .env file in your project root
2. Next run docker-compose up
3. Follow steps 4 and 5 from above to login and create your first admin user

That's it! The Docker instance will help you get up and running quickly while also standardizing the development environment across your teams.

Seed

To seed the database with a few products and pages you can run yarn seed. This template also comes with a GET /api/seed endpoint you can use to seed the database from the admin panel.

NOTICE: seeding the database is destructive because it drops your current database to populate a fresh one from the seed template. Only run this command if you are starting a new project or can afford to lose your current data.

Conflicting routes

In a monorepo when routes are bootstrapped to the same host, they can conflict with Payload's own routes if they have the same name. In our template we've named the Nextjs API routes to next to avoid this conflict.

This can happen with any other routes conflicting with Payload such as admin and we recommend using different names for custom routes.
Alternatively you can also rename Payload's own routes via the configuration.

Production

To run Payload in production, you need to build and serve the Admin panel. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Invoke the payload build script by running yarn build or npm run build in your project root. This creates a ./build directory with a production-ready admin bundle.
2. Finally run yarn serve or npm run serve to run Node in production and serve Payload from the ./build directory.
3. When you're ready to go live, see Deployment for more details.

Deployment

Before deploying your app, you need to:

1. Switch your Stripe account to live mode and update your Stripe API keys. See Connect Stripe for more details.
2. Ensure your app builds and serves in production. See Production for more details.

The easiest way to deploy your project is to use Payload Cloud, a one-click hosting solution to deploy production-ready instances of your Payload apps directly from your GitHub repo. You can also deploy your app manually, check out the deployment documentation for full details.

Questions

If you have any issues or questions, reach out to us on Discord or start a GitHub discussion.