Skip to content

Headless commerce

Headless commerce, in plain English

Headless means the pages your customers see and the engine that runs your shop are separate, and talk to each other through an API.

Get startedBook a demo
Read the diagram as a list
  1. Your storefront. The pages your customers see, built with any framework, on your own domain.
  2. The API lock. The API only accepts browser calls from websites you have registered, and server calls that carry your secret.
  3. The request. Your storefront asks for what it needs, such as GET /products for a product listing.
  4. The answer. The engine replies with plain JSON: names, prices, stock, images.
  5. The engine. Catalogue, checkout, CRM, email, inbox, automation and forms, all sharing one customer record.
  6. Our starters. MIT-licensed storefronts for Next.js, Nuxt and Astro with Alpine, ready to restyle.

What happens when someone buys

  1. Step 1

    Your site asks

    A shopper opens a product page. Your website asks Elara One for the product, its price and its stock, and shows it in your design.

  2. Step 2

    The engine does the work

    Basket, promotions, shipping, tax and checkout run in Elara One. Stock is locked as each order is placed, so two shoppers can never buy the last one, and payment goes to your own Stripe account.

  3. Step 3

    Your team sees it all

    The order lands in your admin and on the customer’s record, the confirmation email goes out, and any follow-up flows start.

Is it for you?

When headless is right, and when it is not

Headless is a trade: more freedom for more setup. Here is an honest way to decide.

Headless is right for you if

  • You want a website that looks exactly like your brand, not like a theme.
  • You already have a website, or a developer or agency you trust.
  • You want more than one website selling the same stock to the same customers.
  • Speed and search ranking matter, and you want control over every page.
  • You want to own your storefront’s code and take it with you.

It is probably not, if

  • You want to drag and drop a theme yourself, with nobody technical to help.
  • You need a marketplace of plug-ins to add features to your shop.
  • You need to be live tomorrow and nobody can set up a website.
  • You only take enquiries. Then you do not need a storefront at all: add our forms to the site you have.

The middle way: start from a starter

Our starter storefronts are complete shops already wired to Elara One: catalogue, search, basket, checkout and accounts. Change the colours, fonts and pages, and keep everything that already works.

See the starters

Starters

Headless, with a head start

Three storefronts, one for each popular way of building websites. Each one is a full shop you can restyle, not a demo you have to finish.

  • Next.jsNext.js 16.3 · React 19.2

    App Router pages with a backend-for-frontend of Route Handlers, served by a small custom server that sees the shopper’s real IP.

  • NuxtNuxt 3.21 · Vue 3.5

    Nuxt server routes as the backend-for-frontend, with the key and secret held in private runtime config.

  • Astro + AlpineAstro 7 · Alpine.js 3

    Every page rendered on the server by Astro, with Alpine.js for the basket, search and checkout. Light enough for any host.

MIT-licensed, so what you build on them is yours. The repositories open to everyone at launch.

Compare the starters

Who does what

You keep the front. We run the engine.

Headless splits the work cleanly. What faces your customers stays yours; the heavy machinery behind it is ours to run.

Yours

What you keep

Your design
Every page, every font, every pixel. No theme to fight.
Your domain
Your shop lives at your own address, not a subdomain of ours.
Your code
Starters are MIT-licensed, and whatever you build on them is yours.
Your payment accounts
Stripe and PayPal pay you directly. No fees on your sales.
Your customer data
Export contacts to CSV or read everything through the API.

Ours

What we run

Catalogue and stock
Products, variants, collections, and stock that is locked as each order is placed.
Checkout
Promotions, shipping, tax, and orders placed exactly once.
CRM
Every customer, order and enquiry on one record.
Flows and email
Order confirmations, follow-ups and one-click unsubscribe.
Inbox
Web chat and SMS, answered from the admin.
The running of it
Hosting, backups, security updates, and two-step sign-in for your staff.

Search and speed

Headless without losing search

A badly built headless site can hide its pages from search engines. Our starters are built the other way round: pages arrive finished.

  • Rendered on the server

    Catalogue, product, search and content pages arrive as finished HTML, so search engines can read them without running JavaScript.

  • Structured data

    Product pages describe themselves to search engines in JSON-LD: name, images, price and stock for every variant.

  • Links for every view

    Filters, sorting and page numbers live in the address, so every listing can be shared and indexed.

  • Titles and previews

    Each product page sets its own title, description and social image from your catalogue.

  • Redirects you manage

    Move a page in the admin and the starters follow your redirects, so old links keep working.

  • Light on the browser

    Instant search stays within a size budget: 8 KB in the Astro starter, 15 KB in Nuxt, loaded in pieces in Next.js.

What the starters do today. A storefront you build yourself can do the same through the API.

Product page · JSON-LD
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Product",
  "name": "Oak desk lamp",
  "brand": "Hearth & Oak",
  "offers": [{
    "@type": "Offer",
    "sku": "LAMP-OAK",
    "priceCurrency": "GBP",
    "price": "89.00",
    "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock"
  }]
}

Simplified from what the starters put on the Oak desk lamp page. Search engines read the price and stock straight from it.

FAQ

Questions, answered

Not sure headless suits you? Book a demo and we will look at your site with you.

Do I need a developer?
To build your own storefront, yes. With a starter, you need someone comfortable setting up and hosting a website; after that, running the shop (products, orders, customers, emails) happens in the admin, with no code.
Where does my storefront run?
Wherever you like. The starters run on any host that runs Node.js, on your own domain. Elara One runs the engine behind them.
Does headless hurt SEO?
Not when pages are rendered on the server, which is how our starters work. Search engines get finished pages with titles, descriptions and product structured data.
Can customers pay with PayPal?
The API takes Stripe and PayPal. The starters show Stripe card checkout today; PayPal buttons are not in the starters yet, so a custom storefront can add them through the API.
Are the starters free to use?
Yes. They are MIT-licensed, so you can change them, ship them and keep your changes private. The repositories open to everyone at launch.
Can I run more than one website?
Yes. Register each website that should call your store, and they all share the same catalogue, stock and customers.
Is my API key safe in a browser?
The starters never send your secret to the browser, and a build check fails if one slips in. The API only accepts browser calls from websites you have registered.
What if I leave?
Your storefront’s code is yours to keep. Export your contacts to CSV, and read your catalogue, orders and customers through the API.

Your frontend or ours

Bring your own storefront, or start from one of ours. Either way, the engine behind it is ready today.

Get startedBook a demo