The store

The store sells book unlocks, printed books and downloads, memberships, and goods. It is enabled by the store module; when the module is off, store pages, checkout, and store administration are unavailable. For membership offers and tiers, see Memberships and pricing.

Provider offerings are booked rather than added to the store bag. See Providers and payouts.

The storefront

Edit the store home page in Sales → Storefront. Set the hero eyebrow, title, subtitle, primary button, and optional secondary link. One part of the title may be italicized with a single *...* pair. Use the switches to show or hide collection tiles, featured products, the editions explanation, membership offers, and online book access.

The hero shows up to three books when books are available for sale. By default, the book with the most paid purchases in the last 90 days is centered if it is available; otherwise the longest featured book is centered, falling back to the longest available book. The side books are selected by length from the featured books when at least three are featured, or from all available books otherwise. Set heroBooks to choose the display manually. Books without a print edition can still appear, using their regular covers. Set heroImage only when the image is intended to replace the book display.

If the store sells printed books only, leave the online-access, membership, and editions switches off.

Products

Sales → Products: one file per thing a person can buy, and the file is the whole offer.

The body is the product's long description. Each ## heading becomes a details panel on its product page.

A printed book's page previews. The product gallery prefers the edition's generated page images. If a fresh deploy has no such images because print generation was skipped, the same slides show bounded excerpts in a Vue page layout that uses the print edition's fonts, 6 × 9 proportions, margins, chapter opener and highlight wash. Original-text slides use the book, rewritten-edition slides use the companion summary when it exists, and the marked-lines slide uses the chapter's editorial marks. The excerpt is capped at 220 words, keeps the slide order, captions and zoom, and does not run Typst or create a PDF; line wrapping and pagination are not the print file's. On phones, readers can swipe left or right one slide at a time or tap the position dots; vertical swipes still scroll the page.

Membership and session cards use a title treatment instead of a product photo. Their product pages omit the image gallery.

Nothing reads Stripe to show a price. The store, the product page and the pricing page render from the files alone, so the store looks the same locally with no Stripe account at all.

Product options and variants

A product may have options such as material, size, or colour. The store generates each available combination as a variant; you do not enter combinations by hand.

In Store → Products the editor shows the options as rows — a name, and the values as chips you add, reorder by dragging and remove — and beneath them a table of every shape that follows, with three things you may set on each:

Sync options from a supplier

If a product names a supplier with a catalogue, use Read the catalogue again in the product editor to refresh its options and values. Supplier-managed options are read-only in the editor.

If a supplier removes a value, the editor keeps it for existing orders but marks every variant using it unavailable. The store refuses new orders for those variants. If the supplier restores the value, it becomes available again unless you have manually turned off its Sold switch.

Most suppliers publish no catalogue — a printer makes what it is sent — and then the options are yours as usual. Suppliers has the whole of it.

Unavailable values remain visible but cannot be selected, so buyers can understand why some combinations are unavailable.

The price on the page follows the choice: before anything is picked it says from the cheapest, because any single number would be one somebody is not charged; where every shape costs the same it simply says the price.

For size-only products, use sizes: [S, M, L]; it creates a single Size option.

Two things worth knowing before you reorder options. The order you write them in is part of each shape's identity, so moving Colour above Size renames every shape and anything already in somebody's basket stops being recognised — the editor asks before it lets you, and says how many settings it would carry. Renaming a value is free, on the other hand: a sale keeps the words it was made with, so a purchase from last year still reads "Leather · Lined" after you have reworded it to "Full-grain leather".

Track inventory

Turn Count the stock on for a product whose units run out, and the shop keeps the number — per shape, so linen and leather are counted separately. Sell past zero keeps the thing on sale when there are none left, for a made-to-order run or a pre-order.

The number is not in the file. The file says the stock is counted; the shop says how many. That is deliberate: a count written into a product would come back as whatever it said every time the site was redeployed, wiping out everything that had sold since. So you set the count in Store → Products, on the product itself, and every change is recorded with a reason — a delivery received, a sale, a return, a stock take — so a number that has drifted can be read back rather than guessed at.

What a shopper sees. A shape with none left is marked sold out on the card, on the page and in the bag, and the checkout refuses it; with Sell past zero on, none of that happens.

A basket does not hold stock for ever. When somebody reaches the checkout the units are reserved, and if they wander off the reservation is released when the checkout expires, so one abandoned basket cannot hold your last unit all day.

Set price lists and promotions

Sales → Price lists. A product’s own price is the usual one; a list is a further price for some people, some of the time, or in another currency. Each list says what kind it is — a sale, which strikes the usual price through beside it, or an override, which simply is the price — optionally when it starts and ends, and who it is for, as rules rather than a word: every rule must hold, and a list with none is for everybody.

The most specific list wins, not the cheapest. If you run a sale at $14 and a members’ rate at $15, a member pays $15. That is deliberate and it is the thing to understand before writing a second list: you decide what specificity means, rather than arithmetic deciding it for you. Where two lists are equally specific, the higher priority wins.

A list that has not started, or has ended, is simply not consulted — you do not have to remember to unpublish it. And nothing about a list reaches Stripe as a price of its own: the product keeps one price and one identity, and a line a list re-priced is charged at the resolved amount, so a sale cannot leave anything behind in your Stripe account.

What a shopper sees

The bag shows the subtotal, each discount by its title, and what there is to pay — a discount somebody meets for the first time on Stripe’s own page is one they had no chance to understand. Under it the bag says your discounts are already applied and Stripe accepts one further code at the checkout, which is Stripe’s limit rather than ours.

A line in the bag holds the price before any discount. The discount is worked out over the whole bag, because it can depend on the whole bag — a threshold discount is not a property of any one line. Storing the discounted price instead meant the bag discounted it a second time, which is the kind of error that costs money and shows nothing.

Sync offers with Stripe

Stripe is kept in step from the files, never the other way round. At deploy, and again just before every checkout, the offers are pushed: a Stripe product is found by the offer's key or created, its price found by the same key or created. A changed price makes a new Stripe price under the same key and retires the old — an existing subscriber stays on what they signed up at. The shopper's browser sends skus, never amounts, and a sku the files do not declare is refused.

Organize products into collections

Sales → Collections: a title, subtitle, tile image, order, featured, and a curated list of products. The storefront shows them as tiles and shelves in the order you set.

Book product pages

A book in print has one store page (/store/products/<slug>) carrying every way to have it: read online first (the unlock — "yours" when it is), then what is printed and what downloads, with the buyer's choices (contents; a hardcover's cloth and foil) made on the page. A card for a book shows the book, standing on the paper with no box round it, at the main offer's price ("From" when a dearer format exists) — the printed cover sheet where there is one, its own cover where there is not. Never a photograph of a cover in a shadowed box: that is what the gallery on the product page shows too, where the first slide is the book itself. The card's room is the book's own 2:3, so the quick-add pill spans the book rather than floating over bare paper beside it. Buying a printed copy or a file opens nothing online; only the unlock does.

Shipping

Where the store ships and what it charges are the storefront's shipping settings: a whitelist of countries or a blacklist, a default price with per-country overrides (US $5, the rest $15, say), and the methods a buyer may choose — each a printer's shipping level (standard, priority, express) with a surcharge and a delivery estimate. The buyer picks the destination on the site first (the bag and the product page ask), and checkout is made for that country alone. The printer ships straight to the buyer; what the buyer paid for shipping is the site's.

Checkout, guest purchases, and downloads

A bag of printed copies and files alone checks out without an account: Stripe asks the email itself, the purchase and the print order are written under that address, and when an account is later made with it, the purchases move onto the account. A paid session may also be booked as a guest when the site opts out of sign-in with coaching.requireAuthToBook: false and that session admits anyone or guest; Checkout must contain only that one session and its selected time. Its booking uses the email Stripe returns, not an address supplied by the browser. A verified account with that same address can later claim its booking and any unused session credit. Other session bookings, memberships, and online unlocks still require sign-in.

A buyer of a download — or of a printed copy whose format includes the files — gets every edition of that file, whichever they chose at print time; the store page and the person's cover page show them under Your files, as links good for an hour, minted on request.

Manage orders

The buyer gets the order's confirmation email (with the files' letter when a file is in it) and, later, the parcel-shipped email with tracking. A print order is written and sent to the printer the moment the payment lands. Sales → Print Orders follows it. The purchase shows in Analytics, and the buyer's account becomes paid for every rule that reads it.

Test checkout locally

With STRIPE_MOCK=1 in the local settings, every buying path completes on the spot with no Stripe account: a purchase, a subscription, a switch of plan, a cancellation. The deploy refuses a mock switched on. A mock purchase differs from a real one only by its ids.

Product comments

A product takes them with comments: in its own file. See Comments.