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Spaces — A hosted, headless eCommerce storefront

With an overnight change to how businesses operate and sell to their customers, those businesses that were traditionally offline, now need to quickly adapt to being online. While some businesses are doubling down on their digital channels and operations, others are simply grappling with how to get online.

Here at Chec and Commerce.js, we are better known for our eCommerce APIs and developer tooling, but we also have simple tools for non-developers.

This post is for those individuals and business who need to get online quickly to sell their goods and services.

Spaces - A simple storefront

Our hosted storefront, Spaces, is simple to setup, doesn’t require any coding, and can be used by a wide variety of businesses to sell almost any kind of product.

Using the Chec Dashboard, businesses can create a storefront that will;

  • Display products with descriptions
  • Support multiple product purchases with a shopping cart
  • Collect the required customer information like shipping address or date of delivery/pickup
  • Accept payments with credit/debit card or PayPal
  • Manage orders and customers

See the example store here.

Spaces example store

What does hosted mean?

A hosted storefront is like selling from a rental retail location. You have a place to sell your goods and services, but you don’t own the land or the building. This means you are limited in the sorts of improvements and customizations you can make, but when something goes wrong, the landlord is responsible for repairs.

Having a self-hosted storefront is like owning your own store. Every part of it belongs to you. You can tear down walls and change out the flooring, but if you get a leak or something breaks, it’s up to you to fix it.

What does headless mean?

Headless eCommerce refers to a modern approach to eCommerce architecture, whereby the frontend elements (what your customer sees and experiences) are decoupled from the backed eCommerce logic (the platform you use to manage products, shipping, and orders). Going headless means you have much more flexibility to create custom eCommerce experiences for your customers.

Selling with Spaces means once you are up and selling, you can create a more customized, unique shopping experience to your customers without having to re-platform. You will however need a developer to make these changes and customizations.

Spaces vs Customized

Marketing and selling to customers

Because Spaces is a hosted storefront, you can use it as a stand alone website (you don't need to have an exsisting website).

Here are just a few ways you can drive traffic to your store and sell to your customers;

  • Link customers to your Storefront from Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Email
  • Create a QR code for customers to scan when they arrive at your physical location or see your advert in an offline context
  • Link customers from your existing website to your Spaces storefront

The customer checkout experience (mobile view)

Spaces mobile checkout experience

Here’s what you need to know about Spaces

  • It takes ~15mins to setup
  • No coding is required
  • It is 100% mobile responsive
  • Comes with a storefront > product display pages > shopping cart > checkout > order confirmation page
  • Supports physical and digital products
  • Integrates with payment gateways like Stripe, Square and PayPal
  • Option for manual payments that can be used for Cash on Delivery, Bank Transfer or Pay via Quickbooks
  • It is free to setup

There are a ton of other features available inside the Chec Dashboard, including; tax configuration, custom shipping zones, and setting custom data collection at the checkout.

You can configure all of this when you create a Chec account (its free to sign up!).