Payload CMS with e-commerce?

[sterile peak]

Hi. Anyone created an e-comm website with Payload CMS? Care to share your experience? Generally, the feedback regarding headless CMS and ecomm seems to be "Use a dedicated e-commerce platform, like Shopify, rather than hacking it together with a headless CMS that doesn't support everything you need." Shopify and similar platform seem to get expensive real quick, so using Payload will be ideal if it's not too tricky.

[bleak flame]

Yes! We've done that. I think I would still recommend headless Shopify for a majority of simple ecommerce sites

There's a lot you need to do by yourself in payload like variants support and all of that data structure which is then tied into Stripe

lmk if you have any specific questions but a brain dump from me:

• get your login/auth implemented early
• get a full end to end check out process working asap
• find a solution for shipping and taxes (if applicable) sooner than later
• if you use stripe and only stripe it's pretty easy to build a custom checkout with their elements, I would recommend just using their portal though for even more simplicity
• otherwise be sure ahead of time that other payment processors are not needed, in our case we had to rewrite checkout
• the stripe plugin for payload should be only used for the proxy client imo...skip the sync and stuff and just handle that on your own via hooks

[sterile peak]

Thanks Paul for the solid feedback and insight. It sounds like Stripe has provided a lot of infrastructure to leverage, I'll look into that.

@bleak flame I'd like to learn more about integrating Stripe subscription recuring payment model with Payload and Nextjs. Do you have any tips/code to share?

[bleak flame]

We didn't have a subscription model so can't say for sure but from what I've read in their docs

its largely the same, except youre initiating a different type of payment

and then you just have endpoints in payload that receive webhooks from stripe to handle these events

so when a subscription renews you will know about it and if it expires you can change a user's permissions in payload and trigger a reminder or something

[sterile peak]

@bleak flame Have you used the Payload e-commerce template, or did you create all of that logic from scratch? If you did use that template, can you recall what challenges you faced? Were you using Stripe and their portal?

[bleak flame]

Our project was before the template existed, we did use the plugin and we quickly came up with issues with the provided sync (it's not enough as it lacks conditional values) so we had to manually sync anyway, we used the stripe elements but I wish we went the portal route instead due to simplicity

I'll recommend portal route every time unless there's very good reasons for a custom checkout page

[sterile peak]

Nice. By portal you're saying the user is directed to the Stripe website to perform Stripe related tasks securely and reliably, like checking-out, refunding etc and upon completion they're redirected to your website via web hooks?

[bleak flame]

Yes

[sterile peak]

Rather than embedding and having the form within my website? Like this? https://youtu.be/0T8PcO6WDnE?t=1031

[bleak flame]

yes

its quicker to implement and if youre doing it on your own you're basically doing the exact same thing

so unless you really need a custom checkout, i'd avoid it