What this is
Pick a theme, and you have picked your ceiling.
Every other platform opens the same way: a gallery of layouts, a demo of somebody else’s shop, and then a long quiet negotiation between the store you had in mind and the store the theme allows.
Stonebridge starts on the other side of that. You describe the shop you want — what you sell, how it should feel, what a customer should do first — and it gets built, in real code, for you. Not chosen from a shelf. Built.
We run the commerce underneath it: the catalogue, the stock, the basket, the discount codes, the postage, the orders. You never build any of that, and you never have to keep it running.
You will need the Claude desktop app on a paid plan — Pro is the usual choice. Setup takes about half an hour, and Claude installs everything except itself.
The difference
Two ways to open a shop.
The template way
- You start by shopping for a layout.
- A new idea comes back as “not supported by this theme.”
- One custom section means a developer, a quote and a wait.
- The theme updates, and your changes can go with it.
- You end up inside somebody else’s design decisions.
The Stonebridge way
- You start by describing what you sell.
- A new idea comes back as a page you can look at.
- One custom section means one more sentence.
- The shop is yours. Nothing changes underneath you.
- You end up with the shop you described.
What you can ask for
Sentences that become shops.
Not one of these is a template, a plugin or a phone call. Each one is a thing you can type.
“A farm stand that sells whatever we picked this morning and hides the rest.”
Stock by location · Drafts stay hidden
“A ceramics shop where every piece is one of one and disappears the moment it sells.”
Sizes and options · Stock
“A coffee page with a grind-size choice and a map of where the beans grew.”
Sizes and options · Pages and banners
“A parts catalogue you filter by category long before you see a price.”
Categories and tags
“A recipe index that links back to the exact products it calls for.”
Pages and banners · Products
“A checkout that quotes postage to a farm gate two valleys over.”
Postage zones and rates
Each of these is the first sentence of a build, not the last.
How you ask
This is the whole interface.
No canvas. No drag handles. No settings screen with four hundred switches nested three deep. You open Claude in an empty folder and paste one message. Two lines of it are yours; the rest just tells Claude where our guide and our reference live.
It is prefilled below with somebody else’s shop. Type over both boxes and watch your own brief write itself, then use the copy button in the corner to take the whole thing with you.
Your brief is ready. Copy it and paste it as your first message.
I want to build an online store using the Stonebridge Commerce platform.
Read these two references before writing any code:
- The storefront developer guide:
https://stonebridge-admin-dev-633417163058.us-west1.run.app/docs/storefront-developer-guide.md
- The OpenAPI specification:
https://stonebridge-api-dev-633417163058.us-west1.run.app/swagger/v1/swagger.json
My store sells: Single-origin coffee, whole beans and monthly subscriptions
The look and feel I want: Warm and editorial, big photography, almost no chrome
Build it as a Next.js storefront following the guide's patterns. Specifically:
- Keep my storefront key server-side only, in .env.local, and never in browser
JavaScript or a NEXT_PUBLIC_ variable.
- Call the Stonebridge API from server-side code, using the browser-safe proxy
route pattern in section 9 of the guide.
- Cover product listing, product detail, cart, and checkout.
Ask me for the storefront key when you need it, and tell me which file to put it
in rather than asking me to paste it into this chat.This is step 5 of the guide, word for word, with the two lines that are yours turned into boxes. Nothing you type here is sent anywhere — it stays in your browser until you copy it.
How it works
Four steps, and then the part that is actually about your shop.
These are the steps from our guide, in order, with nothing taken out to make the number look better.
Install Claude and let it set the computer up
The Claude desktop app is the only thing you install by hand. It then installs the free tools a shop needs, and it asks your permission before it installs anything. It cannot create accounts or type passwords for you: when it reaches one, it stops and tells you exactly what to click.
Ten to twenty minutes, mostly downloads
Create your shop and copy one key
Register here, create your shop, and make a storefront key. That one key is the only credential your shop will ever use, and Claude will tell you which file it belongs in rather than asking you to paste it into the chat.
About five minutes
Describe the shop you want
Make an empty folder, start Claude in it, and paste the brief from further up this page. Say what you sell and how it should feel. Claude reads our guide, plans the work, and starts building.
About two minutes of typing
Look at it, then say the next thing
“Three columns on desktop, one on mobile.” “The checkout button is too small.” Small asks, one at a time, beat one long instruction — and this step never really finishes, in the good way.
For as long as you own the shop
The guide budgets about half an hour for the setup. Step two is the only part that happens on this site — the admin, your shop’s data and everything behind it is already running.
Already built
You are opening a shop, not building a shopping basket.
Nobody’s good idea was ever spent on a basket. All of this is hosted, running and ready before you open the folder, and it stays ours to keep working, not yours.
- Products
- Products and their sizes, colours and options. Each one is a real thing you can price and count on its own.
- Drafts and dates
- Drafts stay invisible to shoppers until you say otherwise, and you can set the morning a product goes live and the evening it comes down.
- Groups
- Collections, categories and tags, so one link in your shop can cover a whole corner of the catalogue.
- Stock
- Counted per size and per place you keep it, so a sold-out size stops selling itself.
- Basket
- A basket that survives a closed tab, so a customer can come back to it tomorrow and find it still full.
- Discount codes
- Applied to the basket and shown in the total before anyone commits to anything.
- Postage and tax
- Zones, rates, free-postage thresholds and tax, all quoted against a real delivery address.
- Checkout
- Checks the basket, freezes the price and starts the order.
- Orders
- Every order with its lines and its delivery address, from the moment checkout finishes.
- Customers
- Who bought, what they bought, and the detail behind each one, without you keeping a spreadsheet.
- Pages and banners
- Recipes, about pages, banners and galleries: the parts of a shop that are not products at all.
- Staff and keys
- Give staff their own sign-in, issue your shop its key, and run more than one shop from the same account.
There are sixteen things a shop can ask our system for, and every one of them is published and documented. Your shop asks with a single key, and that key stays on your own server — it is never handed to a shopper’s browser. You never set any of this up, and there is nothing here you can break from your own shop.
Where the line is
The thing that broke your last website was the part you did not control.
So here is the line, drawn where you can see it.
Ours
The commerce system, your shop’s data, the admin you sign into, and the servers under all of it. We keep it running, we keep it patched, and we keep one shop’s data out of every other shop’s reach.
Yours
Every page a customer ever sees. It is a folder on your computer — copy it, back it up, put it on any host you like. No update we ship can restyle your shop overnight or take a layout away from you.
Not a page builder. There is no canvas and no drag handle. Your shop is not stored as a layout, because it is not a layout. It is code, in a folder, on your own machine.
Not a theme store. If what you want is to open a gallery and pick something that already looks finished, this is the wrong platform — and we would rather you found that out on this page than three weeks from now.
Not magic. Claude will build something and some of it will be wrong. You look at it, you say what is off, it goes again. That loop is the product, and it is faster than any brief you have ever written to anyone.
You cannot break the commerce system from your shop, and we cannot touch the design of it. Both of those are on purpose.
Before you ask
The questions people actually have.
I have never written a line of code. Is this really for me?
The guide is written for someone who has never installed a developer tool in their life, and Claude does the installing. What you bring is taste and decisions about your own shop. What it costs you is one patient afternoon.
What does it actually cost me?
A paid Claude plan, because the free one does not include Claude Code — Pro is the usual choice. Then whatever your host charges to put the shop on the internet. Everything Claude installs is free. What we will charge for the platform is not settled yet, and we would rather say that than print a number we might have to change.
What if I hate the design after a week?
Say what is wrong and have it changed. There is no theme to be trapped inside, no gallery to shop and nothing to migrate. The shop is code Claude already understands, because Claude wrote it.
Where does my shop actually live?
The shop itself is an ordinary web project — a Next.js project, the same kind of thing a great many modern sites are built from — sitting in a folder on your computer, and it can go on any host that runs one. Your products, baskets and orders live in our system, which we run for you.
Is my shop’s key safe in something an AI wrote?
The brief states the rule and the guide holds Claude to it: the key sits in one file on your own server and is never handed to a shopper’s browser. The guide ends with a checklist you can hold Claude to line by line.
Can I see one that was built this way?
Willow B. Farm is a working shop built exactly like this — catalogue, product pages, a basket that survives a reload, checkout, and a recipe section that is not a product at all. It is ours, not a customer’s, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. See the example shop.
How finished is this, honestly?
It is in development, and you should hear that from us rather than find it out in month three. The addresses on this page are development addresses and they will change. What our system can do is still moving, which is why the guide tells Claude to read the live reference rather than copy old examples. We have no customers to name, and the example shop is our own. Everything else on this page you can sign in and check for yourself, which is the only reason we are comfortable publishing it.
So — what do you want your shop to be?
That question is the whole product. Answer it in a sentence and see what comes back. Creating an account takes a few minutes and costs nothing, and you can click through every part of the admin before you build a single thing.
Already have a shop with us? Log in.