Storefronts

This article applies to Contextual Commerce. (Looking for Classic Commerce documentation?)

Understanding the Difference Between Stores and Storefronts

FastSpring uses the terms "Store" and "Storefront" (among others) to refer to certain components of your account. Although the terms are similar, they have different meanings.

Store: The highest-level grouping of settings and features in your FastSpring account. A Store has its own set of products, offers and reports. It can contain any number of Storefronts.

Storefront: A website or popup window hosted securely by FastSpring, to which you send purchasers for the purpose of processing their online transactions. Each Storefront can be used to sell any products in the Store. Each Storefront can have its own unique look and feel (sometimes referred to as a "Theme").

Stores

A newly-created FastSpring account comes with a Store already created for a faster and easier setup. The Store incorporates your products and offers and controls what happens before, during and after the order. You can have any number of Stores for your account, but many FastSpring clients find they only need a single Store. If you need to add additional Stores, please submit a support ticket for assistance.

If you are migrating from Classic Commerce to the Contextual Commerce product, your account will have a new Store added to the dashboard.

When is it a good idea to create a new Store?

We usually encourage vendors to create different Stores for B2C and B2B products, different set of products or different access rights. There is no need to create a new Store for a different look and feel or a checkout flow - all visual aspects of the purchase process and customer experience are now controlled via Storefronts.

Storefronts

As with a brick-and-mortar store, Storefronts give you a range of possibilities in grouping, presenting and selling your products. The default Storefront is ready for use right from the start. You can easily customize a Storefront to resemble your website or tweak its behavior using a simple set of available adjustments. You can also create any number of Storefronts within a Store by either "copying" a Storefront or creating one from scratch.

For more information, see When Should You Use Multiple Storefronts?.

What's a "path"?

Each Storefront is available by a direct link which consists of the domain containing your vendor name and a "path". Your default Storefront will be accessible as http://<company name>.onfastspring.com and all additional Storefronts will add a "path" - a word (or a few). For example, if your company name was "example", then a Storefront created for a Christmas special might have a link of https://example.onfastspring.com/christmas - in this case "christmas" is a "path". For more information on linking to your Storefronts, see Linking to Your Storefronts.

In this example, the "Christmas" Storefront might contain product variations with discounts specifically created for this Storefront. Linking to this Storefront allows your visitors to purchase items with discount while your regular Storefront remains intact.