Solidshop is a free, open-source e-commerce component for Joomla 6+. No SaaS subscriptions, no platform fees, no data harvesting — just your store, running on infrastructure you control.
Shopify charges $19 to $2,300+ per month for the platform, then adds 0.2–2% to every sale on top of your payment processor's own fees — unless you also hand them your payment processing. Pick your own gateway and they bill you for the privilege, every month, on every sale, forever. Solidshop adds nothing on top. You pay your gateway whatever they charge — Stripe, PayPal, Square, anything else — and not a cent more. The core is free, optional plugins are one-time purchases, and we never take a percentage of your revenue. Install it on hosting you already own, and never worry about a platform changing its pricing, policies, or algorithms overnight.
Your customer list, order history, and product data live in your database — not in a SaaS vendor's data center where you are the product.
| Solidshop | Typical SaaS (e.g. Shopify) | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly platform fee | $0 | $19–$2,300+/mo |
| Per-sale platform commission | 0% (you pay only your gateway's fee) | 0.2–2% extra on 3rd-party gateways |
| Data ownership | You own it — your server, your DB | Vendor holds your data |
| Customer data privacy | No third-party access | Shared with platform analytics |
| Code access | Full source, GPL-3 | Black box |
| Vendor lock-in | None — export or migrate freely | Proprietary format, migration pain |
| Platform policy risk | None | Store can be suspended without notice |
| Customisation | Unlimited — modify anything | Restricted to approved apps/themes |
| Hosting choice | Any PHP 8.4 host | Vendor-controlled infrastructure |
The core component installs like any Joomla extension. No account required, no activation call home, no recurring subscription. Advanced features are available as optional plugins — a one-time purchase, yours forever.
A Storefront home menu item gives your landing page somewhere to live — no more empty article holding hand-written HTML — and four modules fill it: a slideshow hero, a category showcase, a shop-by-brand band, and a recently-viewed strip drawn from the shopper's own session, with no tracking table behind it. Title, description, and tagline come from the store, and the page publishes Organization and WebSite structured data. Your front page, assembled in the module manager.
Products with variants, options, brands (each with its own logo), and categories, plus built-in stats per SKU. The edit form follows the product type, so a product only ever shows the tabs and defaults that apply to it, and images upload by drag-and-drop straight onto the form. Change an image size later and one Regenerate images run recuts the library — in the admin, or from the command line. Your catalogue lives in your database — not a rented shelf.
Define your own attributes with Joomla's native Custom Fields — all 19 types, validation, view levels, and groups. They render in a Specifications tab, emit structured data, index into search, and round-trip through CSV. Collect input at checkout, on addresses, or per order line — gift message, delivery slot, engraving — and answers are frozen onto the order with their labels.
Curate cross-sells per product with a drag-ordered picker. Suggestions render as ordinary product cards under the description and follow the same visibility rules as your listings — unpublished, scheduled, or access-restricted products drop out on their own.
Multi-step checkout with guest support, address book, shipping rate selection, and tax calculation at order time. Fully customisable via Joomla template overrides.
Full order lifecycle — status, payment status, fulfillment status, return status. Inline editing and batch actions. No per-order fees, ever.
Stock per product and per variant, claimed atomically inside the order transaction — two shoppers can never both buy the last unit. Cancellations and refunds restock automatically, and low-stock items surface on the dashboard before you run out.
Define tax zones by country or state. Rates are snapshotted at order time — your historical orders are immutable and accurate, independent of future rate changes.
Shipping profiles with zones, regions, and rate tiers. Attach profiles to specific products or variants. No carrier lock-in — integrate any provider you choose.
KPI cards, sales analytics, recent orders, and product insights — all within your Joomla admin, with backlog tiles on the Joomla home page counting pending, unpaid, and unfulfilled orders, each linking to exactly the rows it counted. A System → Extensions tab lists every Solidshop extension on the site with its version, its state, and any update waiting for it. Plugin-extensible widget system. Your analytics stay on your server.
One box in the administrator header finds the record you want — an order id or reference, a customer name or email, a product name, SKU, or barcode, a coupon code. Ctrl+K from anywhere, results grouped by type with status badges, and every group respects the searching user's own permissions.
Four reports over any date range — sales by period, by product, tax collected, and by payment method — each downloadable as a self-describing CSV. Scoped by payment status and reported per currency, never silently summed across them.
Auto-generated invoices on every order — PDF download from the admin or customer account. An optional approval step holds the PDF, the customer email, and customer visibility until you sign off. Your invoices, your format, stored in your database.
Built-in discount support for promotions out of the box, with a coupon field and a discount row on the cart page so savings are visible before checkout. A discount can reduce shipping as well as line items, and tax is charged on the discounted amount — so the cart, the invoice, and your tax report agree. No extra plugins required to get started.
Give a product a compare-at price and the whole storefront knows: a Products on Sale Only menu item for a Deals page, an On sale toggle in the filter panel, a Biggest discount sort, and Show / Hide / Only on the products module. Sale pricing sits on the product row, so the storefront, the REST API, and the MCP tools all give the same answer.
Customisable notification templates with a user-friendly UI — edit order confirmations, shipping updates, and status change emails directly from the admin. No code required. And a failed send never goes unnoticed: the Email Queue screen shows delivery status, attempt count, and the last error, previews the exact body that was stored, and retries what failed — or re-send any confirmation from the order itself.
Customers save and share wishlists. All wishlist data stays in your database — no cross-site tracking.
Joomla-user–linked profiles with order history, address book, and wishlists. You own the relationship with your customers — no platform sits between you.
A three-step wizard that bulk-loads and updates your catalogue from one file — one row per variant,
auto-mapped Shopify and WooCommerce headings, per-language Name [xx-XX] columns, and
chunked processing so large catalogues import without timing out. Export the same shape back out
whenever you want — the door out is as wide as the door in.
Products index into Joomla's own site-wide search (com_finder) — live sync on save,
publish, and delete, per-language entries, and Type, Category, Brand, and Language filters.
One search box covers your articles and your catalogue.
Let shoppers read your catalogue, cart, and checkout in any published currency that has an exchange rate. Display-only by design — the order, invoice, emails, reports, and gateway charge all stay in your store currency, stated with the exact amount at checkout. No surprise conversions.
Read-only REST endpoints for products, categories, and brands — plus an MCP server that hands the
same catalogue to AI agents as five tools. Guest-visible data only: no cost prices, no stock counts,
no customer data. Every response carries the canonical URL back to your storefront, so AI referrals
land on your pages, not a marketplace's. And /llms.txt at your domain root states what
the store sells and where the API, MCP endpoint, and sitemap live — rendered from your own store
data, so there is no file to hand-maintain.
Joomla ACL integration across every admin view — control who can view, create, edit, delete, publish, and manage orders per user group. Your access rules, your server.
Storefront and admin built to WCAG 2.1 AA — semantic landmarks, ARIA attributes, full keyboard navigation, visible focus states, and a dark-mode palette that preserves contrast. Inclusive by default.
Clean URLs, proper H1 hierarchy, canonical tags, Open Graph and Twitter cards, dynamic stock
availability, and Product/Offer structured data (JSON-LD, SKU included) — plus breadcrumbs on
product and listing pages feeding Joomla's own BreadcrumbList output, and a native sharded XML
sitemap with honest per-product lastmod and per-language alternates. Your products rank on their own
merits — not behind a platform's.
Sell in multiple languages from a single catalogue — translate product, category, option, status, and email-template text with per-language slugs, hreflang tags, and recipient-language emails. One product, one stock level, one price; the language layer falls back to your default when a translation is missing, so launching a new locale never blanks your catalogue.
Ten drop-in site modules ship with the core — a slideshow hero, category showcase, shop-by-brand band, recently-viewed strip, faceted filters that fold into a drawer on narrow screens, an off-canvas mini-cart drawer, currency switcher, product search, a product showcase, and a Solidshop-aware language switcher. Fully themeable and working out of the box with any Joomla template.
Release notes as each version ships, and practical guides to getting more out of Joomla 6 — with Solidshop as the worked example.
All posts →Twelve things to check so an AI assistant can reach your store, understand it and quote it. No agency, no tooling, one afternoon for the items that matter most.
What Google reads in the structured data of a Joomla product page: what Joomla ships, one product per page, the required and recommended properties, variants as a ProductGroup, prices, sales, GTINs, ratings, shipping and returns, and a...
What an XML sitemap does and does not do, what Joomla ships, the tags search engines read and the two they ignore, how to split a sitemap into an index, which pages belong in it, an honest lastmod, images and language alternates, and how...
Core 1.6.0 is out: a setup wizard for a fresh install, a Store setup checklist on the dashboard, a sitemap that covers your menu items and articles as well as the catalogue, and switches for what the product page shows. Foundra 1.0.1,...
What Joomla's stock robots.txt blocks and why, the old rules that still break migrated sites, how crawlers actually match rules, what a store should add (a Sitemap line, one Allow for the catalogue API), how to decide about AI crawlers,...
From download to first sale in minutes — no account, no API key, no activation server.
Download Solidshop from menu Downloads and install via Joomla's Extension Manager.
No account, no licence key, no activation. Done in 2 minutes.
Set up your store, currencies, tax zones, and shipping profiles from the Joomla admin you already know. Your configuration lives in your database.
Add products, choose the extensions you need, and go live. Every order, every customer, every payment record is yours — stored on your infrastructure, readable by you directly.
There is no Solidshop cloud. No telemetry. No analytics beacon. Your customer names, addresses, and order history never leave your server unless you send them somewhere.
We ship zero tracking or beacon code in the component or plugins. Your install never calls home.
Your store doesn't call home to any Solidshop server. Ever. Choose your own analytics stack — or none at all.
No Solidshop login required to run the software. Download, install, done. The core is yours unconditionally.
Every commercial feature — invoicing, discounts, reviews, downloadable files — is a self-contained Joomla plugin. Plugins own their own database tables, admin MVC, frontend layouts, language strings, and event handlers. The core never needs to be patched.
Dispatch custom events, register product types, inject checkout tabs, and extend the admin panel — all through Joomla's standard event system. And because it's GPL-3, you can read, fork, and modify every line.
