Frequently Asked Questions

Solidshop is a free, open-source e-commerce component for Joomla 6. It turns a standard Joomla site into a full online shop — products, variants, cart, checkout, orders, customers, taxes, shipping, and discounts — all running on infrastructure you control. There is no SaaS subscription, no platform fee, and no per-transaction tax.

Independent shops, small and mid-sized retailers, and developers who want to keep their store, their data, and their margins under their own control. If you are already running Joomla — or would like to — and you do not want to pay a percentage of every sale to a hosted platform, Solidshop is built for you.

A small, independent team based in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam. We are the same team behind Solidres, the open-source booking and reservation extension for Joomla that we have been shipping since 2014. More on the About page.

Yes. The core component and our commercial extensions are on a regular release cadence, with a public changelog so you can see exactly what shipped and when. The latest releases, fixes, and new features are listed on the changelog.

Yes. The Solidshop core component is released under the GPL-3 licence. There is no monthly fee, no transaction percentage, no “trial” that quietly expires, and no usage cap. You can install it on as many sites as you like, modify the code, and even redistribute it, as long as you respect the GPL.

Optional commercial extensions — for example advanced discount engines, invoicing, reviews, and additional payment integrations — are sold individually on a per-licence, per-year basis. Browse the catalogue on the extensions page (coming soon). Pricing for each extension is shown alongside it; there are no hidden fees and no recurring transaction cuts.

Each commercial extension licence covers a defined number of sites for 12 months. During that period you receive updates and direct email support. After 12 months the extension keeps working indefinitely on your site — we do not “phone home” or disable software when a licence ends. To keep receiving updates and support, renew the licence.

Your store and any installed extensions continue to run exactly as they did the day before your licence expired. The only thing you lose is access to new updates and to the email-support channel for that extension. Security patches are still released for older minor versions for a limited window — details in the support policy.

Yes. Agencies and freelancers are explicitly welcome. The core is GPL-3, so there are no restrictions on building client sites with it. For commercial extensions, each client site needs its own licence (or a multi-site licence, where available). If you build a lot of Solidshop sites, contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. about partner pricing.

A reasonably current LAMP/LEMP stack:

• Joomla 6.x
• PHP 8.3 or 8.4
• MySQL 8.0+ or MariaDB 10.6+
• Apache 2.4+, Nginx 1.24+, or LiteSpeed
• HTTPS (essentially mandatory for accepting payments)

Almost every shared host that supports modern Joomla will meet these requirements. Full list in the support policy.

Anywhere you can run Joomla — shared hosting, a VPS, a dedicated server, or a cloud provider of your choice. We do not run a hosted version. You pick the host, you keep the keys, you keep the data.

If your Joomla site is on version 6.x and meets the PHP / database requirements, yes — Solidshop installs as a regular component and can coexist with your existing content, menus, users, and template. We always recommend trying it on a staging copy first.

The storefront uses standard Joomla output, so it works with any well-built Joomla 6 template. We ship polished defaults for the official Cassiopeia template and a set of dedicated overrides for our own Foundra template. Third-party templates generally work out of the box; visual fine-tuning is a matter of standard Joomla template overrides.

Yes. The storefront is fully translatable and ships in multiple languages, including right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Persian. The cart, prices, taxes, and orders are currency-aware, and the system is designed for multiple stores under one Joomla install.

Two channels:

• Free core — the public community forum. Core maintainers read and reply there, alongside other Solidshop users.
• Commercial extensions — direct email support at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for the duration of your licence period.

Full details in the support policy.

For commercial-extension support, we aim to reply within one business day. Free-core forum questions are answered on a best-effort basis — typically within a few business days. Suspected security vulnerabilities are acknowledged within 24 hours, every day of the week.

Through the standard Joomla extension updater. Once an update is available, you see it on the Joomla updates screen and apply it with one click, exactly the way you update any other Joomla extension.

Customisations done the Joomla way — template overrides, language overrides, plugin params — survive updates. Direct edits to component source files do not, and we do not recommend them. If you need a behaviour change that is not covered by overrides or events, let us know; often the right answer is a new event or extension point in the core, not a fork.

Commercial extension purchases are sold by Paddle.com Market Limited as Merchant of Record. Paddle handles taxes, invoicing, and fraud checks, and processes refunds on our behalf. You will see Paddle on your card or PayPal statement.

Yes — every new commercial extension purchase comes with a 14-day money-back guarantee, no questions required. Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. with your order number within 14 days of purchase and we approve a full refund. Full terms in the refund policy.

Licences renew automatically every 12 months through Paddle. You receive a reminder email before the renewal charge, and you can cancel auto-renewal at any time from the link in any Paddle receipt or by emailing us. If a renewal charge surprises you, contact us within 30 days for a full refund.

This is the most-asked question on the forum — the short answer is “whichever ones you connect.” The free core ships with bank-transfer and cash-on-delivery, plus the integration framework. Card processing, PayPal, Stripe, regional gateways, and so on are provided by individual payment plugins — some free, some commercial. See the extensions page (coming soon) for the current list.

In your own Joomla database, on your own host. We never see your customer list, your orders, or your revenue. There is no Solidshop cloud, no central dashboard, and no shared multi-tenant database. The only data we hold is what you give us when you buy an extension or open a support ticket.

No. The core does not transmit usage analytics or store data to us or to any third party. Commercial extensions contact our update server only for the things you would expect: checking the licence on activation and looking up whether a new release is available.

Yes — because the data lives on your server, you are the data controller and you keep full control over how customer data is collected, stored, and erased. We provide the tools (consent surfaces, data-export, account deletion) but cannot give you legal advice for your specific jurisdiction. See the privacy policy for how solidshop.app itself handles data.

Migrations vary widely from one source platform to another — data shape, custom fields, URL structure, and payment history all differ. The best first step is a short conversation: tell us what you are running today and what you would like to bring across, and we will walk you through the options. Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to get started.

Joomla-to-Joomla migrations are usually cleaner than a cross-platform one — users, content, and URLs already live in your database — but each cart organises its data differently, so we prefer to look at your specific setup before recommending a path. Drop us a line at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and we will discuss it with you.

Always. The data is in your Joomla database under tables with the #__sshop_ prefix — you can query, dump, and export it with standard MySQL tooling at any time, with no “export plan” required. We also provide CSV export tools for products, orders, and customers from the admin UI.