Payload E-Commerce Template

A template for Payload to power e-commerce businesses. There is a complete front-end website made explicitly for this template which can be found here.

Core features:

• Pre-configured Payload Config
• Authentication
• Access Control
• Shopping Cart
• Checkout
• Paywall
• Layout Builder
• SEO

For details on how to get this template up and running locally, see the development section.

How it works

The Payload config is tailored specifically to the needs of an e-commerce business. It is pre-configured in the following ways:

Collections

See the collections documentation for details on how to extend this functionality.

• Users (Authentication)

  Users are auth-enabled and encompass both admins and customers based on the value of their roles field. Only admin users can access your admin panel to manage your store whereas customer can authenticate on your front-end to create shopping carts and place orders but have limited access to the platform. See Access Control for more details.

  For additional help, see the official Auth Example or the authentication docs.

• Products

  Each product is linked to Stripe via a select field that is dynamically populated in the sidebar. This field fetches all available products in the background and displays them as options. Once a product has been selected, prices get automatically synced between Stripe and Payload. All products are layout-builder enabled so you can generate unique pages for each product using layout-building blocks, see Layout Builder for more details. Products can also gate their content or digital assets behind a paywall, see Paywall for more details.

• Orders

  When an order is placed in Stripe, a webhook is fired that Payload listens for. This webhook creates a new order in Payload with the same data as the invoice. See the Stripe section for more details.

• Pages

  All pages are layout-builder enabled so you can generate unique layouts for each page using layout-building blocks, see Layout Builder for more details.

• Media

  This is the uploads-enabled collection used by products and pages to contain media, etc.

• Categories

  A taxonomy used to group products together. Categories can be nested inside of one another, for example "Shirts > Red". See the official Payload Nested Docs Plugin for more details.

Globals

See the globals documentation for details on how to extend this functionality.

• Header

  The data required by the header on your front-end, i.e. nav links, etc.

• Footer

  Same as above but for the footer of your site.

Access control

Basic role-based access control is setup to determine what users can and cannot do based on their roles, which are:

• admin: They can access the Payload admin panel to manage your store. They can see all data and make all operations.
• customer: They cannot access the Payload admin panel and have a limited access to operations based on their user (see below).

This applies to each collection in the following ways:

• users: Only admins and the user themselves can access their profile. Anyone can create a user but only admins can delete users.
• orders: Only admins and the user who placed the order can access it. Once placed, orders cannot be edited or deleted.
• products: Everyone can access products, but only admins can create, update, or delete them. Paywall-enabled products may also have content that is only accessible by users who have purchased the product. See Paywall for more details.

For more details on how to extend this functionality, see the Payload Access Control docs.

Shopping cart

Logged-in users can have their shopping carts saved to their profiles as they shop. This way they can continue shopping at a later date or on another device. When not logged in, the cart can be saved to local storage and synced to Payload on the next login. This works by maintaining a cart field on the user:

{
  name: 'cart',
  label: 'Shopping Cart',
  type: 'object',
  fields: [
    {
      name: 'items',
      label: 'Items',
      type: 'array',
      fields: [
        // product, quantity, etc
      ]
    },
    // other metadata like `createdOn`, etc
  ]
}

A complete front-end solution for this can be found here.

Stripe

Payload itself handles no currency exchange. All payments are processed and billed using Stripe. This means you must have access to a Stripe account via an API key, see Connect Stripe for how to get one. When you create a product in Payload that wish to sell, it must be connected to a Stripe product by selecting one from the field in the product's sidebar. This field fetches all available products in the background and displays them as options, see Products for more details. Once set, data is automatically synced between the two platforms in the following ways:

1. Stripe to Payload using Stripe Webhooks:

   • invoice.created
   • invoice.updated
   • product.created
   • product.updated
   • price.updated

2. Payload to Stripe using Payload Hooks:

   • user.create

For more details on how to extend this functionality, see the the official Payload Stripe Plugin.

Checkout

A custom endpoint is opened at /api/checkout which initiates the checkout process. This endpoint creates a PaymentIntent with the items in the cart using the Stripe's Invoices API. First, an invoice is drafted, then each item in your cart is appended as a line-item to the invoice. The total price is recalculated on the server to ensure accuracy and security, and once completed, passes the client_secret back in the response for your front-end to finalize the payment.

Paywall

Products can optionally gate content or digital assets behind a paywall. This will require the product to be purchased before it's resources are accessible. To do this, we add a paywall field to the product collection with read access control to check for associated purchases on each request. A purchases field is maintained on each user to determine their access which can be manually adjusted as needed.

{
  name: 'paywall',
  label: 'Paywall',
  type: 'blocks',
  access: {
    read: checkUserPurchases,
  },
  fields: [
    // assets
  ]
}

Layout builder

Products and pages can be built using a powerful layout builder. This allows you to create unique layouts for each product or page. This template comes pre-configured with the following layout building blocks:

• Hero
• Content
• Media
• Call To Action
• Archive

A complete front-end solution for this can be found here.

SEO

This template comes pre-configured with the official Payload SEO Plugin for complete SEO control. A front-end solution for this can be found here.

Development

To spin up the template locally, follow these steps:

1. First clone the repo
2. Then cd YOUR_PROJECT_REPO && cp .env.example .env
3. Next yarn && yarn dev (or docker-compose up, see Docker)
4. Now open http://localhost:8000/admin to access the admin panel
5. Create your first admin user using the form on the page

That's it! Changes made in ./src will be reflected in your app—but your database is blank and your app is not yet connected to Stripe, more details on that here. You can optionally seed the database with a few products and pages, more details on that here.

Connect Stripe

To integrate with Stripe, follow these steps:

1. You will first need to create a Stripe account if you do not already have one.
2. Retrieve your Stripe Secret Key from the Stripe admin panel and paste it into your env:

   STRIPE_SECRET_KEY=

3. In another terminal, listen for webhooks:

   stripe login # follow the prompts
   yarn stripe:webhooks

4. Paste the given webhook signing secret into your env:

   STRIPE_WEBHOOKS_ENDPOINT_SECRET=

5. Reboot Payload to ensure that Stripe connects and the webhooks are registered.

See the official Payload Stripe Plugin for more details.

Docker

Alternatively, you can use Docker to spin up this template locally. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Follow steps 1 and 2 from above, the docker-compose file will automatically use the .env file in your project root
2. Next run docker-compose up
3. Follow steps 4 and 5 from above to login and create your first admin user

That's it! The Docker instance will help you get up and running quickly while also standardizing the development environment across your teams.

Seed

To seed the database with a few products and pages you can run yarn seed.

NOTICE: seeding the database is destructive because it drops your current database to populate a fresh one from the seed template. Only run this command if you are starting a new project or can afford to lose your current data.

Production

To run Payload in production, you need to build and serve the Admin panel. To do so, follow these steps:

1. First invoke the payload build script by running yarn build or npm run build in your project root. This creates a ./build directory with a production-ready admin bundle.
2. Then run yarn serve or npm run serve to run Node in production and serve Payload from the ./build directory.

Deployment

The easiest way to deploy your project is to use Payload Cloud, a one-click hosting solution to deploy production-ready instances of your Payload apps directly from your GitHub repo. You can also deploy your app manually, check out the deployment documentation for full details.

Questions

If you have any issues or questions, reach out to us on Discord or start a GitHub discussion.