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Swell — Build a headless ecommerce store in minutes
Swell is the most powerful headless ecommerce platform for modern brands, startups, and agencies. Create fast and flexible shopping experiences with our future-proof API and headless storefront themes.
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Shaun Trennery
Congrats on the launch. Looks incredible. Multi-tentant support?
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@shauntrennery Cheers! Yep, we support multi-tenant stores. We currently have a few two-sided marketplaces who've built on Swell. If you're interested, you can check out the case studies on Spinn (global IoT coffee store) and NowVac (B2B marketplace for scientific vacuums) on our website!
This is extremely cool. Contentful has shown the value of backend-first platforms that allow future-save implementation approaches.
It also allows you to decouple backend and frontend decisions. Eg have the frontend be rewritten cheaply whenever needed. Or have multiple frontends for one store – or even multiple stores as your company grows.
The team has been working on this for a really long time stealth. Congrats to Eric, Joshua and team – now is a great moment for the public launch. 🙌
Disclaimer: Fan & Investor
@andreasklinger Thanks so much for the support. I'm happy we became friends a couple years ago - and that you dug what we were working on, and decided to join! :)
Yep, that's exactly right -- decoupled frontend and backend making it ideal to be more innovative and creative without hitting ceilings.
Super excited for the next chapter of delivering API-first, headless commerce to the world.
@bzar_ You could say that, but if you dig into the implementation details, I think you'll find our API surface is simpler and easier to work with. Also afaik, Spryker is a single-tenant solution that you can't create a store and start building on right away. In comparison, Swell is hybrid multi-tenant SaaS, meaning each store has its own database but runs on the same platform infrastructure and software version.
Pricing is too complicated between limits on revenue, feature differences, limits on product quantities (and further rules based on their type), limits on variant quantities, limits on API calls, and bandwidth varying between plans. If I can't anticipate the costs and constraints, I can't recommend it to clients, so it doesn't get used.
@kaigradert Thanks so much Kai! Love that you're also super into product. We're very much product-first but want to deliver headless ecommerce to the masses in the future. Cheers
This looks awesome, have been talking about a product like this for the fast-fashion space, but this covers a much wider market.
@brianmfreeman Cheers Brian! Are you by any chance doing a TBYB sales model? We're scoping that feature out at the moment. Feel free to get in touch with us if you have some pain points/wish list/general thoughts about this.
This is exactly the product I was looking for, but any plan to support GraphQL? It’s becoming a must for an headless API.
Something else I would really like is to be able to manage stocks with decimals. It’s more specific but only Magento support that and it’s required for any shop that sell in bulk or sell fabrics
Really impressed by the performance and speed. I've checked out some websites that use swell, and they're quite fast. Good stuff.
@celiknimani Appreciate the warm and fuzzies! We pride ourselves on speed and uptime. Any website stand out to you in particular? :)
Sadly way too expensive on the standard plan at $299 a month compared to Shopify and Squarespace. Shame.
@futuresgreen Hi Darren, what are the features/limits you're referring to exactly? In our pricing, we're factoring in greater developer efficiency/flexibility as well as not needing lots of apps/plugins on top.
@paper_tokyo Hi Dave - the promotions and discount rules are helpful to have on an eCommerce store but I couldn't justify to a client to pay an extra $245 a month, these need to be in the basic package as standard or have an price plan which is between $99 - $150 and put that in there with bulk coupon and advanced reporting. Most of my clients (on Squarespace) never have more than 3 users and maybe 2/3 web hooks. Hope this helps.
Congrats on the launch! As a former owner of a design agency, I can tell you that this would have helped our clients *so much*.
@techwraith Oh man, that means a lot! I'm happy you value great design and great product -- they're only going to be more important as we head into the future. Also love what you're working on with Viable Fit!
?makers looks really cool! Great job :)
I definitely think headless wins on developer experience but how do I convince clients or non-technical stakeholders to go for headless over something like Shopify, WooCommerce or Webflow?
@yonidejene Great question, and that's why we're working to make the rest of the platform experience amazing for operators (not just devs), so it's easy to get clients on board. We believe you shouldn't have to trade ease of use and features for a headless architecture. If you create a store and dig in I think you'll see what I mean :)
Congratulations on releasing Swell into the wild after spending considerable time whiteboarding, wire framing, building, testing and debugging. Looks solid, and I'm just now building a shop on Shopify. Might need to hit pause and try Swell.
Do you have any examples you can share here and on your site so we can see it in action? Keep up the good work!
@rickbakas Here's a demo running our first storefront theme (built with Nuxt.js): https://origin-demo.swell.store/. You can actually set up this exact demo when you sign up just to give it a spin. To see some live (real) stores, check out our case studies with links at: https://www.swell.is/case-studies/
Thanks Rick, hope you get to try it out soon, we'd love to have you!
@ericingram The pricing for Swell is confusing. Tier 1 is $59 and then the next tier up is $299? That's a dramatic jump in price! I'm looking at the features and failing to see what there's such a steep jump. That alone is enough of a deterrent for me to avoid signing up. Wishing you guys success but I will not be using Swell with the current pricing model.
Hey Product Hunt Community! 👋
I'm incredibly excited to share Swell with you all. We've spent nearly 2 years building the most complete, powerful and easy to use headless ecommerce platform — with a mission to give entrepreneurs the tools they need to start selling quickly, without getting stuck when the time comes to get really creative.
Why? It's all about speed and flexibility. The front-end technology stack is evolving too fast for legacy platforms to keep up, and to stay ahead of the curve we need a platform that's designed for this new reality.
Before Swell, headless commerce was reserved for hardcore developers and big companies with big budgets, but our approach is different. Just sign up and activate a storefront that's headless out of the box and hosted for you. Bring on a developer when the time is right and they'll be able to build on what you started, to create anything you can imagine.
So, what makes this a big deal?
• Create a headless storefront in minutes (powered by Nuxt and Vue), customize with a no-code editor — and for developers, a git-based workflow to deploy on Swell's built-in hosting or a CDN-backed provider like Netlify or Vercel.
• Everything you need to run a modern online store: Unlimited product options, variants, attributes, flexible discounts, and many more features you wished were standard in other ecommerce platforms.
• Sell subscription products — physical or digital — no third-party apps required.
• Completely customizable checkout — use Swell's hosted checkout or build your own with Swell.js (https://swell.store/docs/js/).
• Key integrations like Stripe, PayPal, Mailchimp, AvaTax, Segment and Klaviyo, with many more on the way.
Thanks for checking it out, and let us know what you think!
So happy to be launching today. It's been a long journey and we're excited to share Swell with you! Let us know what you think :)
anyone have thoughts on SEO friendliness? Much talk about shopify being good for SEO. I've not found that to be the case.
@vickiemacfadden Since SEO is entirely a frontend concern, it depends entirely on the site is implemented. What are the specific shortcomings you've encountered with Shopify?
@daveloneragan First, I'm not a developer or SEO expert, just an e-commerce owner (B2B) in a very competitive space (company/school swag, merch, whatever you call it!).
We're on the middle tier in shopify.
We have Bold apps -- not a luxury, but a necessity because we have tiered pricing + lots of product options. The current SEO company says the apps are creating problems for SEO because, for instance, they create multiple pages for one item based on available colors/pricing, etc. + the fact 'collections' for instance is part of the url structure.
The other issue we have is that when we make a copy of our store, you only get the shopify portion, not the Bold apps where pricing, color variants, decoration options, etc. are housed. Unless. Wait for it. You buy another app!
To upgrade our site, because of custom programming + the paid theme we use (from Out of the Sandbox, we can't just push a button when shopify has an upgrade. Gotta bring a developer in. Pain in the neck.
@vickiemacfadden That sounds pretty painful! It definitely fits a couple of problems we're aiming to solve:
1) you shouldn't need 3rd party apps for many of those features i.e. tiered pricing and product options are native in Swell. Apps are great for things that are totally novel, not so great for core functionality
2) a headless approach means you don't need weird workarounds for things like URL structure, since you (or your devs) can modify it to be anything you want - our themes define the page structure not the platform itself
This is exciting! I can attest to the team's expertise in building this product. Eric Ingram has been working in e-commerce for more than 10 years and, as my co-founder of StartupList, is the right person to be leading this team in building the future of e-commerce.
@thinker Thanks so much Nick - I can confirm Eric is an awesome dude and an amazing co-founder ❤️