From an empty site to a working store in one sitting. This guide walks the whole road: set up the headless CMS, deploy the ecommerce block, load your categories and products, connect Stripe or PayPal — safely — and set your shipping rates.
A Claude CMS store is two things working together. Your website — the pages, the brand, the product pages people browse — runs on your own hosting, fast and self-contained. The store itself — the product catalogue, stock, checkout and orders — runs on a dedicated headless commerce layer behind an API. Your site renders the products; the commerce layer does the transactional heavy lifting. (The announcement covers the architecture in more depth: Claude CMS now has headless ecommerce.)
The built-in headless store comes with the Setup + Monthly plan (£9.99/month, first month free) and the Managed plan. It isn't part of the £6.99 Monthly-only licence — but that plan isn't locked out of selling: Claude CMS also works with WooCommerce and Shopify, so Claude can run an existing store on either platform — products, prices, stock and orders.
Setting it up is a short, mostly conversational job. Here it is start to finish.
Log in to your Claude CMS account and open the Shop tab. Complete the short setup form and your headless store is provisioned: a product catalogue, a checkout, and an order admin, all held in your account and ready to be filled. Nothing is installed on your website at this point — the store lives behind the API until a front end asks for it.
From here you have two equally good ways of working, and you can mix them freely:
Both write to the same catalogue, so nothing you do in one place is invisible to the other. The rest of this guide uses the conversational route — swap any step for the panel if you prefer clicking to typing.
If you're starting a new site, one message builds the entire front end:
The ecommerce block is a tested, ready-made storefront from the block library: category listing pages, product pages, a cart and the checkout hand-off, all wired to your headless store automatically and styled to your brand on the way in. On an existing site the same block applies too — Claude fits the shop into your current design and navigation instead of starting fresh.
Categories first, products second — that way every product lands somewhere sensible and your navigation builds itself:
Claude creates the categories in the headless store and the matching listing pages on your site. Renaming, nesting or merging them later is one more sentence.
For each product, give Claude:
Bulk works too. "Add these 40 products from my spreadsheet" is a perfectly good message, and so is "put everything in Paint & Decorating down 15% for September".
Off the shelf, Claude CMS supports Stripe and PayPal. Checkout is hosted by your chosen provider, and it's connected to your own account — money goes directly to you, and we take nothing from your sales.
Connecting a provider means giving your site an API key, and there is exactly one right place to put it: the Keys tab, following the steps in the help centre. Added there, the key is held in secure storage your website itself cannot read, and it's attached to requests at the last moment — it never sits in a file on your server.
Never paste a key into a chat — with Claude or anyone else. Anything typed into a conversation stays in that conversation's history, so a key pasted there should be treated as burned and replaced with a fresh one.
Once the key is saved under a short name, you refer to it by name and nothing sensitive ever crosses the chat:
Shipping is where those product weights pay off. Describe your real parcel bands — weight tiers, flat rates, a free-shipping threshold, different rates for different regions — and Claude configures the store to match. Checkout then quotes every basket correctly without you thinking about it again.
Want the bigger picture first? The ecommerce website builder page shows what a full store build looks like, and Claude CMS vs Shopify covers the honest trade-offs. The built-in store comes with the Setup + Monthly plan at £9.99 a month, first month free — and with no transaction fees, ever.