Setting up your storefront from onboarding
The e-commerce onboarding step covers Stripe connection and your first products, so your storefront is ready to take orders.
When you choose the 'Online store' intent during signup, VeloCMS adds an extra onboarding step — shop setup — that gets your storefront ready to take orders before you finish the wizard. The step has two parts: Stripe connection and a guided 'first three products' flow with templates tailored to your shop type (apparel, digital, physical).
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Most blog shops look bolted on — a generic store widget that clashes with everything around it. VeloCMS does the opposite: your shop is built into your blog and rendered in your theme's own look. Same fonts, same colors, same feel. Let me set up a storefront and show you what I mean.
First, a product. In the admin I add one — a name, a price, some photos, and whether it's a physical thing I ship or a digital file that auto-delivers. Fill it in, save, and it's ready to sell. No separate store platform, no plugin, no second dashboard to babysit.
Now the storefront itself. Here's the part I love — my shop page isn't a generic grid. It's rendered in my active theme, so if my blog is warm and editorial, my shop is too. Every one of the themes has its own bespoke storefront. It looks like it belongs, because it does.
Click a product and you land on its detail page — big images, the description, price, variants, an add-to-cart button — and it's still wearing my theme. This is where a lot of blog-plus-shop setups fall apart and suddenly look like a different website. Here it stays seamless.
Checkout's built in too. A cart, and payment through Stripe or PayPal — I'm just showing it, not buying. Digital products deliver automatically after payment; physical ones drop into a fulfillment queue. Your reader never leaves your site to buy from you. That's the whole point.
And it all lives inside one blog. One site, one navigation, one brand — a cart icon in the same header as your posts. Your readers browse a story and buy a product without ever feeling like they changed websites. Content and commerce, finally in one place.
A shop that looks like your blog, because it is your blog. Set yours up at velocms dot org.
Connecting your Stripe account
VeloCMS is BYOK — you bring your own Stripe keys, we encrypt them at rest with AES-256-GCM. Paste your Stripe secret key (starts with sk_live_ or sk_test_) and publishable key (pk_live_ or pk_test_) into the onboarding form. We validate the keys against the Stripe API before saving. You cannot finish the onboarding wizard without valid Stripe keys — this is a deliberate gate so your public shop never appears without a working checkout.
Shop type templates
Pick the shop type that matches what you sell — apparel (sized / colored physical goods), digital (downloads, subscriptions), or physical (single-SKU items like books, prints, accessories). Each type pre-fills the 'first three products' form with realistic defaults: for apparel, size and color attributes are already configured; for digital, the download URL field is prominent and stock is infinite; for physical, the SKU and weight fields are required.
You can always add more products, more attributes, or change shop type later. The onboarding 'first three' is just enough to take your first order — most tenants ship a dozen products in their first week. Skip templates you don't want and come back to them via Admin > Products > New.
What happens after onboarding
The shop page goes live at /shop the moment you publish your first product. Customers browse, add to cart, and check out via Stripe. Orders land in Admin > Orders as they come in. Low-stock alerts are enabled by default (see the Low-stock alerts article). You can customize the shop theme from Admin > Themes, add categories, and configure shipping from Admin > Shipping and Admin > Settings > Commerce whenever you're ready.