Online Store

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Definition

The Online Store is the public-facing storefront TWICE ships with — no separate platform to host, no plugin to install. It reads from the same Listings, Stock Items, Pricing Tables, and Locations you manage in the admin, and it writes back Orders into the same orders table that staff-created orders land in.

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Storefront architecture

The Online Store has three layers: The storefront editor renders the actual customer experience, so you can preview changes in any viewport before saving. Saving writes them to the live storefront immediately — there is no separate publish step.

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Pages in the storefront

The storefront has a fixed page set — what you customize is layout, content, and visuals, not the page structure itself: Page paths are fixed; the domain they are served from depends on your domain setup.

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Theme system

Your storefront has a single theme configuration — a set of design tokens covering colours, typography, layout, and component styles. There are no versioned theme bundles, no theme library, and no draft themes: the storefront editor edits the one configuration directly, and saving applies it to the live storefront immediately. Configure the theme through the panels in the storefront editor’s Theme mode. There are 21, in one list rather than grouped: Announcement bar · Availability indicator · Breadcrumbs · Buttons · Calendar · Cart store selector · Collapsible section · Collection card · Colors · Custom CSS · Filter section · Header bar · Inputs · Layout · Listings card · Logo · Pickup availability · Search bar · Theme style · Typography · Variant pills Read more: Themes · Theme editor

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Multi-store support

A store on the storefront is a service Location — the same Locations you manage in the admin. When more than one Location is enabled for the Online Store channel, the storefront shows a Stores page, a Store page per Location, and a store selector customers use before checkout. All stores live inside one storefront. They do not carry their own theme, domain, or language set — the account’s single theme configuration, domain setup, and storefront languages apply to every store. What varies per store:

• Which Listings are available (based on the Listings published to the store’s Location)
• Stock and availability, driven by the Location’s Stock Items and opening hours

The catalog is shared across the account — every store draws from the same Listings, while each store sells the Stock Items assigned to its own Location.

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Domain configuration

The storefront is served from one of two domain types: How many custom domains you can connect depends on your plan — see Domains. Configure domains under Settings → Domains. TWICE provisions SSL automatically once DNS is verified. Read more: Domains setting

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Customer accounts on the storefront

What does exist is the link in the other direction: a checkout matches an existing customer profile by email and updates it, so staff see one accumulating record per customer in the admin even though the customer has no way to log in and read it themselves. See Collect customer data at checkout.

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Channel availability per Listing

Listings are not automatically shown on the storefront. Each Listing has a publishing tab that controls:

• Whether the Listing is published to the Online Store channel
• Which stores it appears in (for multi-store accounts)
• Whether it’s visible to all customer groups or restricted
• Whether the Listing is searchable, browsable in collections, or only reachable by direct link

Read more: Listings · Listings publishing tab

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Store selection

On storefronts with multiple active Locations, customers choose which Location they order from before checking out. The store selector appears in two places:

• Top bar — a button on every storefront page (except checkout) that opens a slide-out sidebar listing all active Locations. Each entry shows the store name, address, and opening hours.
• Cart page — a selector with real-time availability feedback. It shows how many Locations can fulfill the current cart and marks each store as “Cart available” or “Cart unavailable” based on stock levels for the selected dates and quantities.

The selection persists across page navigations and browser sessions. A store must be selected before the customer can proceed to checkout. For single-store merchants, the only Location is auto-selected and the selector is hidden. Configure the sidebar content (title, description, search) in the Store selection sidebar settings panel.

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Booking and purchase flow

The listing page contains a booking widget where customers complete their purchase selection. The widget adapts to the listing’s purchase types:

• Booking — the customer picks dates and times from an availability calendar, selects variant options (size, colour), chooses a quantity, and adds to cart
• Sale — the customer selects variants and quantity, then adds to cart
• Subscription — the customer picks a subscription plan and start date

On desktop, the widget renders inline next to the product images. On mobile, tapping a purchase button opens a full-screen drawer with the complete flow. Variant selection happens inside the booking widget. Single-value variants are auto-selected. The availability calendar and pricing update in real time as the customer changes their variant selection.

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Booking options and the selected date

The dropdown lists items in this order:

1. The purchase option
2. Choose your own dates
3. The listing’s fixed duration options
4. Any subscription plans

Out of the box, the fixed duration options run shortest first, with equal-length options falling cheapest first. An option billed Starting at leads its same-length elapsed-time sibling. You can switch the fixed options to longest-first, cheapest-first or most-expensive-first as a store-wide setting, in the Listing page theme editor. Everything else in the list holds its position. The Booking options dropdown reflects the date the customer has picked. An option that cannot start on that date renders greyed, captioned with the first day it can — “Not available for selected dates — next available Mon 18.8”. When no later startable day is found, the caption drops the date and reads “Not available for selected dates”. Greyed options stay selectable. Choosing one moves the start date to that option’s next startable day and moves the calendar to that month. Times picked for the old day are dropped and re-derived for the new one. Each option is judged on its own terms: its own start slots, the full booking window it needs, and — for options billed in capped periods — whether the final period resolves a valid return. The requested quantity counts too, so the same date can leave one option bookable and grey another. Two bounds apply to the next-available date. The forward search only covers days the widget has already loaded availability for, and it stops 180 days out. An option with no startable day inside those bounds shows the caption without a date. Sale and subscription options are never greyed — they are point-in-time and carry no booking window. While a sale or subscription option is selected on a mixed-type listing, no booking option is greyed either.

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Leaving checkout

A customer who reached checkout from your storefront can leave it from the first step with Back to store, which returns them to the cart. The checkout header logo goes to the same place. Both are a full page load rather than in-app navigation, so the checkout page’s state is torn down: details submitted on an earlier step are stored on the checkout, but anything typed on the current step and not yet submitted is lost. Customers who opened a checkout link instead of shopping the storefront get no such exit — they never had a cart to return to. See Step navigation for the back button on every other step.

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Inventory and availability on the storefront

The storefront reads from your live inventory:

• Customers see real-time availability based on Stock Item commitments and unavailability windows
• For rentals, the calendar shows date ranges with available units, blocked dates, and Location-specific opening hours
• When a customer selects a store, the booking widget shows per-store availability and pricing
• Out-of-stock and unavailable Listings can be hidden, greyed out, or shown with a “next available” hint depending on theme configuration
• When a customer selects a store, availability narrows to that Location’s stock — see Listing Availability for how eligibility and stock checks layer on each other
• Items in the cart are counted as booked while the customer keeps shopping, buffer windows included — see Items already in the cart

The storefront and admin share the same allocation engine — what’s available in checkout matches what the admin can commit.

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Settings that affect the storefront

Several other settings shape what the storefront does:

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Relationships

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