Solidshop — Free, self-hosted e-commerce for Joomla 6+

Short description

Long description

Solidshop is a free, open-source shopping cart for Joomla 6. It installs like any Joomla extension — no account, no licence key, no activation server, no feature gating behind a subscription. Your catalogue, customer list, and order history live in your own database, on your own server. Released under GPL-3.

Why self-hosted

Typical SaaS platforms charge a monthly fee plus a per-sale transaction cut, and they hold your data on their infrastructure. Solidshop charges nothing, takes nothing per sale, and stores everything in your Joomla database. There is no Solidshop cloud, no telemetry, no analytics beacon, and no third-party sub-processor — your install never calls home.

What's included (all free)

• Catalogue — Products with variants, options, brands, and inventory tracking, plus curated related-product suggestions shown alongside each product. Bulk edits via CSV import/export.
• Custom fields — Define your own fields with Joomla's own Custom Fields — all 19 types, validation, view levels, groups, and language assignment. Put them on products for a storefront Specifications tab and Schema.org output, at checkout for a gift message or PO number, on addresses, or per order line for engraving and personalisation. Captured answers are frozen onto the order with their labels, so renaming or deleting a field later never rewrites a placed order.
• Cart & checkout — Multi-step checkout with guest support, address book, shipping selection, and tax at order time. Mini-cart drawer, coupon field on cart and checkout, template-overridable throughout.
• Orders — Full lifecycle (order, payment, fulfillment, return status) with inline editing, batch actions, and auto-generated invoices you or the customer can download as PDF.
• Reports — Sales by period, by product and by payment method, plus tax collected, over any date range — each exportable as CSV. Payment-scoped and per-currency, so the figures reconcile with your books.
• Dashboard — KPI cards, sales chart, top products, and customer insights in the Joomla admin. Plugin-extensible widgets.
• Tax — Zone-based rates by country, state, or ZIP range, snapshotted at order time so historical orders never shift when a rate changes.
• Shipping — Profiles with zones, regions, and rate tiers, attachable per product or variant. No carrier lock-in.
• Payments — Cash on delivery and bank transfer are bundled; gateway plugins install separately.
• Discounts — Automatic discounts and coupon codes, visible on the cart page before checkout begins.
• Search & SEO — Products indexed into Joomla Smart Search, a native XML sitemap, clean SEF URLs, canonical tags, Product structured data, Open Graph cards, and per-store SEO settings.
• Catalog API & AI discovery — A read-only REST API for products, categories, and brands, plus an MCP server that hands the same catalogue to AI assistants as five read-only tools. Guest-visible data only — no cost prices, no stock counts, no customer data — and every response carries the canonical link back to your own storefront. Public by default, or gated behind Joomla API tokens with one switch.
• Multilingual — One catalogue, many languages: translated product, category, option, status, and email text with per-language slugs, hreflang tags, and emails in the customer's language, falling back to your default.
• Currency — A currency switcher module lets shoppers read the catalogue, cart, and checkout in any published currency that has an exchange rate. Display-only by design: the order, invoice, emails, reports, and the amount actually charged all stay in your store currency, stated with the exact figure at checkout.
• Customer accounts — Joomla-user-linked profiles with order history, address book, invoices, and shareable wishlists.
• Email templates — Edit order confirmations, shipping updates, and status-change emails from the admin, without touching code.
• Modules — Cart (with mini-cart drawer), Products, Search, Filters (category, brand, price, rating, tags), Currency switcher, and Language switcher.
• Accessibility & dark mode — WCAG 2.1 AA storefront and admin: semantic landmarks, ARIA, full keyboard navigation, visible focus states, RTL support, and a contrast-preserving dark palette.
• Granular ACL — Joomla ACL across every admin view: view, create, edit, delete, publish, and manage, per user group.

For developers

Built for extension, not modification. Major features are self-contained Joomla plugins that own their own database tables, admin MVC, frontend layouts, language strings, and event handlers — the core never needs to be patched. Dispatch custom events, register product types and reports, inject checkout tabs, and extend the admin panel through Joomla's standard event system. The read-only catalog REST API and MCP server ship in the box, sharing one set of response shapers and the storefront's own visibility rules. PSR-12, PHP 8.4 enums, backed by PHPUnit, full GPL-3 source.

Requirements

• Joomla 6.x or later
• PHP 8.4 or later
• MySQL 8.4 or later

Licence

GNU General Public License v3 (or later).