// the find
saleor/storefront
Saleor Storefront built using React, Next.js with App Router, TypeScript, GraphQL, and Tailwind CSS.
Paper is a Next.js 16 storefront template for the Saleor headless e-commerce backend. It handles the full shopping flow — product listings, variant selection, multi-step checkout, account management — with a well-considered caching strategy built on Partial Prerendering. It's for teams building on Saleor who want a solid starting point rather than rolling everything from scratch.
The caching architecture is genuinely well done: named `cacheLife` tiers (`catalog` at ~5min, `menus` at ~1hr), channel-scoped cache tags, and webhook invalidation with TTL as a fallback. The 'display-cached, checkout-live' split is the right call and is executed consistently rather than ad-hoc. The checkout is actually complete — international address forms, exponential backoff for flaky connections, guest and authenticated flows — most storefront starters ship a payment placeholder and leave you on your own. GraphQL Codegen throughout means you get type errors when the API changes, not runtime surprises. The `AGENTS.md` + `skills/` structured rules for AI pair programming is a practical idea — concrete patterns for caching and variant selection beat hoping the LLM reverse-engineers your conventions.
The Saleor coupling is total — every GraphQL query is Saleor-schema-specific, so swapping backends means rewriting data fetchers, not just changing an adapter. That's fine if you're on Saleor, but worth knowing upfront. Product filtering is admittedly unfinished: the README lists 'fetching attributes from API for dynamic product filters' as planned future work, so if you need faceted filtering (size, color, price range) you're building it yourself. The webhook-based cache invalidation for self-hosted deployments requires manual dashboard configuration because the Saleor Cloud Paper app that automates it is Cloud-only for now — production self-hosters have a real operational gap here. The FSL-1.1-ALv2 license converts to Apache 2.0 after two years but blocks offering it as a managed service without Saleor's permission — many teams won't read this until they're already committed.