// the find
shopnex-ai/shopnex
Open-source Shopify alternative built with Payload CMS.
ShopNex is a Shopify alternative built on top of Payload CMS, using Next.js 15 for both the admin and storefront. It gives you a full e-commerce stack — products, orders, Stripe payments, cart — without the monthly Shopify fees. Aimed at developers who want something self-hostable and actually modifiable, not a SaaS wrapper.
Payload CMS as the backend is a genuinely good choice here — you get a typed, code-first data model with a free admin UI rather than building one from scratch. The monorepo structure separates the core platform from storefront implementations (builder-shop, shop) cleanly, so you can swap or add storefronts without touching the data layer. The `create-shopnex-app` CLI gets you running in one command, which is the right developer experience for a template like this. CJ Dropshipping integration out of the box is a practical differentiator — most open-source e-commerce tools ignore fulfillment entirely.
The roadmap has more planned items than shipped ones — order history/tracking, omni-channel, shipping management, and most payment providers beyond Stripe are all still 'planned'. That's a lot of table stakes missing for production use. SQLite is listed as a database option in the README, which is fine for dev but will surprise anyone who tries to run this at any real volume without reading the fine print. The storefront in apps/shop still has Medusa icons in the component directory, suggesting this was forked from Medusa's starter and the cleanup is incomplete. Documentation is thin — the docs app exists but core topics like self-hosting and multi-tenancy are marked as planned, leaving you to read the source.