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Shopper is a headless e-commerce framework. It ships without a frontend, giving you full control over how customers interact with your store. You can build your storefront with any technology: React, Vue, Svelte, or server-rendered Blade. If you want to skip the blank canvas and start from a working storefront, Shopper provides Starter Kits. Each kit is a complete, production-ready storefront that gets copied directly into your Laravel application. Once installed, the code belongs to you. Modify anything, delete what you don’t need, or use it as a reference to build something entirely different.

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Starter Kits vs Themes

Starter kits are not themes. The distinction matters. A theme is a runtime dependency. Your application relies on it, receives updates from it, and can switch between themes. A starter kit is scaffolding used once: the installer copies files into your project, installs dependencies, and removes itself. There is no hidden package to update, no active dependency at runtime. If you want to “switch” starter kits, you start a new project. This is by design. The trade-off is intentional: you get full ownership and freedom to customize every line of code, at the cost of not being able to swap frontends with a click. 
Starter Kit                          Theme (out of scope)
--------------------------------     --------------------------------
Scaffold — used once                 Runtime — active permanently
Code belongs to the developer        Managed by the system
Not switchable                       Switchable from admin
Manual merge for updates             Update = dependency upgrade

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Scope

Shopper starter kits cover Laravel storefronts only: Laravel + Livewire and Laravel + Inertia.js (Vue or React within the Laravel context). Projects outside of Laravel (standalone Vue/React SPAs, Svelte, mobile apps) consume the Shopper API independently and are distributed through their own channels (GitHub, ThemeForest, Gumroad, etc.). These are not in scope for the starter kit system.

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Available Kits

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Livewire

The Livewire Starter Kit is a full-stack Laravel storefront built with Livewire 3, Flux UI and Tailwind CSS v4. It provides reactive components for product browsing, cart management, multi-step checkout with Stripe payment, customer accounts, and multi-currency zone support. Because Shopper’s admin panel is also built with Livewire, you can reuse patterns and components across your admin and storefront.
Livewire Starter Kit storefront

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Inertia

The Inertia Starter Kit is currently in development. It will provide a modern single-page application storefront using Inertia.js with Vue or React, while keeping the full power of Laravel on the backend.Check the Shopper repository for updates on the release timeline.

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How It Works

The shopper:kit:install command is built into Shopper. No additional package is required. When you run it with a kit package name, the installer performs the following pipeline:
  1. Backup your composer.json for rollback if anything fails
  2. Detect the kit package on Packagist, GitHub, Bitbucket, or GitLab
  3. Download the kit temporarily via composer require
  4. Read the shopper-kit.yaml manifest from the kit package
  5. Validate PHP, Laravel, and Shopper version constraints
  6. Copy files from the kit into your project according to export_paths
  7. Install Composer dependencies declared in the manifest
  8. Run post-install commands (migrations, storage link, asset build)
  9. Write a .shopper-kit state file tracking installed files with SHA-256 hashes
  10. Remove the kit package from your composer.json
  11. Clean up the backup file
After installation, every file lives in your project. The kit package is gone from your dependencies.

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The Manifest

Every starter kit contains a shopper-kit.yaml manifest at its root. This file declares everything the installer needs: metadata, version constraints, which files to copy, which dependencies to install, and what commands to run after installation. 
name: "My Storefront"
description: "A modern storefront for Shopper."
version: "1.0.0"
author: "acme"
url: "https://github.com/acme/my-storefront"
shopper: "^2.7"
php: "^8.4"
laravel: "^12.0"

export_paths:
  - resources/views
  - resources/css
  - routes/web.php
  - app/Livewire

dependencies:
  - livewire/livewire: "^3.7"

dev_dependencies: []

post_install:
  - php artisan migrate
  - npm install && npm run build
FieldRequiredDescription
nameYesDisplay name of the kit
export_pathsYesFiles and directories to copy into the project
descriptionNoShort description
versionNoSemantic version (defaults to 0.0.0)
authorNoAuthor name
urlNoKit repository URL
phpNoPHP version constraint (defaults to *)
laravelNoLaravel version constraint (defaults to *)
shopperNoShopper version constraint (defaults to *)
dependenciesNoComposer packages to install
dev_dependenciesNoComposer dev packages to install
post_installNoShell commands to run after file copy
The installer blocks certain paths for security: .env, composer.json, composer.lock, vendor/, .git/, and node_modules/ are never copied, even if listed in export_paths.

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The .shopper-kit State File

After installation, a .shopper-kit file is created at the root of your project. It records which kit was installed, its version, and the SHA-256 hash of every copied file. 
{
    "kit": "shopper/livewire-starter-kit",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "installed_at": "2026-04-06T14:32:00+00:00",
    "files": {
        "app/Livewire/Pages/Home.php": "sha256:abc123...",
        "resources/views/pages/home.blade.php": "sha256:def456..."
    }
}
This file should be committed to git. It enables future diff commands to detect which files you have modified locally since installation and which files have changed upstream in a new kit version.

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Creating Your Own Starter Kit

Shopper provides a scaffolding command to create a new starter kit with the correct structure. 
php artisan shopper:kit:init
The command prompts you for the kit name, package name (in vendor/name format), description, and author. It then creates a directory with the following structure: 
my-starter-kit/
├── shopper-kit.yaml     # Manifest — configure export_paths and dependencies
├── composer.json        # Package metadata with type "shopper-starter-kit"
├── README.md            # Installation instructions
├── resources/
│   ├── views/
│   ├── css/
│   └── js/
└── routes/
From there, add your storefront files and update shopper-kit.yaml to declare which paths should be exported. Publish your kit on Packagist or a Git repository, and anyone can install it with shopper:kit:install. You can specify a custom directory for the kit with the --path option. 
php artisan shopper:kit:init --path=../my-starter-kit