How Spots Works
Up and running
in under an hour.
Whether you're a merchant launching your first storefront or a developer building your first theme — here's exactly how Spots works, step by step.
For merchants
Your storefront, live
before lunch.
Spots is built for artisan business owners — not developers. If you can fill in a form, you can launch a professional online store.
Step 1
Create your account
Sign up with your name, email, and business type. Verify your email with a one-time code. That's it — no long forms, no credit card, no waiting.
You'll be asked to choose your unique subdomain — the address your storefront will live at. Something like sweetbites.spots.com. This can be upgraded to a custom domain later.
Sweet Bites Bakery
Bakery & Patisserie
Step 2
Choose a plan and a theme
Pick the plan that matches where your business is right now. You can upgrade at any time as you grow — there's no penalty for starting small.
Then browse the theme marketplace. Our compatibility engine only shows you themes that match your business type and the modules your plan supports — so every option you see is a guaranteed fit.
Step 3
Add products and set up inventory
List your products with names, prices, descriptions, and variants. For the inventory engine, define your raw ingredient base pools — say, 50 kg of cake mix — and Spots automatically calculates how many of each product variant you can still produce.
When a customer adds something to their cart, the stock is reserved in real time using a Redis-backed token. If they don't complete checkout, it's released back automatically.
Step 4
Connect payments and go live
Connect your Paystack or Stripe account in a few clicks. Configure your delivery zones — set a base delivery fee and a per-kilometre rate, and Spots calculates the exact road distance to each customer's address automatically.
Your storefront is now live. Share your spots.com link, add it to your Instagram bio, and start accepting orders.
Step 5
Grow — turn on features as you need them
Spots is modular. As your business grows, toggle on new capabilities from your dashboard with no downtime and no new learning curve.
For developers
Build once.
Earn every install.
Build React storefronts for artisan merchants, upload to the Spots marketplace, and earn 80% of every licence sale — on your schedule.
Step 1
Register your developer account
Sign up at /developer/register. Your dashboard gives you instant access to your earnings summary, active themes, payout history, and review queue updates.
Step 2
Generate your API key and build locally
Generate a secure X-Developer-Key from your dashboard settings. Use it to authenticate your local Vite project against our documented storefront API endpoints — products, cart, orders, custom requests, delivery, and more.
The Spots CLI (npm install -g spots-cli) lets you preview your theme against a real test store locally before submission.
Step 3
Write your theme metadata
Create a spots-theme.json file at the root of your project. Declare the business types your theme supports (bakery, chocolatier, café, restaurant), the platform modules it requires, and the modules it optionally supports.
Our compatibility engine uses this file to match your theme with the right merchants in the marketplace — so a pastry-studio theme only shows up for pastry studios.
Step 4
Submit for review
Run spots deploy from the CLI, or manually zip your Vite build output and upload it to the developer portal. Our extraction service rewrites all asset URLs automatically — no manual path configuration required.
Our review team checks your theme for code quality, security, and compatibility within 5 business days. You'll receive email notifications at each stage of the review.
Step 5
Earn on every install — indefinitely
Once approved, your theme appears in the marketplace. Every time a merchant installs it, you earn 80% of the listed price. Earnings are credited to your payout wallet in real time.
Withdraw to your bank account at any time — there's no minimum threshold and no hold period. A single well-designed theme that resonates with merchants can generate substantial recurring income.
What makes Spots different
Stock that knows how many cakes your ingredients can still make — not just how many units are left.
Delivery fees calculated on actual road distance via Google Maps — not straight-line estimates.
Brief intake, live chat negotiation, quote, and payment — all inside one workflow.
Every storefront runs on its own database. No shared tables, no cross-merchant data risk.
Ready to see it
for yourself?
Start your free 14-day merchant trial — or create a developer account and build your first theme. Both take under five minutes to set up.