Introducing Solidshop: a native e-commerce companion for Joomla
From the team behind Solidres — a brand-new open-source shopping cart for Joomla 6, built with the same principles that brought you here.
Since 2013 we have been building Solidres — a reservation engine for hotels, B&Bs, vacation rentals, and tour operators who want to run their booking business on Joomla, on their own server, without paying a SaaS toll on every guest.
Today we are excited to introduce a sister product: Solidshop, a free, open-source e-commerce extension built natively for Joomla 6. It is the same philosophy as Solidres, applied to a different problem: your store, your server, your data.
Why we built Solidshop
Over the years, the question we have heard most often from the Solidres community is some variation of: “I love that my reservations live inside Joomla — why does selling a gift card, a tour package, or a bottle of local wine have to live somewhere else?”
The honest answer is that, until now, the options were not great. You could bolt on a heavyweight cart, glue together a SaaS checkout, or hand-roll something. None of those felt like Joomla. None of them felt like Solidres.
And the existing Joomla shopping cart extensions? We looked hard, and the experience was consistently overwhelming. Most of them carry years — sometimes more than a decade — of accumulated baggage from having to support every Joomla version since Joomla 3, 4, and 5 in parallel. That legacy shows up everywhere: bloated code paths gated behind version checks, deprecated APIs propped up for backward compatibility, settings panels that have grown into mazes, and admin UIs that still look like they were designed a decade ago. Even simple tasks — adding a product, configuring a tax rule, building a checkout — can feel like wading through a museum.
We did not want to add another layer to that pile. We wanted a clean break: a cart written for Joomla 6 from day one, with no version-compat ballast, no leftover patterns from Joomla 1.5, and a modern admin UI that respects your time.
So we built the thing we wished existed: a shopping cart that belongs in Joomla the same way Solidres does.
What Solidshop is
Solidshop is a complete, native commerce layer for Joomla 6. Out of the box you get:
- A full product catalog with variants, options, and inventory tracking
- Orders, fulfillment, shipping zones, and tax engines that handle real-world rules — not just a happy path
- A plugin-based architecture — discounts, invoices, reviews and more are independent plugins you enable as you need them
- Translations in 23 languages on day one, with the same translation workflow Solidres users already know
- First-class SEO, accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA), dark mode, and RTL support — not afterthoughts
- GPL-3, self-hosted, no monthly fees, no platform commission, no data sent anywhere you did not ask for
What this means for Solidres users
Solidshop and Solidres are independent extensions — you can run either one on its own. But they were designed by the same team, on the same Joomla, with the same conventions, so running them side by side is genuinely seamless.
For accommodation and tour businesses, that opens up a lot:
- Sell gift cards and vouchers alongside your room or tour inventory
- Offer merchandise, spa products, F&B items, or local goods from the same site your guests already book on
- Bundle add-ons — airport transfers, equipment rental, branded extras — as proper products with stock and tax handling
- Run a pro-shop, gallery, or a winery storefront on the same Joomla install that powers your bookings
- Keep one customer database, one design system, one admin login, one invoice flow — instead of stitching together a separate platform
Same back office, same branding, same hosting bill. One Joomla.
Built on the same principles
If you have used Solidres, Solidshop will feel immediately familiar:
- Open-source, GPL-3. No vendor lock-in, no proprietary modules locked behind a subscription wall.
- Self-hosted. Your products, your customers, your orders — all in your own database, on your own server.
- Native Joomla MVC. Standard components, plugins, modules, and overrides — no exotic frameworks to learn.
- Documented and supported. Full docs, a public forum, and a release roadmap you can read.
Try it today
Solidshop 1.0 is released and ready for real stores. The first version is stable, the docs are written, and the foundation is laid for everything that comes next.
Head over to www.solidshop.app to download Solidshop, browse the documentation, and try it on your Joomla site. If you already run Solidres, you can install Solidshop alongside it on the same instance — no migration, no conflict.
We cannot wait to see what the Solidres community builds next.
The store is yours. Solidshop is just the engine.