Ecommerce as a service, explained
Ecommerce platforms sell you a whole site with a shop inside. Ecommerce as a service sells you only the shop and leaves the site to you. For anyone who already has a website they like, the second model is the one that fits.
The difference in one picture
A platform: your website lives inside their system. Themes, pages, blog, shop, all theirs. You customise.
A service: your website lives wherever you built it. The service provides the selling layer through an embed or an API. You integrate.
What the service layer contains
- A catalogue: products, prices, stock, images.
- A cart that respects stock and quantities.
- A checkout that takes money safely, usually a hosted one like Stripe's.
- Order storage and notifications.
- A way to manage all of the above: a dashboard, an API, and increasingly an MCP server for AI agents.
When a service beats a platform
- You already have a site and do not want to rebuild it.
- The shop is part of the site, not the whole business.
- You want to pay per sale rather than per month.
- You want your AI tools to manage the shop.
When a platform still wins
Large catalogues with variants and inventory across locations, teams working in an admin all day, marketplaces and POS. Those are what platforms are for.
How AddTheShop does it
One script tag for the embed, a storefront API for custom frontends, a merchant API and MCP server for management, Stripe Connect for payments into your own account. No monthly fee; 2% per sale.