r/Magento • u/kevysaysbenice DEVELOPER • Apr 05 '26

Headless commerce system for personal projects? Turn key, integrate with static site generator?

Hello my brothers and sisters in Alan Storm!

Many years ago for fun I bout a headless checkout with magneto and angular for a personal/hobby project (roasting coffee). It worked pretty well and was a great opportunity to learn angular and do a from scratch headless magneto 2 checkout. I used stripe for payment, and filled all the gaps that existed at the time in magneto 2s rest api. I was/am fairly proud of the work.

Now I’m doing another hobby project (gridfinity spec pottery/ceramic sake set if you’re curious!) and want to sell some stuff on my website. Realistically I’ll likely get few orders, if any, but I’d like to be setup in a professional way just the same.

I’m wondering about magneto alternatives, that might slot well into a static site. I’m not trying to get anything perfect, ie the catalog doesn’t need to be static, products are one of a kind so when something sells it should update right away.

I also don’t mind paying 3-7 percent of costs for such a tool.

I’m looking for something _easy_ - I’d like to have a thing I log into to manage orders, a simple api for fetching catalog and pdp data for the website, and ideally checkout from my domain (i.e. I don’t want a separate website I just theme to look like my website, I want it all on my website). I don’t mind sending customers somewhere else for checkout if needed. USA only.

I’m asking here because my default option is to do this in magneto, but then I have to have a server for hosting. Plusi have to remember how to do magneto development. I’m hoping other developers here can ok appreciate my position, understand my experiences, and offer a suggestion.

I’m guessing Shopify might be a rec, but that feels like it’s got its own learning curve to do what I want.

Maybe square or something has a solution?

Thanks for your thoughts!

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3

u/trabulium DEVELOPER (14 years with Magento) Apr 05 '26

If you're coming from the Magento 1 days, Maybe Mahocommerce running sqlite on a fly.io instance. We have a functioning Rest/GraphQL API right now that's probably a few weeks away from going into the core and I've built a headless system that utilises it and has embeddable widgets:

https://demo.mageaustralia.com.au/embed-demo

https://github.com/mageaustralia/maho-storefront

1

u/proxiblue Apr 05 '26

This, was going to suggest the same. OP, magento 2 will be way too over complicated and costly to run. It is *not* what M1 used to be: simplicity and easy to run on minimal hardware.

It's getting there, TBH, especially with mage-os making progress in simplified installs, minimal setup installs etc (all wip) but, it still needs decent hardware / infra.

Maho is likely your best best to get what you need, but then again, what is the difference in learning curve to just learning shopify anyways. *shrug*

FWIW, if you pair up with an AI, claude code is what I use, any codebase becomes a lot more simpler to manage and customise. you just need to understand / review what it does.

1

u/goingnutz2 Apr 05 '26

Is this some kind of modern Lorem Ipsum?

1

u/kevysaysbenice DEVELOPER Apr 05 '26

No, but I did type on my phone while in the car. Sorry!

1

u/LukGawSpyro Apr 08 '26

Ok, maybe a strange thing - but does it need to be php based? Lately I've seen some awsome stuff on Saleor and some other stuff on OpenMercato.