Platform overview
The five-minute mental model of Orchard. Read this first, then branch into the merchant or developer path.
What Orchard is
Orchard is a multi-tenant commerce platform — an all-in-one store engine that runs many independent stores on one shared, operator-managed backend. Each store (“tenant”) is fully isolated at the data, authentication, domain, payment, and audit layers. Two stores on Orchard can never see each other’s data.
A single platform team (the operator) runs the infrastructure. Each store has its own admin users who run their store day-to-day, and its own customers who shop it. Those are three different kinds of account, with three different ways of signing in — see Concepts.
What you run vs. what Orchard runs
| You run | Orchard runs for you |
|---|---|
| Your brand, storefront design, and marketing | The store engine: catalog, orders, customers, payments plumbing |
| Day-to-day operations | The admin tools you do that work in |
| Your own Stripe account (you get paid directly) | Inventory, subscriptions, reviews, returns, reports, email |
| Your domain | Hosting and security for the admin and API |
Your money flows through your own Stripe account — Orchard never touches it.
Three ways to put a storefront in front of customers
Orchard separates the commerce backend from the storefront. You choose how the storefront is built:
- Shared runner — Orchard hosts your storefront from a shared, themeable runner. The fastest path; you customize through theme settings, no code.
- Per-tenant fork — you (or a developer) run your own storefront repo from a starter template, fully bespoke, talking to Orchard through the typed SDK.
- External API consumer — you own and operate your own frontend entirely,
consuming Orchard’s
/api/v1REST surface as a public API client. This is the model for teams building a fully custom UI on top of an Orchard catalog.
All three use the same commerce primitives underneath. A merchant on the shared runner and a developer building an external client are looking at the same orders, the same products, the same customers.
The pieces you’ll touch
| Surface | URL shape | Who uses it |
|---|---|---|
| Admin | admin.theorchard.dev | Store owners and staff |
| Platform API | api.theorchard.dev/api/v1/* | Developers and integrations |
| Test API | api-test.theorchard.dev/api/v1/* | Developers (separate test data) |
| Webhooks | you host the receiver | Your systems, reacting to events |
Where to go next
- You run a store: Merchant quickstart — login to first published product.
- You build on Orchard: Developer quickstart — first authenticated API call in five minutes.
- You want the vocabulary: Concepts — tenant, product, variant, order, and the three account types.