Unchained Engine

Multi-channel ready, GraphQL & developer-first e-commerce platform.

Implement all the crazy pricing, crypto payments, and discount & loyalty ideas through the unique developer-first approach. Start selling goods, services & subscriptions on any internet-connected device.

Headless
(bring your own UI)
Open-source
(no vendor lock-in)
Omni-channel
personalization

Ultra high-speed

Full customization & control

Seamless integration

You own your data

B2B-friendly

Crypto payments

Built in Web Auth support

Customizable messaging

Tailor-made extendable Admin-UI control panel

Built in two-factor authentication support

Customizable access control

The Most Flexible E-Commerce Platform

The headless approach allows you to build e-commerce apps which run natively on mobile phones, watches, TVs, wearables, and your own hardware. It empowers developers to integrate proprietary and decentralized systems, bridging digital commerce with distributed ledgers & IoT.
By using open-source technologies & popular programming languages, it is very easy for developers to extend and adapt the platform to a company's specific needs. This enables product owners to design like never before.

Built for Developers

There is no UI. Just build your own interface on top of the GraphQL API. If you want to connect your existing back-ends or add a cryptocurrency as a method of payment, simply write a small plugin, build your own module, add a micro-service, fork the whole thing, or just extend the GraphQL API with your own queries & types.

All you need is some Javascript. (Node.js) know-how, and our multi-channel enterprise shop system.

To make it even easier, we have created a boilerplate template with all the required initial setups. All you have to do is, copy the code below and execute it in a command line, scaffold a template that suits you, and start developing with Unchained in less than a minute.

npm init @unchainedshop

Open Source

Usage of OSS prevents vendor lock-in. Using software that is open to the public leads to communities that help each other, the software is resilient to economic issues like bankruptcy of the software owner.

OSS

Your Front-End

Integrate your iOS app, Android watch, website, or even car.
Connect the Unchained GraphQL API with your front-end of choice & build the perfect customer experience.

Your Back-End

Simply add your CRM, ERP, PIM. We already successfully connected the Unchained Engine to various core systems such as Microsoft Navision and crossbase, as well as smallinvoice and Google Sheets. API available? Go!

Unchained Admin UI

The Unchained Admin UI is our Web UI to all data management APIs that the Unchained Engine provides out of the box. Manage products, collections, users & orders. Compatibility and feature parity with the Unchained Engine.

Read more
headless

What is Hackable?

Non-hackable software (like SaaS) uses the technique of customisation, meaning it provides a massive control panel where every aspect of the software can be configured, themed or disabled. Sadly, there is always something that needs additional software development work and requires creating a custom plug-in.

In Unchained Engine, the software flow is changed through code and not through UI, which means a software developer is always required to configure the platform. Our hackable software provides you with basic out-of-the-box customisation, however it allows for the business logic to be fully-customized by the developer. This is achieved through a staged approach ranging from plugins to a full hard fork.

Quick Sample

Software Stack in Detail

Node.js ES6

We use the most popular programming language on the web because we think it is key for a hackable software. If you have a hackable software but no coder, what is the point then? As the project manager you will propably always find somebody that can program in JavaScript, while finding people that code in GoLang are rare.

Apollo GraphQL Server

GraphQL is the new REST. Having a schema on the API helps with connecting systems in a micro-service architecture and makes it extremely easy to implement in client apps for all kind of operating systems and programming languages. When adding, removing, and migrating back-end data stores, the API doesn't change from the client's perspective. It's simple to add new types and fields to your API, and similarly straightforward for clients to begin using those fields. This helps design, develop, and deploy features quickly.

MongoDB

We have chosen MongoDB because it is the most popular NoSQL DBMS out there. With a schema-less database, development of plugins and extensions that need to extend the existing data structure is much simpler. The document data model is a powerful way to store and retrieve data that allows developers to move quickly. MongoDB’s horizontal, scale-out architecture can support high volumes of both data and traffic.

How Does It Work?

What Can You Integrate?

Features by Module

Delivery
  • Downloadable products
  • E-mail the order to a third-party logistics provider's central inbox
  • Upload orders as CSV to an FTP host*
  • Transfer orders electronically to any other system
  • Post (Yellowcube), UPS, DHL commissioning*
Documents
  • Generate documents through a local bookkeeping system (SAP R/3, Abacus, and others)
  • Generate documents with HTML templates
  • Generate documents through SaaS services (e.g. smallinvoice)
  • Generate a new XML file for external processing
Messaging
  • Send order confirmations and invoices by e-mail, SMS or WhatsApp
  • Send user registration notifications via Slack
  • Twitter new orders anonymized*
Payments
  • Invoice (post- and prepaid)
  • Stripe
  • PostFinance
  • PayPal
  • Datatrans
  • Bonity-checked invoices (Deltavista)
  • Bity
  • Coinbase Commerce
  • Bitcoin Suisse
Pricing
  • B2B special pricing
  • Date range dependent pricing
  • Dynamic tax rate retrieval
  • Product, payment, order or delivery prices configurable
  • Order total and weight dependent charges, dynamically calculated by UPS*
  • Prices dependent on languages, countries, users, order quantities etc.*
Discounts
  • Christmas & Black Friday discounts
  • Percentage discount codes
  • Absolute amount reduction discount codes
  • Swear word-dependent daily discounts based on Donald Trump's Twitter feed*
  • Lottery or random prices: every 1000th buyer receives their order free of charge*
Warehousing
  • ERP, as inventory management*
  • Manage inventory in Google Docs
  • Fire just-in-time production of any goods*
  • Real-time quantities (see an event get sold out live)*
Quotations
  • Automatically build individual offers in response to RFPs
  • Quotation workflow to confirm and reject offers
  • Allow users to digitally negotiate with the vendor
Product Reviews
  • Allow users to comment on ordered products
  • Allow users to rate a product
  • Allow users to post custom data and/or reply to messages
  • Intelligent workflow that allows to scan incoming reviews and controls the requirement for manual approval
Faceted Search
  • Filters on any hierarchical level
  • Filters that get filtered by filters (faceted)
  • Range, selection and custom filter types
  • Fast (custom index)
  • Item count prediction
And so much more
  • One shop for one world (multi-country support)
  • Price your products in any currency you like, $XLM maybe?
  • Internationalization with multi-language support
  • Metadata extension on any entity made possible
* Examples of crazy plugins built during past projects. The plugins usually take only a couple of hours to develop.