The SpreadFront manual

Everything SpreadFront does, how it works, and when to use it. New here? The step-by-step setup guide gets you live first; this manual is the full reference.

What SpreadFront is

SpreadFront turns a Google Sheet into a complete online store. One row in your sheet is one product in your shop. There is no admin panel to learn, no page builder, no plugins: the spreadsheet you already know is the product catalog, and everything else — the storefront, the cart, orders, notifications, analytics — is handled for you.

Three principles shape every feature:

The sheet is your catalog

How syncing works

When someone visits your store, SpreadFront serves a cached copy of your catalog. If that copy is older than about a minute, it quietly re-reads your sheet. In practice: edit the sheet, and your store updates within a minute. No publish button, no deploy step.

If you want a change visible instantly (say, you just fixed a price), open your store in the dashboard and press Refresh products from sheet now.

If Google Sheets is ever unreachable, your store does not go down: SpreadFront keeps serving the last good copy of your catalog for up to 24 hours. A hiccup on Google's side never closes your shop.

Product columns

Your sheet needs a header row; column order does not matter, and names are matched case-insensitively. Sheets made for store.link work without changes.

Rich descriptions

On paid plans, descriptions support simple Markdown, so a candle maker can list burn times as bullets and a gadget shop can bold the specs (on the Free plan, descriptions render as plain text with line breaks preserved):

Plain text stays plain: if you never type a Markdown character, your description renders exactly as written, line breaks included.

Product images & videos

Paste the image address as text into the image cells. All of these work:

Videos work too: paste a direct video link (ends in .mp4 or .webm) into the Thumbnail or any Image column. In the product grid it plays silently on a loop like an animated photo; on the product page it appears in the gallery with playback controls. Use a direct file link - a YouTube or Vimeo page link will not play. Keep clips short and small (a few MB) so the page stays fast.

One thing that cannot work: pictures inserted into sheet cells (Insert, then Image). Google does not expose inserted pictures to any external service, so always paste a link instead. Square photos around 800×800 pixels look best.

Uploading files: images and digital products

Every store has a Files & images section in its dashboard. Upload there and SpreadFront hosts the file for you (Free plan: 100 MB, paid plans more):

How digital delivery works

Digital delivery is a paid-plan feature (it rides on buyer emails). Card orders deliver instantly - the moment the payment succeeds, the buyer's confirmation email includes the download links. For cash/manual orders, nothing is sent automatically at checkout — the moment you set the order's status to paid, confirmed, shipped or completed, the buyer automatically receives an email with secure download links.

Buyer lost the email, or the 7 days passed? Click ↻ Resend email next to the order - the buyer gets the same status email again with fresh download links, valid another 7 days. Links are personal to that order and expire after 7 days; if a buyer loses one, just set the status again to resend fresh links.

Use cases: an author selling an e-book, a photographer selling presets, a teacher selling worksheets — with cash-free delivery via a Stripe payment link, the whole shop runs itself.

Subscriptions

Pro plan - and billed through Stripe Connect card payments, which are available soon. The sheet column and the storefront display already work today, so you can prepare subscription products now; buyers will be able to order them the moment Connect card payments go live on your store.

Add an Interval column to your sheet and write weekly, monthly or yearly on a product's row — that product becomes a subscription. The storefront shows its price as "€12 / month", and at checkout the buyer's card is charged automatically every period through your own Stripe account until they cancel. Renewals, failed payments and cancellations are all handled inside your Stripe dashboard; every renewal pays out to you directly with 0% SpreadFront commission.

Every renewal also lands in your dashboard as a new paid order (and counts in your store analytics), so your order history shows recurring revenue without opening Stripe.

Rules to know:

Use cases: a weekly veggie box, a coffee-refill club, a monthly membership with a digital download attached, yearly access to a workbook collection.

Your storefront

Large catalogs paginate automatically: the store shows 48 products per page (after any category, brand or search filter), with page links under the grid. Search engines index every page and every product individually, and AI shopping agents always see the full catalog regardless of pages - pagination only keeps the page fast for human visitors.

Every store lives at yourname.spreadfront.com: a real, fast, mobile-friendly website with your products in a grid, category chips, a brand filter, full-text search, product pages with photo galleries, and a shopping cart.

Currencies & languages

53 currencies: USD, EUR, GBP, RSD, BAM, MKD, CHF, SEK, NOK, DKK, PLN, CZK, HUF, RON, BGN, TRY, UAH, GEL, INR, IDR, MYR, SGD, THB, VND, PHP, KRW, JPY, CNY, HKD, TWD, AUD, NZD, CAD, MXN, BRL, ARS, CLP, COP, PEN, ZAR, NGN, KES, GHS, EGP, MAD, DZD, AED, SAR, ILS, IRR, PKR, BDT, LKR. Prices display correctly formatted for the chosen currency, and you can switch a store's currency at any time. Note: card payments support the currencies your own Stripe account can settle; a few (e.g. IRR) work for cash-on-delivery stores only.

7 storefront languages: English, Serbian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian - the whole buyer journey (storefront, cart, checkout, buyer emails) runs in the language you pick per store in settings (one at a time), while your product texts stay exactly as written in the sheet. On the Pro plan, the storefront additionally shows a buyer-facing language switcher: you set the default, and each visitor can flip the store chrome to any of the 7 languages - a Swiss shop can genuinely serve German, French and Italian buyers at once.

Your own domain

Connect the www name, redirect the bare name. If you connect www.yourshop.com, also set up a redirect from the bare yourshop.com to it at your DNS host or registrar (usually called "URL forwarding" or "domain redirect"). People - and AI assistants - often type the address without the "www", and without the redirect that bare address goes nowhere.

On paid plans you can serve your store on your own domain (say shop.example.com) instead of the SpreadFront subdomain. In store settings, enter the domain, then add a CNAME record at your DNS provider:

The HTTPS certificate is issued automatically within minutes and the settings page shows the live status. Once active, search engines are told your domain is the store's one true address and the old subdomain redirects to it automatically, so nothing you shared before breaks.

One DNS rule to know: a bare domain (example.com without www) cannot take a CNAME record. Use www.example.com as the store domain and add your registrar's web-forwarding from the bare domain to www - every registrar offers this.

Your own pages

On paid plans, every store can have up to 10 extra pages - About us, FAQ, shipping & returns, size guides… Create them in the dashboard ("Pages"), write the content in the same Markdown as product descriptions, and they appear as links in your storefront footer (and in your sitemap for search engines).

Analytics & pixels

On the Pro plan, paste your Google Analytics ID (G-…) or Meta/Facebook Pixel ID into store settings and the snippet is injected into every storefront page - so your ad campaigns and traffic reports work exactly as on any other site. Leave the fields empty and nothing is injected. (Independent of this, your dashboard always shows SpreadFront's built-in cookieless store analytics.)

WhatsApp & Viber orders

On paid plans, enter your WhatsApp and/or Viber number in store settings (international format, digits only, e.g. 381641234567) and every buyer sees chat buttons right after ordering - on the confirmation screen for cash orders and on the thank-you page for card orders. The WhatsApp button opens your chat with the order number, items and total pre-filled; the Viber button opens your chat directly (Viber does not support pre-filled messages). Perfect for arranging delivery details where commerce lives in chat.

Look and feel

In store settings you control:

Changing your store address

You can rename your store's address (the yourshop in yourshop.spreadfront.com) any time from the store page, as long as the new name is free.

What happens to the old address depends on your plan:

Getting paid: 0% commission

SpreadFront never sits between you and your money. Several payment modes, usable together:

Use case: a jewelry maker enables both — locals pick up and pay cash, international buyers click through to her per-product Stripe links.

Important with payment links: the payment happens entirely inside Stripe/PayPal, so SpreadFront cannot know whether it succeeded. Enable customer receipts and merchant notifications in your payment provider's settings — that way both sides get an instant email from Stripe/PayPal on every successful payment, and you match it to the order number the buyer was told to mention.

Shipping fees

In settings you can define:

The cart shows buyers the running math — subtotal, shipping, total — and nudges them naturally toward the free-shipping threshold ("add one more candle and shipping is free" is one of the oldest tricks in commerce, now yours).

Shipping never applies to digital (downloadable) products: an order containing only downloads pays no shipping, and a mixed order pays shipping only because of its physical items.

Coupons

Create discount codes in the store dashboard:

Buyers type the code in the cart and see the discount immediately; the final check happens again at order time, so an expired or exhausted code can never slip through.

Use cases: a WELCOME10 code in your Instagram bio; a MAJA20 code given to an influencer with 50 maximum uses, so you can count exactly how many sales she brought; a springtime -15% that expires on the season's last day. Active coupons per store: 3 on Free, 10 on Starter, 100 on Pro.

Custom checkout fields

Ask buyers for anything your business needs, right on the checkout form: up to four extra fields, each optional or required.

Use cases: a bakery asks for "Preferred delivery time" (required); a print shop asks for "Name to engrave"; a flower shop asks for "Card message". Answers appear with the order in your dashboard, in the notification email, and in the CSV export.

Orders

Where orders live

Every order is stored safely the moment it is placed and appears instantly in your dashboard, with the buyer's details, the items, and the full price breakdown (subtotal, coupon, shipping). Orders are never written into your public product sheet: buyer names and addresses are personal data and stay private.

Order statuses

Work through orders by setting their status: new → confirmed → shipped → completed (or cancelled). This is your lightweight fulfillment tracker. Card orders arrive already marked paid; you can also set an order to paid manually — handy when a bank transfer lands.

Monthly order limits count per calendar month and reset for everyone on the 1st. On paid plans the limit is shared across all your stores - a quiet store's unused orders are available to a busy one. Abandoned card checkouts (where the buyer never completed payment) do not count against your limit.

Notifications

CSV export

One click in the dashboard downloads all orders as a CSV for Excel or Google Sheets: numbers, dates, statuses, buyers, items, discounts, shipping, totals. Handy for bookkeeping and for your accountant.

The merchant app

Your dashboard at app.spreadfront.com is an installable app:

Once installed you get a real app icon, full-screen experience, and most importantly push notifications: tap "Enable order notifications on this device" and your phone buzzes the moment an order arrives — "New order #12 · Your Store — €49.00". You can enable this on several devices (phone and laptop, for example). On iPhone, notifications require installing first — that's an Apple rule for all web apps.

Store analytics

Each store's dashboard shows a Traffic panel with the last 30 days:

Two things make this analytics unusual and worth knowing:

If you want your own tools as well, support for pasting your Google Analytics or Meta Pixel snippet is on the roadmap.

Bot protection at checkout

Checkout is protected by Cloudflare Turnstile, a privacy-friendly replacement for CAPTCHAs. Most buyers see at most a brief "verifying" moment — no traffic lights to click, no distorted text. What it prevents: automated junk orders that would flood your inbox and eat your monthly order quota. Every order in your dashboard was placed by a human.

Being found: SEO and AI readiness

This is where SpreadFront quietly outclasses the competition. Every store automatically ships with:

You don't configure any of this. It is simply how every SpreadFront store is built.

AI shopping agents (agentic commerce)

Every SpreadFront store is agentic commerce ready, on every plan. Stores register structured WebMCP tools with the browser, so AI assistants built into browsers can search your catalog, read product details (including variants), fill the buyer's cart and hand over to your normal checkout - instead of guessing at your pages. Payment is always completed by the human shopper on your checkout page, with all your payment options and bot protection intact.

There is nothing to set up: it is on by default (switch it off in store settings under "Agentic commerce" if you prefer). Agent support in browsers is rolling out - the standard is young - but stores that expose structured tools today are the ones AI assistants can already shop from. Combined with the machine-readable catalog every store serves at /products.json, a per-store /llms.txt map (the file AI assistants check first when someone pastes your store's link into a chat), and full product structured data, your store is as visible to AI assistants as it is to Google. Practical effect: a shopper can paste your store address into ChatGPT or Claude and ask "find me X under Y" - the assistant reads the catalog and answers with your product links, no setup needed, on every plan.

AI assistant endpoint (paid plans): your store also runs its own MCP endpoint at your-store-address/api/mcp - the Model Context Protocol that server-side AI assistants (Claude, ChatGPT and others) use to call external tools. Anyone can add your store's endpoint to their AI assistant as a remote MCP server; the assistant can then search your catalog and read product details directly, and hands the shopper your product and checkout links to complete the order on your storefront. In Claude, for example: Settings → Connectors → add your store's /api/mcp URL. The "Agentic commerce" switch in store settings controls both this endpoint and the browser tools; the endpoint appears within a minute of upgrading and is rate-limited against scraping.

Privacy and security

Plans and limits

Free (now): 1 store, 100 products, 100 orders per month, your address at yourshop.spreadfront.com, rich descriptions, coupons (3 active), shipping fees, custom checkout fields, order dashboard with CSV export, analytics, bot protection, the merchant app with push notifications. If your sheet has more rows than your plan's product limit, the store simply shows the first ones; nothing breaks.

When an order would exceed the monthly limit, the buyer is politely asked to try later or contact you directly — nothing breaks, and the counter resets with the new month.

Starter and Pro add more stores (3 / 10), bigger catalogs (1,000 / 3,000 products per store), higher order volumes, automatic email notifications, custom domain support (connect a domain you own - a free SSL certificate is included automatically), removal of SpreadFront branding, a multi-language storefront with buyer language switcher (Pro) and priority email support. Every paid plan starts with a 14-day free trial, and even after billing starts there is a 14-day no-questions-asked refund - 28 risk-free days in total.

Who SpreadFront fits