What it does
Hoq Shop is a store builder for one person or a small team. You get products with up to three options, collections, a cart and checkout, discount codes, gift cards, payment links and order emails sent in your store's name.
The whole store lives in one document in your Hoq Storage drive: catalog, stock, customers, orders, theme and pages. Every night it is backed up there, and once a week the newest backup is restored into a scratch copy and checked.
Card payments go through Hoq Funds to your business's own Stripe or Square account, so the money settles with you and Hoq never holds it. Card readers and Tap to Pay on Android phones work at the counter through the same Funds account.
One store can run several storefronts, each with its own domain, theme, language and price list. Orders can go to Hoq Commerce for packing and shipping, and stock can come from Hoq Commerce or Hoq Inventory.
In numbers
7theme presets, Hoq Default plus six designed themes
7storefront languages
3options per product, with a variant for each mix
30 daysa closed store's final copy is kept
2 weeksof nightly backups kept in your drive
Specifications
| Where the store lives | One document in your own Hoq Storage drive holding catalog, stock, customers, orders, theme and pages. |
|---|---|
| Who holds the money | Your own Stripe or Square account, connected in Hoq Funds. Card details never touch Hoq Shop. |
| Payment methods | Cards on a Stripe-hosted page from your own Stripe account, or on Square's payment page. Gift cards and store credit from Hoq Funds can pay all or part of an order. |
| Counter payments | Stripe card readers paired to a till, or Tap to Pay on an Android phone running the Hoq Till app, each taken as a Funds payment. |
| Moving in | Imports past orders from Shopify or WooCommerce, and copies products, photos, categories and pages from a WooCommerce store. |
| Tax | Your own rates, or Stripe Tax, with tax-included prices supported. |
| Languages | English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch per storefront. |
| Backups | Nightly backup to your drive, two weeks kept, a restore tested every week. |
| Cookies | Only the cart, the Hoq Pay sign-in and a form-protection token. No advertising or tracking cookies. |
| If credit runs out | The store is paused, shoppers see a closed page, nothing is lost, and it reopens when you top up. |
Features
94 features, all in beta. Listed from the product's feature ledger; each row shows the day it was last checked.
| A store in one file | Keeps the whole store, catalog, stock, customers, orders, theme and pages, in one file in the owner's own Hoq drive. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Set up in five steps | Walks a new owner through name, address, payments, shipping and going live. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Your stores | Opens every store a person owns or works in from one home page. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Staff by email | Lets the owner add people by email as managers or staff, with staff unable to change settings or money. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Your own domain | Serves the storefront on the owner's own domain with its own certificate. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Export and close | Hands the owner the whole store as one archive, and closes a store with a final copy kept for 30 days. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Nightly backups | Backs up every store each night and tests a restore every week. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Changes with undo | Records each edit as a change the owner can undo, and lets agents' and staff's changes wait as drafts to apply or discard. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Work in a draft | Lets the owner switch on a draft so storefront and catalog edits wait, preview the store with them, then put them live together or discard them. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Products with options | Sells products with up to three options (size, color, …) and a variant for each mix, each with its own price, SKU and stock. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Collections | Groups products by hand or by rules such as tag, type or price. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Digital downloads | Sells files that the shopper downloads after paying. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Specs and sizes | Keeps specifications, weights and dimensions on each product. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Import and export | Reads and writes the catalog as a spreadsheet, and brings over past orders from Shopify or WooCommerce. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Reviews | Collects product reviews from shoppers, shown once the owner approves them. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Gift cards | Sells gift cards that pay for later orders, alone or with a card. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Gift cards in Hoq Funds | Links the store to its business's Hoq Funds so every café's till and the website share one set of gift cards, moving the store's own cards across with their codes and balances. | Checked 2026-10-24 |
| Gift card holds | Holds a gift card's part when payment starts and takes it when the order is placed, so two tills can never spend the same money. | Checked 2026-10-24 |
| Gift cards when Funds is down | Places a paid order even if Hoq Funds cannot be reached, marks it, and takes the card's part once Funds answers. | Checked 2026-10-24 |
| Refunds by payment | Splits a refund across what paid for the order: the card or cash first and the gift card last, unless the store says otherwise. | Checked 2026-10-24 |
| Stock from Hoq Commerce | Can leave stock to Hoq Commerce, which then sets what the store may sell. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Stock from Hoq Inventory | Can leave stock to Hoq Inventory, which reads the store's orders and sets what the store may sell without undoing sales it has not seen yet. | Checked 2026-10-27 |
| Your own fields | Adds fields of the owner's own to products and variants, shown on product pages and to search engines. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
3 more in Catalog
| Records | Keeps lists of the owner's own things (makers, materials, …) that products can point to. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Tags and filters | Groups tags and lets shoppers filter listings by price, stock, options, tags and fields. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Move in from WooCommerce | Copies products, photos, attributes, categories, pages and old addresses from a WooCommerce store, safe to repeat. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Cart and checkout | Takes a shopper from cart through contact, shipping and payment, with prices and stock checked again before paying. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Card payments through Hoq Funds | Charges cards on the business's own Stripe or Square account connected in Hoq Funds, with no Hoq fee; Hoq never holds the money. | Checked 2026-11-02 |
| Sign in with Hoq at checkout | Lets a shopper fill in their details from their Hoq account in one tap, store by store, never their card. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Discount codes | Gives money or percent off, free shipping, buy X get Y, and batches of one-time codes, limited to chosen products. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Shipping rates | Prices shipping by zone, flat, by weight or by order amount, with free shipping over an amount. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Tax | Works out tax from the owner's own rates, or with Stripe Tax. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Payment links | Makes a link that sells one thing without the storefront. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Abandoned carts | Emails a reminder with a link that brings the cart back. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Subscriptions | Sells products on a schedule with a discount, renews them by card and emails the shopper before and after. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Forms on store pages | Puts a Hoq Forms form on any store page, drawn in the store's theme. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Orders | Lists orders with search, filters and a spreadsheet export. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Fulfilment by line | Marks lines shipped as they go, with tracking and a packing slip. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Refunds by line | Refunds chosen lines or shipping, returning the money through Stripe. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Order emails | Sends order, shipping and refund emails from orders@hoq.app in the store's name. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Webhooks | Sends signed notices of orders, products and stock to the owner's other systems, retried until they land. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Orders to Hoq Commerce | Sends orders to Hoq Commerce for packing and shipping, and takes the tracking back. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Seven theme presets | Starts the store's look from Hoq Default or six designed themes, each with its own colors, hosted font pair and home page. | Checked 2026-10-30 |
| Looks that hold up on any catalog | Keeps the menu to one row with the rest under More, stops card titles at two lines, shows photos whole without borders, sends sharp copies to phones and puts a placeholder where a product has no photo. | Checked 2026-10-30 |
| Card, button, nav and badge styles | Applies the theme's card (flat, bordered, shadow), button (solid, outline, pill), menu (inline, centered, stacked) and badge choices to the storefront. | Checked 2026-10-30 |
| One-row phone header | Fits the menu, store name, search and cart into one row on a phone. | Checked 2026-10-30 |
| Tidy up after moving in | Joins products that differ only by size into one product with sizes to choose, shortens long names, builds the menu from the collections, shapes tiles to the photos, lays out the home page and hides test pages, all as one draft to preview, put live or undo. | Checked 2026-10-30 |
| Product page that sells | Shows choices as buttons with sold-out ones struck through, a quantity stepper, a stock line, shipping, returns and sizing from the store's own pages, and related products. | Checked 2026-10-30 |
| Cart beside its summary | Lists the cart beside the totals and code field, with quantities that save themselves and a phone layout that fits. | Checked 2026-10-30 |
| Sections on every page | Lays out the product and collection pages from sections you add, reorder and set, like the home page, keeping the part that sells. | Checked 2026-10-30 |
| Shop by category | Shows collections as picture tiles on the home page or a collection's own sub-collections on its page. | Checked 2026-10-30 |
| Custom CSS | Takes CSS of your own for the storefront, kept to the storefront and refused with a reason if it would load or run something. | Checked 2026-10-30 |
| Free design | Lets a storefront be any page you or AI can write, layout, markup, styling, motion, while prices, stock, the cart and checkout stay the shop's own. | Checked 2026-10-30 |
| Free design with AI | Writes a whole storefront from a few sentences using your real catalog, or changes the one you have, and checks it before it is saved. | Checked 2026-10-30 |
| Free design sandbox | Runs a free design where it cannot reach the network, cookies or anything outside, so it can only show the catalog and add to the bag. | Checked 2026-10-30 |
| Back to Hoq Default | Puts a storefront with a free design back on its sections and theme in one click. | Checked 2026-10-30 |
10 more in Storefront
| Storefront check for free designs | Walks a free design like a shopper, from the home page to an open checkout, and fails it if a product cannot be found or bought. | Checked 2026-10-30 |
| Theme editor with live preview | Changes colors, fonts and home page sections and shows the storefront as it will look. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Design with AI | Turns a sentence into a theme through Hoq Intelligence, checked like a hand edit. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Pages and policies | Keeps the store's own pages, with refund, privacy and shipping policies written to start from. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Search engines | Gives each product its own address, search data and sitemap. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Shopper accounts | Lets shoppers see their orders and ask for their data or its removal. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Page blocks | Builds pages from the same blocks as the home page. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Menus | Edits header menus with dropdowns, a phone menu and footer columns; with no menu set, shows top-level collections and a footer of policy and contact pages only. | Checked 2026-10-30 |
| Blog | Publishes articles on the storefront. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Addresses and redirects | Keeps old addresses working with redirects and lists pages shoppers could not find. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Made-to-order menu | Builds items whose sizes each come with their own recipe (a 16 oz latte has 2 shots), from a shared library of choices that cost only what they add, with a size's own prices and choices a size does not offer. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Sold out now | Marks an item or a choice sold out from the console, and brings everything back at close. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Bring in a WordPress menu | Copies a menu from our earlier WordPress menu plugin into the store, safe to repeat. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| The till | Rings up at the counter on a tablet: tap size, milk and syrups in any order, send to the bar, then cash, a card reader or pay later, with staff PINs. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Card readers at the till | Takes cards on a Stripe reader with its tip screen, through the store's own Stripe account: pick a reader already on the account or pair one by its code, one per till, and a tap the till never came back for still settles its order. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Tap to Pay on a phone | Takes cards on an Android phone running the Hoq Till app instead of a reader: the tip is chosen on the till, then the customer taps their card on the phone. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Orders to the kitchen | Sends each order to Hoq Commerce the moment it is rung up, so the drink shows on the Hoq KDS screen with only what changed (Oat Milk), and the sale turns paid when the money is taken. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Say it | Turns words said or typed at the till into priced lines, asking when something is missing and never inventing. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Order ahead | Lets shoppers build drinks on their phones, choose a pickup time and pay, with no address asked. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Several storefronts | Runs more than one storefront from one store, each with its own domain, theme, menus, pages and contact address. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| What each storefront sells | Limits a storefront to chosen collections or tags, everywhere from listings and search to checkout. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Checkout rules per storefront | Sets the countries a storefront ships to, a smallest order, account-only checkout and an order note. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Languages | Shows a storefront in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese or Dutch, remembering the shopper's choice. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Translations | Translates products, collections, pages, articles, menu links and home page wording, with AI first drafts that wait to be saved. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Price lists | Keeps prices in another currency, filled from the store's prices by a rate and rounding, and charges exactly those. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Shipping in each currency | Prices shipping rates in each storefront's currency. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Prices with tax included | Shows tax-included prices and takes the tax out of them, at checkout and with Stripe Tax. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Pages and menus of its own | Lets a storefront keep its own pages and menus, drawn there in place of the store's. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Copy a storefront | Makes a draft copy of a storefront, with its own copy of the theme, pages and menus, to change without touching the original. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Preview links | Shows a storefront before it is live, or with the owner's draft, to anyone holding a link that expires and can be revoked; the preview follows every link on the page. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Test checkout | Lets anyone in a preview go through checkout to a receipt, with nothing charged, held or kept. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Ready to launch | Checks a storefront before it goes live, something to sell, shipping that reaches its countries in its currency, working menu links and home page blocks, payments, and lists what is worth a look. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Swap and retire | Puts one storefront in another's place in one step, moving its web addresses, carts and shoppers, with an exact undo; the old one sends shoppers on and is cleared away after 30 days. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
2 more in Storefronts, languages and currencies
| Booked swaps | Books a storefront to take another's place at a time in the store's clock and go back at another, checked again when the time comes, with an email if it cannot happen. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Storefront API | Lets the owner's own website or app read a storefront and start carts with a public key, checking out on Hoq's pages. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Agents in the store | Gives an agent the store's tools with a level per area, where "ask first" makes a draft for the owner. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Health checks | Checks each store and the service, and warns when something changes. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
| Help and status pages | Publishes help topics and a public status page. | Checked 2026-10-23 |
Works with
- Hoq CommerceEach order goes to Commerce the moment it is placed, and tracking comes back for the shopper's email.
- Hoq InventoryInventory reads the store's orders and sets what the store may sell.
- Hoq FundsThe store's gift cards and card payments can run through the business's Funds, shared with every till.
- Hoq KDSTill and order-ahead orders reach the kitchen screen through Commerce.
Your data
| Where it is kept | One document in your Hoq Storage drive, with nightly backups beside it. |
|---|---|
| Getting it out | The whole store as one archive, plus catalog and orders as spreadsheets. |
| If you leave | Closing takes the store offline, releases its domains and keeps a final copy for 30 days. |
APIs and standards
- JSON API: POST /api/shop/w/{key} with a Bearer key (scope shop:use)
- Signed outbound webhooks for orders, products and stock
- Storefront API with a public key for your own website or app
- MCP tools for agents, with a permission level per area
- Standard: Schema.org product data (JSON-LD)
- Standard: XML sitemaps
Pricing
Your first store is free. Each further store costs 9 credits a month, counted by the hour while it is open, from the credits on your Hoq ID account. A store you put away costs nothing. Hoq adds no fee to orders paid through Hoq Funds. Stripe or Square charges its own processing fees.
As published at https://shop.hoq.app/ (store price); hoq-shop/src/Links/FundsPayments.php sets no application fee.
Compared
| Checked 2026-11-01 | Hoq Shop | Shopify Basic | Square Online (Square Free and Plus plans) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price per month | First store free; each further store about 9 Hoq credits a month, by the hour | $39 billed monthly, $29 billed yearly1 | $0 on Square Free; $49 per location on Square Plus2 |
| Online card rate | Stripe's or Square's own rate on your own account | 2.9% + 30¢1 | 3.3% + 30¢ on Free; 2.9% + 30¢ on Plus3 |
| Platform fee per order | None on orders paid through Hoq Funds | 2% when you use a third-party payment provider1 | not published4 |
| Staff accounts | Staff by email as managers or staff | Additional staff accounts not included on Basic1 | not published2 |
| Sales channels beyond the store | Hoq Commerce channels; no social or marketplace selling in Shop itself | Social, marketplaces and AI chats included1 | Selling on search and social on Free2 |
| Where your store data lives | One file in your own drive, exportable as one archive | not published1 | not published2 |