AI store builders: how far generation gets you, and what you still have to check
A store is the hardest site type: catalogue, detail, cart, checkout, payment, back office, stock — break one link and no money arrives. Here is what generation covers and what you must verify yourself.
Why a store is the hardest kind of site
A brochure site only has to look right. A store has to work as a chain: the listing filters, the product page adds to cart, the cart edits quantities, checkout totals correctly, payment leaves and comes back, and the back office changes prices and stock.
The defining property of that chain is that one broken link equals no money. A visitor will not report "add to cart does nothing"; they close the tab. So accept a store by walking the chain, never by looking at the homepage.
How far generation actually gets you
From one specific sentence, the first version normally includes:
- Pages: homepage, catalogue, product detail, cart, checkout, order confirmation
- Data: a products table (name, price, stock, images, description) and an orders table
- Backend logic: add to cart, place order, decrement stock, order lookup
- Back office: admin login, create/edit products, order list
- Payments: reaching a real checkout and writing the result back to the order
What generation cannot decide for you
The model can write code; it cannot know your business. These stay your job:
- Real catalogue data — SKUs, prices, variants, stock, images. Never ship with sample data
- Shipping rules: thresholds, regional pricing, pickup points. Business decisions, not technical ones
- Payment eligibility: whose account receives the money, the fee, the settlement cycle
- Returns, invoices, privacy policy — the policy pages have to be true
Five things to put in the prompt
Cover these five and the first version lands much closer:
- What you sell, specifically (pet supplies, not "products")
- How many SKUs — three hero products or three hundred (this decides pagination and filters)
- The two to four actions that must work: filter, add to cart, order, track, edit prices
- Which payment methods your customers use, because it shapes the checkout page
- Who uses the back office — just you, or colleagues too
Build a pet-supply store: three featured products on the homepage, filtering by pet type and price on the catalogue, variant selection and add-to-cart on the product page, a single-column checkout, and a back office where I edit prices and stock
Add an orders page: signed-in customers see their orders and each order status (pending payment, paid, shipped)
Accept it by walking the chain
Do each step by hand. Do not judge by how the pages look:
- Add to cart: the counter changes and survives a refresh
- Order: submit delivery details and confirm the order really reaches the back office
- Payment: reach a real checkout and pay 0.01 to confirm the order flips to paid
- Back office: change a price and see it change on the storefront after a refresh
- Phone: can a visitor do all of the above on a phone? Most of them will be on one