About Shopstar
A simpler way to sell online.
We build single-page storefronts. No blog templates, no 'About Us' page builders. Just products and checkout — the way it should be.
Our story
Started after watching friends wrestle with Shopify.
Most ecommerce platforms make you build pages you'll never use. Our friends didn't need a full website — they needed a place to list products and take payments.
So we built a single-page storefront. Products at the top, checkout at the bottom, nothing in between. It turns out a lot of sellers wanted exactly that — three years later, fifty thousand of them run their business on Shopstar from Cape Town to Manila.
Stores
Beautiful, conversion-first storefronts
Merchants
Thousands of independents already selling
Global
From Cape Town to anywhere in the world
Growth
The tools creators need to scale
- Active merchants
- 50K+
- Countries served
- 15+
- Average review
- 4.9★
- Storefront uptime
- 99.99%
Our values
Three principles guide everything we build.
Less is more
Every feature has to earn its place. Most requests get a "no" because complexity compounds. The merchants who ship fast are the ones who don't fight their tools.
Revenue share, not rent
Our free tier takes a small cut of sales. If you're not selling, we're not charging. Incentives aligned. We win when you win — never before.
Ship daily
Small releases, often. We'd rather fix a bug today than batch it into next month's update. The changelog tells the story — read it; we don't skip weeks.
The road so far
From weekend prototype to global platform.
Three years, a handful of obsessive engineers, and a lot of feedback from real merchants.
Bootstrapped, profitable, independent.
2023
The first sale
Built the original one-page storefront over a weekend in Cape Town after a friend asked for a way to sell pottery without a website. Six prototypes later, it shipped.
2024
Five product types
Added bookings, memberships, digital downloads and event tickets to the platform. One storefront, every business model.
2025
Going global
Stripe + Paystack live across 15 countries. Multi-currency checkout. Local payment methods baked in by default.
2026
AI commerce
First African platform to ship the Agentic Commerce Protocol. Customers can now check out from inside ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity.
The team
Small team, big mandate.
We are deliberately small. Everyone here ships code, talks to merchants, or both.
Chris Edington
Co-founder, CEO
Spent a decade building software for African SMEs. Started Shopstar after watching too many friends abandon Shopify trials.
Amara Okonkwo
Co-founder, CTO
Payments-infrastructure engineer. Believes the best checkout is the one customers don't notice. Owns the platform from edge to database.
Daniel van der Merwe
Head of Design
Obsessed with the single-page format. Every pixel earns its place. Previously designed at one of South Africa's biggest digital agencies.
Sasha Patel
Head of Merchant Success
Ran her own e-commerce stack for eight years before joining. She knows what merchants ask before they do, and answers tickets personally.
Hiring
We're growing — engineering, design and merchant success. See open roles.
Ready when you are
Try it out — free to start.
No credit card to get going. Spin up a store, drop in some products, and see what your shop can look like in under five minutes.