Kona

Every live Shopify shop publishes its catalogue as plain JSON, on the same host as its storefront, with no authentication: /products.json, /collections.json, and /collections/handle/products.json. These are the files the official Liquid themes already read, served for a decade. Kona reads them at build time, from a server, and emits static HTML.

So there is no app to install, no Storefront API token, no GraphQL query, no scope to grant and no Liquid theme to edit. The only value Kona needs is SHOPIFY_STORE_URL, the address of your storefront. Sell the site to a client and you never ask for admin access. Paste the admin address by mistake and the theme converts it for you: that mistake answers 200 in HTML, so nothing else catches it.

Collections become shelves, product options become filters, and each variant keeps its own price and availability. Photographs come straight from the Shopify CDN, resized by it. The cart lives in the browser and holds three things per line: handle, variant id, quantity. At checkout those lines become a Shopify cart permalink, a native address, and the shopper lands on your checkout with your payment providers and apps. Kona never takes a payment, holds no secret and sees no card.

Three things the public JSON does not carry, and Kona does not invent. The currency, set once in the theme and confirmed against the shop by pnpm shopify:check. Exact stock quantities, so the theme says in stock or sold out, never that two are left. Ratings, which live in an app, so no aggregate rating is written at all.

Leave SHOPIFY_STORE_URL empty and Kona serves its own demo catalogue offline: eight products covering options that cross, a sale price, a sold out variant inside an available product, and overlapping shelves. Unzip, install, run: a shop is on screen before any store is connected. Then pnpm shopify:check reads a real shop in one command and reports what its public JSON answers: products, variants, whether the cart permalink responds, which currency the shop declares. It builds nothing and runs on plain Node, so a merchant can test their shop before buying the theme.

The catalogue is frozen at the moment of the build. Add a product in Shopify and it is not on the storefront until the site is built again; the same goes for a price or a variant that just sold out. That is what static HTML costs, and a page that lists only advantages is not worth reading.

The answer is a rebuild nobody has to remember: a deploy hook at your host, called by a Shopify webhook when a product changes, or a rebuild on a schedule. Kona ships neither, because both belong to your host rather than to a theme. Availability is the case to weigh hardest: between two builds the storefront can still offer a variant that has sold out, and the shopper finds out at checkout.