Getting started
Welcome to cartonium. This guide orients you to the admin — the dashboard where you run your store day to day — and points you to the right place for everything else.
What cartonium is
cartonium is a commerce backend. You manage your catalog, inventory, orders, pricing, and more from the admin, and your storefront — the website customers actually shop on — connects to cartonium over an API.
That split is the whole idea: cartonium runs the commerce engine, and your storefront can be built on any stack. If you don't have a storefront yet, a developer can build one using the developer docs, or you can start from one of the reference storefronts.
Signing in
Open admin.litecommerce.io and use your merchant account. Password is the default sign-in method. You can also choose Email code to request a sign-in code for that same account.
If you received your first invitation, follow its link and finish setting your password before using the normal sign-in page. An email-code request does not create an account, accept an invitation, or grant access to a store.
See Sign-in troubleshooting for the full steps, missing emails, password recovery, and invitation help.
Working across multiple stores
A single account can belong to more than one store. Open the current organization's name in the admin header, then choose a store under Switch organization. The menu lists only stores that account belongs to. Confirm the selected store before editing its catalog, orders, or settings.
If you use separate merchant accounts, choose Sign in to a different account from that menu. For a missing store, ask someone who manages its team to check your membership. Sign-in troubleshooting explains both paths.
Who can do what: roles
Every teammate has a base role, and finer-grained permission groups can grant specific abilities on top of it:
| Role | What it can do |
|---|---|
| Owner | Everything, including billing and ownership transfer |
| Admin | Full day-to-day control across the store |
| Staff | Read-only by default; gains specific write access through permission groups |
Permission groups (like catalog, orders, or pricing access) let you give a Staff member exactly the access they need — no more, no less. Managing teammates and their access is covered in Team & permissions.
Your first steps
Use the dashboard's setup checklist to track progress alongside the work your store needs:
- Fill in your store profile and branding.
- Add your products and variants, then set the opening stock for the products you sell from inventory.
- Create collections to organize your products.
- Choose the checkout and customer-account experience that fits your storefront. Hosted cartonium checkout and hosted customer accounts are optional and can be adopted independently; see Checkout & customer accounts.
- Invite teammates and assign access for the work they do.
If your store will collect payments through cartonium's payment flow, connect its Stripe account and complete checkout and tax setup. The checklist's payment step follows the account's Verified status; it cannot be completed by manually ticking a box. Review the remaining checkout requirements before taking payments.
Your storefront builder can use the developer docs to connect your chosen storefront and customer experience.
Getting help
Can't find what you need here? Browse the menu for the task you're working on. For anything else, talk to us.