How to Build a Custom Ecommerce Store with Thor Commerce and AI

Building a custom ecommerce storefront used to mean choosing between two uncomfortable options: start from a rigid template, or spend months rebuilding catalog, pricing, inventory, cart, checkout, and customer logic from scratch. Headless commerce changes that tradeoff. You keep a purpose-built commerce backend, but your storefront remains ordinary application code that you can shape around your brand and buying journey. In this tutorial, you will create a working custom storefront with Thor Commerce , its open-source Next.js storefront , and an AI coding agent such as Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor. You do not need to ask the agent to invent checkout logic. Instead, it works inside a typed, documented foundation that already covers product discovery, market-aware pricing, carts, checkout, payments, orders, and customer accounts. By the end, you will have: A local Next.js storefront connected to your Thor project Products and prices resolved for the correct market A persistent cart and checkout flow A safe workflow for customizing the storefront with an AI coding agent A clear path to production deployment What is Thor Commerce? Thor Commerce is a headless commerce platform for B2B, DTC, and hybrid businesses. Thor manages the commerce engine—catalog, contextual pricing, inventory, customers, carts, checkout, and orders—while you control the customer experience. The separation is straightforward: The Admin API is the control plane for trusted, server-side operations such as managing products, prices, inventory, stores, channels, customers, discounts, and orders. The Storefront API powers buyer-facing product discovery, cart, checkout, and customer account flows. Your storefront decides how those capabilities look and feel across web, mobile, portals, and other channels. Both APIs are GraphQL. Your application selects only the data it needs, and generated TypeScript types keep the storefront aligned with the schema. Thor also resolves commerce in context. The same pro