A commerce engine that lives where your data lives.
One Composer package inside your Laravel app: catalog, cart, checkout, orders, reviews, payments, plus booking, classifieds and a mobile API, all executing against your own database. One control plane above it: license, capabilities, heartbeats, health. Signed traffic between them carries policy and counts. Never your rows.
It started as our own engine.
We built the first engine for our own client shops at Folowise. It held their data on our side and served it over an API. It shipped real stores, and it taught us the cost: an API hop on every page, and client data living in our house instead of theirs.
So we rebuilt it from a blank repository. The commerce logic became a package that installs into your Laravel app and writes to your database. The engine kept only governance: licenses, capabilities, signing, heartbeats, health. That is the FoloEngine you are reading about.
Everything commerce, running locally.
Each module writes to your database through a capability gate. Core modules always ship. Optional modules switch on per site when the engine grants them. Nothing here makes an API call to render a page.
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01Catalog
Products, categories, variants, brands.
A full product catalog in your own commerce_ tables: variable products, per-variant images and pricing, tags, brands, filter facets. Your storefront queries it like any local model, because it is one.
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02Cart & checkout
Snapshot pricing, atomic checkout.
Carts are token-hashed and server-owned. Prices snapshot at add time so a mid-session price change never surprises a customer. Checkout revalidates stock inside one transaction. No race window, no oversell.
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03Orders & payments
Full lifecycle, audit-logged.
Cash on delivery, CliQ and bank transfer out of the box, with manual reconciliation in your admin. Every status transition is recorded with who, when and why. Your operations team reads history, not guesses.
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04Reviews
Captured, throttled, moderated.
Customers submit from your storefront. The package validates, rate-limits and queues. You approve or reject in your own admin. Review bodies never reach the engine; it only ever learns how many are pending.
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05Inventory & recovery
Low-stock alerts, abandoned carts.
Core, not upsells. The package watches stock levels and flags abandoned carts locally, then nudges recovery on your schedule. The engine sees an open-alert count and a job-health signal, nothing more.
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06Optional modules
Bundles, promos, loyalty, and whole verticals.
Product bundles, promo codes, loyalty points, gift cards, order tracking, AI content assist, and then entire businesses: booking for stays, a classifieds marketplace, a mobile app API, dropship sourcing. Each one is a capability the engine grants per site. Granted means on. Revoked means it degrades politely, never fatally.
One license. The whole toolkit.
Twelve capabilities ship in every install and are always on. Thirty-three more switch on per site the moment the engine grants them, including three complete verticals. Here is the full set in plain language, no contract to read.
From a license key to a selling shop in four moves.
Install, connect once, run local, stay watched. The engine sits in the control path, never in the request path.
Composer in, migrations out.
composer require folowise/commerce, then commerce:install publishes config and the commerce_ migrations into your own app. Your database grows the tables. You own them from minute one.
One handshake, shown once.
We mint a license key, you run commerce:connect. The engine activates it, binds it to your site, issues a signing secret, and returns your capability matrix. The raw key is never shown again.
Every page is a local query.
Storefront and admin read your own database through the capability gate. Permission checks answer from the signed local cache, so a brief engine outage never interrupts a sale.
A pulse every 15 minutes.
Your site sends a signed heartbeat with counts and health metrics. The engine computes a health state, raises notices, and shows us a live dashboard. Watched, never touched.
What is actually inside the box.
Nothing exotic. Nothing you cannot replace at 2 a.m. The engine is a stack of well-worn primitives wired with care.
The four problems it kills.
You stop fighting someone else's CSS.
Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce: all of them hand you a template and you spend a month bending it. FoloEngine ships zero frontend opinions. Your storefront is your Laravel app, your Blade, your design system.
You stop renting access to your own data.
On platform commerce, leaving means begging for an export and praying it imports. With FoloEngine there is nothing to export. Products, orders and customers were in your database the whole time.
Your shop stops dying with someone's API.
Headless platforms put an HTTP call between every visitor and every page; one API blip and the whole shop blinks. FoloEngine lives inside your app. Pages come from your database and permission checks from a signed cache, so a brief engine outage is our dashboard problem, not your checkout problem.
You stop paying revenue share.
Shopify and BigCommerce take a percentage of every transaction. FoloEngine charges a flat fee per site. You ship more, you pay the same.
Built for the team that owns its stack.
Agencies running multiple client shops.
One package, every client site. One dashboard watching them all.
Founders launching a portfolio of brands.
Same engine in every brand. Different designs. Separate databases.
Laravel teams who refuse SaaS lock-in.
It is a Composer package. Read the source, extend the models, own it.
Operators who answer to regulators.
Data residency by construction. Your customers' rows never leave your server.
Invite only.
For now.
The engine is invite-only. No self-signup. You email us, we mint a license, you run two artisan commands, and commerce is live inside your own app the same day.
Pricing is flat per site. No revenue share, no transaction fees, no surprise platform tax. Tell us what you are building and we send a sandbox by the same evening.
Everything people ask before they license it.
Short answers, no sales voice. If yours is not here, the contact form reaches the same engineers who built the engine.
01 What is FoloEngine?
A commerce engine in two parts. A Laravel package that installs into your website and runs catalog, cart, checkout, orders, reviews and payments against your own database. And a central control plane, operated by Folowise, that manages your license, your feature grants, and your site's health. Your shop runs in your house; we govern from a distance.
02 Where does my store's data live?
In your own database, on your own server. Products, orders, customers and reviews never leave it. The engine only ever receives counts and health signals, for example "128 products, 46 orders, queue healthy". It cannot read a single row, by architecture, not by promise.
03 What happens if FoloEngine's servers go down?
Your shop rides it out. Pages are served from your own database, and the engine's permission checks answer from a signed local cache, so a brief outage on our side is invisible to your customers. If your site stays cut off from us for longer than its cache allows, the storefront pauses politely and your admin shows exactly why, instead of the shop running unlicensed. Nothing is lost: your data is in your database, and everything resumes on its own the moment the connection returns.
04 Do you take a percentage of my sales?
No. One flat license fee per site. No revenue share, no transaction fees, no platform tax. You sell more, you pay the same.
05 Can I keep my own design?
Yes, and you have to: FoloEngine ships zero frontend opinions. No theme, no template, no CSS to fight. Your storefront is your own Laravel app with your own design system. The engine gives it commerce; it never decides what a page looks like.
06 What payment methods does it support?
Cash on delivery, CliQ instant payments, and bank transfer work out of the box, with manual reconciliation in your own admin. You enable or disable methods per site without redeploying anything.
07 What do I need to run it?
A Laravel site on PHP 8.4 with any database Laravel speaks: SQLite, MySQL or Postgres. Install the package with Composer, run two artisan commands, and commerce is live the same day. If you do not have a site yet, Folowise builds the whole storefront around the engine as a full package.
08 How do I get a license?
FoloEngine is invite-only for now. Send a message through the contact page or email info@folowise.com. We reply within one business day, mint your license, and ship a sandbox the same week. The license key is shown once, then stored hashed; treat it like a password.
09 Can it run a multi-vendor marketplace?
Yes. Switch on the marketplace capability and products belong to vendors, the cart groups items by vendor, and checkout splits one basket into one order per vendor automatically. The same engine powers a single-brand shop or a full marketplace; you choose per site.
10 What growth and loyalty features are included?
Promo codes, loyalty points, gift cards, product bundles and a public order-tracking page with carrier links. Each is a capability the engine grants per site, so you turn on exactly what your store needs and nothing it does not.
11 How do customers sign in, and how are they notified?
Customers get real accounts with order history, and optional one-tap Google sign-in for a faster checkout. Notifications reach owners and customers across email, Telegram, web push, SMS and an in-app feed, each channel switched on independently.
12 Does it support Arabic and other languages?
Yes. The engine is built bilingual from the ground up, English and Arabic with full right-to-left support, and your storefront can run in either. Because the storefront is your own Laravel app, you can add more languages without waiting on us.
13 I am not technical, or I do not have a website yet. Can you still help?
Yes. That is the other half of what Folowise does. You bring the brand and the vision; we design the storefront, build it, install FoloEngine inside, and run the marketing after launch. You end up owning a complete shop and its data without writing a line of code.
14 Will I be able to see what is selling?
Yes. Turn on advanced analytics and your admin shows traffic, conversion funnels, customer journeys, campaign attribution and a weekly email digest. Like everything else, that data lives in your own database, never on the engine.
15 Can it run a booking site, like stays or rentals?
Yes. The booking vertical ships properties, destinations, live availability calendars and binding nightly quotes, with reservations linked to real orders for the money side. Hosts get their own back office, and a multi-host marketplace works the same way the multi-vendor store does. Same license, same signed engine.
16 Can it run a classifieds marketplace, like a souq site?
Yes. Members post and edit ads, a moderation queue keeps quality up, and faceted search with autocomplete keeps everything findable. When you want revenue on top, paid promotion tiers, verified badges and dealer subscriptions are built in as capabilities you switch on.
17 Can I ship a mobile app on top of it?
Yes. The mobile API capability exposes a hardened HTTP API for native iOS and Android apps: token auth, guest browsing, device carts that merge on login, catalog, checkout, orders, loyalty and profile, plus push notifications to your customers' phones. Your app talks to your own site, and the data stays in your database.