Out of the box, Saleor is a blank commerce engine: the right structure, but no opinion about your taxes, your brand, or your warehouse geography. The agent knows the GraphQL schema, the env files, and the storefront code — which makes it good at the unglamorous setup work that decides whether the shop feels like yours. Ten customizations worth asking for.

1. Set up taxes that match where you sell

Saleor’s flat-rate tax system combines tax classes on products with per-country rates. The agent creates the classes you need (standard, reduced, zero), sets the country rates, assigns classes to your product types, and then verifies with a real checkout query that a German customer sees the right tax on a book versus a mug. Discovering a tax misconfiguration at checkout time is worse than doing this once, deliberately.

Try: “Set up flat taxes: 20% UK VAT on the standard class, 5% reduced rate for the Books class, and show me a test checkout for a £25 book with the tax itemized.”

2. Wire up transactional email

Account confirmations and order notifications only work if SMTP is configured and the sender address is right. The agent sets the mail env vars, picks a sane default sender, and sends test messages end to end — sign-up, password reset, an order flow — until they land in a real inbox. SPF and DKIM notes included, because deliverability is half the job.

Try: “Configure SMTP with these credentials, set the sender to orders@ourshop.com, and test the full email flow — account confirmation and order confirmation — until they arrive in my inbox.”

3. Rebrand the React storefront

The storefront is a Next.js app, so the brand layer is plain code: a Tailwind theme for colors, a public folder for the logo and favicon, components for the footer and homepage copy. The agent makes the changes, rebuilds the container, and tells you which files it touched so you can tweak them later. A rebrand becomes an afternoon, not a project.

Try: “Rebrand the storefront: logo from /home/assets/logo.svg, primary color #1B4D3E, footer with our company details, and a new homepage headline. Rebuild it when done.”

4. Add attributes and a real filter

Attributes are Saleor’s way of modeling what makes your products different — roast level, material, size — declared once on the product type instead of typed per product. The agent creates the attribute with its values, attaches it to the right product type, and wires it into the storefront’s faceted filters so customers can actually use it. Attributes nobody can filter by are just decoration.

Try: “Add a Roast level dropdown (Light, Medium, Dark) to the Coffee product type and make it appear as a filter on the storefront category pages.”

5. Custom fields without forking the core

Most “can Saleor do X?” questions are metadata questions. Nearly every object — orders, checkouts, products, customers — carries free-form metadata and private metadata that flows through the API and webhooks. The agent adds your custom field (a gift message, an internal reference, a delivery note) at the right layer and shows you where it surfaces in the dashboard and in your automations. No core patches, clean upgrades.

Try: “Add a gift-message field to checkout that lands on the order as metadata, shows in the dashboard, and gets included in our packing webhook payload.”

6. Scaffold your own Saleor app

When metadata is not enough, Saleor apps are the supported extension point: an external service with an API token, permissions, and webhooks. The agent creates the app registration, stores the token in an env file, and scaffolds a small FastAPI service on the server with webhook endpoints and signature verification. From there, custom logic — packing slips, loyalty checks, anything — has a proper home instead of living in a cron script.

Try: “Create an app called packing-slip with ORDER_CREATED and ORDER_FULFILLED webhooks pointing to a small service on this server, and put the token in the env file with the right permissions.”

7. Turn on payments with Stripe

The Stripe plugin ships with Saleor core; the work is configuration and testing, not code. The agent installs your keys, enables the plugin on the right channels, and walks a sandbox order through checkout to the Stripe dashboard while you watch. Doing this carefully once beats debugging why real customers cannot pay.

Try: “Configure the Stripe plugin with my sandbox keys on the default channel and walk me through a test order so I can see the payment in Stripe.”

8. Harden the deployment

A commerce server faces the internet, so the boring settings matter: debug mode off, allowed hosts and CORS limited to your real domains, the secret key rotated since the default one came from a tutorial somewhere, and HTTPS enforced at the proxy. The agent audits the env files and the proxy config, fixes what is loose, and flags what needs a maintenance window — a key rotation logs everyone out, so it gets planned, not improvised.

Try: “Audit the API container’s environment: confirm debug mode is off, allowed hosts and CORS list only our real domains, and plan a secret key rotation for tonight with a note on what it invalidates.”

9. Configure gift cards before the holidays

Gift cards are built in — a sellable product type that issues store credit — but the shop settings decide how they behave. The agent enables them, sets your expiry policy, creates the product and a test card, and shows you where issued cards live in the dashboard. Ten minutes of setup now instead of during the December rush.

Try: “Enable gift cards with a 12-month expiry, create a $50 gift card product, and issue one to vip@example.com as a test so I can see the whole flow.”

10. Design your warehouse layout

Multi-warehouse is where Saleor’s data model earns its keep: warehouses attach to shipping zones, and checkout allocates stock from the warehouse that can serve the customer. The agent adds your warehouses, wires each to the right zones, seeds starting stock, and verifies with test checkouts from different countries that orders route where you expect. Get this right early — re-routing live stock later is tedious.

Try: “Add a warehouse in Rotterdam attached to our EU zone, move 20 units of our ten best-selling SKUs into it, and verify a German checkout allocates from Rotterdam.”

Every one of these keeps your upgrade path intact — attributes, metadata, apps, and env config are all supported surfaces, not hacks. Ask for one, review what the agent changed, and keep the list for your next server: Saleor on OpenSysLab.