Switchback is an Astro store template for outdoor, sports and technical equipment shops whose customers need to compare specifications and fit. A split photo hero leads into activity categories, a product specification sheet ordered by weight and a product grid. Product pages place key facts beside the buying options, followed by grouped specifications, size tables and field notes. The demo uses a fictional technical outdoor gear shop with a repair workshop as example content you replace. Switchback 1.0.0 costs $67 USD one-time.
Its signature feature is side-by-side comparison: shoppers select up to four products, see the lightest marked and choose to show only rows that differ. Each product page also compares its specifications with up to two others in the same category. Set compare.enabled to false in src/site.config.ts to remove the comparison feature. Extras such as the cart, search and analytics can also be switched off in site.config.ts; activity pages and size guides disappear when their content folders are empty. Use CUSTOMIZE.md and AGENTS.md to guide edits with any coding agent.
Assign a checkout link to each product or variant using Stripe Payment Links, Polar, Lemon Squeezy or Shopify. The Buy button opens the provider’s checkout, where you manage payments and orders. The optional Stripe Checkout cart lets customers buy products together and requires a server adapter and your own Stripe secret key. For this theme, cart tests used mocked Stripe only; a checkout through a server adapter and Stripe test mode was not run. Set up pricing, taxes, shipping and fulfillment with your provider, and test your checkout before publishing.
The default edition stores products, categories, activities, size tables, journal entries and pages in Markdown files. The optional EmDash edition switches with npm run emdash:setup on Node.js or Cloudflare, with menus and site settings edited in EmDash. The included EmDash edition reads products, categories, activities, size tables, journal entries and pages from EmDash and was tested with EmDash 1.1.0 on Node and locally on Cloudflare. The included photographs have CC0 source records, and the sample policies need your own text before the shop goes live.
