Introduction & core concepts
Forma is a complete e-commerce platform built for Pakistan — your catalog, checkout, payments, shipping, and storefront design all live in one dashboard. This page covers the handful of concepts everything else builds on.
What Forma does
Forma gives you a public storefront your customers can browse and buy from, and a private dashboard where you manage everything behind it — products, orders, payments, shipping, discounts, your theme, and your team. One flat subscription (Rs 3,000/month) includes the whole platform; there are no feature tiers to unlock.
Your account and your store
When you sign up, Forma creates two things for you: an account (how you sign in, via a magic link sent to your email — no passwords) and a store (your actual shop — its name, its products, its settings). Most merchants only ever have one store, but the underlying model supports a merchant owning several.
Every store gets a free storefront address the moment it's created: {your-store}.forma.pk. You can also connect a domain you already own — see Custom domain.
Draft vs. live
A new store starts in Draft. Draft stores are fully usable in the dashboard — you can add products, set up payments, and preview your storefront exactly as customers will see it — but the public storefront URL won't accept real orders until you go live. This lets you set everything up at your own pace with zero pressure.
Once you've met the requirements on your go-live checklist, flip your store to Live from the dashboard and start accepting real orders.
Roles: who can do what
Forma separates three kinds of people:
- You (the store owner) have full access to everything — settings, billing, staff, all of it.
- Staff are teammates you invite with a specific role (Manager, Staff, Fulfillment, Marketing, Analyst, or Support) that controls exactly which parts of the dashboard they can see and change. See Staff & roles.
- Customersare the people buying from your storefront. They're never members of your organization — checkout works as a guest, and customers who create an account get order history but no dashboard access.
Money, always in PKR
Every price on Forma is Pakistani Rupees, displayed as Rs 1,299. Internally, amounts are stored as whole paisa (so Rs 1,299 is stored as 129900) to avoid rounding errors — you'll never see this in the UI, it's just how the numbers stay exact under the hood.
Where to go next