How it works

From a product URL to a published Shopify store in eight stages, in about two minutes. The merchant's part is roughly thirty seconds of tapping.

Camel is a pipeline. Each stage feeds the next, and the whole thing is built around one principle: the merchant should not have to provide anything Camel can work out for itself.

Stage 1 — Scrape the product

Paste the URL of a product page (a supplier listing, an existing store, a marketplace page). Camel opens it in a real browser, reads the title, description, price, variants, images and reviews, and turns them into structured product data. If the page is a Shopify product, Camel reads it through Shopify's own data instead.

If you already sell on Shopify, there is a second way in: connect your store and pick products from your own catalogue. Camel then builds around what you already have (see What gets published for the two modes).

Stage 2 — The questionnaire

About six questions, generated from the product itself rather than a fixed form: who is buying this, what kind of store (a single hero product, or a catalogue with collections), how much colour the design should carry, which design style, and a couple of shape questions. Each answer narrows what the later stages do. This is the persona-first part: a generic "average buyer" store is a weak store, so Camel never builds one.

Stage 3 — Brand identity

From the product and the persona, Camel picks a design style (one of eight), a colour palette, a type pairing, a store name and a voice. These become the design tokens every section of the store consumes, so the whole store is one coherent thing rather than a set of styled parts.

Stage 4 — Copy

Headlines, product descriptions, benefit sections, FAQs, reassurance copy, the lot — written for the persona, in the brand's voice, with the product's real facts. The copywriter is told what each section is for and which template it is using, so the copy fits the layout it lands in.

Stage 5 — Imagery

Camel generates product and editorial imagery from the product's own photos: clean identity shots that repeat wherever the product appears, and editorial images that give the brand a look. It never generates people.

Stage 6 — Page assembly

The store is composed from pre-built sections chosen for this product, persona and store shape: a homepage, product pages, collection pages where the catalogue has them, and the supporting pages. Camel selects, orders and populates sections; it never generates raw HTML or CSS from scratch. That is why the output is fast, consistent and mobile-safe.

Stage 7 — The editor

The generated store opens in Camel's editor, where you change it by touching it: click the headline to rewrite it, swap a section's template, switch the whole store's design style, add or remove sections, set up offers. See The editor.

Stage 8 — Publish

Connect a Shopify store and publish. Camel creates the products and uploads the images, then emits native Online Store 2.0 sections — Liquid with schemas, JSON templates and theme settings — into your own Dawn theme (work in progress). Publishing takes about a minute. The result is yours: edit it in Shopify's customizer, and nothing in it depends on Camel being installed. Details in What gets published.

Timing

Reading this with a machine? This page is also at /docs/how-it-works.md, and every page is indexed at /llms.txt.