Shop Front

An aluminium shopfront, or storefront on American drawings, is the glazed face that a ground-floor business shows the street: framed glass from pavement to fascia, a door in the rhythm, and the company name above it. The system is a kit of extruded profiles, head, sill, mullions, transoms, and door frames, that a glazing contractor assembles into the elevation. We extrude shopfront and storefront sections at our facility in Indonesia, and because this product carries the most divisive name in our catalogue, the vocabulary comes first.

Shopfront or Storefront? The Split That Confuses Enquiries

This is the clearest market divide in commercial glazing. The UK, Australia, Canada, and most of Europe write shopfront, sometimes as two words, shop front. The United States writes storefront, and an American specification will not say shopfront once. The product is identical: an aluminium-framed glazing system for ground-floor commercial elevations.

Why it matters practically: international tenants, franchise fit-out manuals, and imported drawings mix the two terms constantly, and suppliers who only recognise one of them misquote the other. We read both as the same enquiry, in aluminium or aluminum to match.

What a Shopfront System Is

The anatomy is a frame doing four jobs. A sill section at the floor takes the glass's weight and keeps water out of the shop. A head section closes against the structure above, with allowance for the building to deflect without loading the glass. Mullions and transoms divide the elevation into glazing modules and carry wind load back to floor and head. Door framing interrupts the rhythm where the customers come in.

Profile depth runs around 50 to 65 mm, which is the number that defines the product class: deep enough to span a storey of wind load, shallow enough to keep sightlines slim and cost commercial.

Shopfront or Curtain Wall? Pay for the Right One

The two systems look alike from the pavement and are priced nothing alike, so this distinction saves real money. A shopfront spans a single storey, sitting on the slab and closing against the beam above; its dead load goes straight to the floor and its 50 to 65 mm profiles suit openings up to roughly storey height. A curtain wall hangs in front of the structure and runs continuously past multiple floors, with mullions of 100 mm and deeper, pressure-managed drainage, and bracketry engineered per level.

The buying rule we give every fit-out contractor: a single-storey opening specified as curtain wall is money donated to the facade industry, and a double-height void stretched out of shopfront sections is a wind-load problem wearing a discount. Match the system to the storey count, and the rest of the specification falls into place. The zone a curtain wall closes above the shopfront is covered on our spandrel page.

The Door Decides the System

Our position, formed by where shopfronts actually fail: the elevation is glass, but the product is the door. Glass panels stand still for twenty years; the door cycles hundreds of times a day, and its hinges, floor spring, and frame reinforcement take every one of those cycles. Specify the door hardware for the real traffic count, framed swing doors with continuous gearing for heavy retail, floor-spring pivots for frameless entrances, sliding leaves where the pavement is tight, and let the framing schedule follow from that choice. A shopfront quoted glass-first and door-last is a callback waiting to be scheduled.

Framed or Frameless

A framed shopfront wraps every glass edge in aluminium: the economical, forgiving default that accepts standard 6 to 12 mm glazing. A frameless storefront shows toughened 10 or 12 mm glass with no vertical metal at all, the glass fixed by patch fittings and slim head and sill channels. Frameless is not the absence of extrusion; it is the concentration of it into two horizontal lines, which is why those channels and their anchorage deserve more engineering attention, not less. For conditioned interiors, thermally broken profile variants are available where the energy specification calls for them.

Where Shopfront Systems Get Used

• Retail, the founding application, from single units to mall frontages.
• Showrooms, where the elevation is the display case.
• Restaurants and cafes, with sliding and folding leaves opening to the street.
• Banks, clinics, and offices at ground floor, where the system carries access control and heavier doors.

Specifications

Sections ship as full system schedules or as individual profiles against a cutting list.

Custom Shopfront Profiles from Indonesia

Glazing contractors and fit-out firms buy this product against an elevation, and that is how we quote it. Standard system sections ship cut-to-size; the die library covers alternative depths and glazing pockets; and a custom die can produce a proprietary profile, including specific door-jamb reinforcements and frameless channel details. Send the elevation, the door schedule, and the glass spec, and our team will reply with a profile schedule, price, and lead time from our factory and warehouse in Indonesia.

For the opaque band that closes the facade above the glazing line, see our Spandrel page.