# PlatformDTC

> PlatformDTC is an enterprise AI commerce platform for direct-to-consumer brands operating at real volume. It covers the whole order lifecycle — storefronts and catalog, subscriptions and dunning, payments settled to the brand's own merchant accounts, multi-location inventory, returns, and destination-based fulfilment routing to third-party logistics providers — with analytics in a ClickHouse warehouse. Autonomous agents operate that system from natural language or from the Agent Gateway API; agent actions that touch money or customer data pass a scoped, idempotent, audited control plane with human approval before spend. Brands migrating from another platform are onboarded sales-led.

## Documentation

Developer and API documentation, including the Agent Gateway reference.

- [PlatformDTC Docs](https://docs.platformdtc.com/)

## Full text

The complete text of every answer and glossary page, in one request: [llms-full.txt](https://platformdtc.com/llms-full.txt)

## Data and endpoints

- [DTC AI crawler index, raw JSON](https://platformdtc.com/research/dtc-ai-crawler-index.json): every record from our brand survey verbatim, with the licence attached and permissive CORS. Free to cite with attribution; quote the collection date it carries, because these numbers move.
- [Agent readiness API](https://platformdtc.com/api/agent-readiness): POST {"url": "..."} and get back what an agent can read from that page with no JavaScript executed. Rate limited, returns checks rather than HTML.
- [agents.md](https://platformdtc.com/agents.md): what an agent can do with this site. This is not a store — there is no catalog, cart or checkout here.

## Answers

Direct answers to common questions, each with sources cited on the page. The text below is the complete answer as published — quote it and cite the URL.

### What is agentic commerce?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/what-is-agentic-commerce

Agentic commerce is commerce in which an AI agent completes steps a human shopper used to complete by hand: it reads a goal in natural language, queries merchant catalogs for real-time price and availability, compares options against stated constraints, and — where the merchant supports it — builds a cart and authorizes payment within limits the shopper set. For a merchant it is less a new sales channel than a new class of customer: one that never renders a page, never sees a promotion, and buys strictly on machine-readable data.

### ACP vs UCP vs AP2 vs MCP: which agentic commerce protocol matters?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/agentic-commerce-protocols

The four protocols named in agentic commerce solve different layers and largely compose rather than compete. MCP (Anthropic) defines how an agent discovers and calls tools. UCP (Google and Shopify) covers catalog discovery and cart construction. ACP (OpenAI and Stripe) specifies product feeds, checkout sessions and delegated payment inside an AI interface. AP2 (Google-initiated, donated to the FIDO Alliance in April 2026) proves cryptographically that a human authorized a given payment. A merchant needs discovery first, payment authorization last.

### How do you make an ecommerce store readable by AI shopping agents?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/how-to-make-your-store-ai-agent-ready

Making a store agent-readable is four pieces of work: server-render product data so price, availability and identifiers exist in raw HTML rather than after client-side rendering; mark it up with schema.org Product including offers, price, priceCurrency, availability and a GTIN or SKU; publish a discovery layer — robots.txt admitting assistant crawlers, a sitemap, and an llms.txt; and expose a programmatic quote and cart endpoint so an agent can obtain a binding price without driving a browser. The first item resolves most of the gap on its own.

### What are the latest agentic commerce statistics?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/agentic-commerce-statistics

As of Q1 2026, AI-sourced traffic to US retail sites grew 393% year over year, and AI-referred visitors converted 42% better than non-AI traffic in March 2026 — a reversal from March 2025, when they converted 38% worse. Revenue per visit from AI referrals ran 37% above non-AI traffic. Retail product pages score 66% on machine readability, the lowest of any page type. McKinsey projects agentic commerce will mediate $900 billion to $1 trillion in US retail revenue by 2030 and $3–5 trillion globally.

### What is MCP and what does it do for ecommerce?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/what-is-mcp-in-ecommerce

MCP — the Model Context Protocol, published by Anthropic — is an open specification for how an AI agent discovers what tools it can call and then calls them with typed arguments. In ecommerce it is the mechanism by which an assistant learns that your store exposes operations like "search catalog", "create draft order" or "issue refund", and invokes them directly instead of simulating a human clicking through an admin UI. The protocol carries no permission model of its own, so scoping and audit are the merchant platform's responsibility.

### Can AI agents actually run an ecommerce store?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/can-ai-agents-run-an-ecommerce-store

Agents reliably handle the read-and-draft half of store operations today: catalog work, merchandising changes, campaign drafting, analytics investigation, support triage and routine customer service. They are not reliable unsupervised on irreversible money movement — ad spend, refunds, price changes on live SKUs, bulk customer messaging. The practical division is not by task difficulty but by reversibility: an agent can be trusted with anything you can undo, and needs an approval gate on anything you cannot.

### What tools does a store’s UCP MCP endpoint expose?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/ucp-mcp-tools-list

Thirteen, on every store we measured: three for catalog (search, lookup, get product), four for carts (create, get, update, cancel), five for checkout (create, get, update, complete, cancel) and one for orders (get order). It is a complete commerce API rather than a checkout bolt-on. Listing the tools requires nothing; calling them requires the agent to present its own resolvable identity, so an anonymous request is refused.

### How do I tell whether my store already supports agent checkout?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/does-my-store-already-support-agent-checkout

Request /.well-known/ucp on your storefront domain. A JSON document naming a version and payment handlers means agents can already discover your store; a 404 means they cannot. If the first request succeeds, post a tools/list request to the MCP endpoint that document names to see the commerce tools exposed. Of 147 DTC brands checked in August 2026, 70 answered both — almost always because the platform enabled it, not the merchant.

### What payment methods can an AI agent use to check out?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/what-payment-methods-can-ai-agents-use

On the 70 DTC stores we found accepting agent checkout in August 2026, the registered payment handlers were Google Pay, a platform card handler and Shop Pay. The set is not a platform constant: three stores registered only two of the three, and the Google Pay entry carries a per-merchant identifier. What an agent can pay with therefore follows the payment methods that merchant enabled for human shoppers, inherited rather than separately configured.

### Does llms.txt actually do anything?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/does-llms-txt-actually-work

Google has said directly that it does not: John Mueller stated in June 2025 that no AI system currently uses llms.txt, comparing it to the abandoned keywords meta tag. No assistant vendor has documented reading it since, and no controlled test has shown a ranking or citation effect. Adoption is high anyway, mostly because platforms generate the file automatically. Treat it as cheap and unproven rather than as a requirement or a trick.

### What is the difference between llms.txt and robots.txt?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/llms-txt-vs-robots-txt

robots.txt states which crawlers may fetch which paths; it is a permission file that well-behaved crawlers honour voluntarily. llms.txt offers a summary of what a site is and which URL answers which question; it grants and withholds nothing. Removing robots.txt changes what crawlers are allowed to do. Removing llms.txt changes only what they are handed as a shortcut. Neither file enforces anything — enforcement happens at your edge.

### How should an ecommerce store write its llms.txt?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/how-to-write-llms-txt-for-ecommerce

Generate the file from the same data that builds your navigation and sitemaps, so it cannot drift. Open with two or three sentences on what the store sells and who it serves, then list category and key content URLs with a short description each. Keep it small. Before publishing, request the path and read what is already there — replacing a platform-generated file can remove endpoint information you did not know it contained.

### How do you get your products to show up in ChatGPT and other AI assistants?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/how-to-get-products-into-chatgpt

There is no submission form for ChatGPT and no way to buy placement — product results are organic and ranked on relevance. What determines whether an assistant surfaces your product is: structured product data an agent can parse without executing JavaScript, real-time accurate price and availability, brand facts stated consistently everywhere they appear, and third-party presence in reviews, publications and communities. The last factor weighs most and is the one you control least.

### Should an ecommerce store block AI crawlers in robots.txt?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/should-i-block-ai-crawlers-ecommerce

Block model-training crawlers if you want to; it costs nothing in search rankings or AI answer visibility. Do not block answer-engine crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot, or live agent fetches like ChatGPT-User — those are what put you in AI answers and bring referral traffic. The distinction matters because around a quarter of ecommerce and B2B SaaS sites block major LLM crawlers unintentionally, often at the CDN rather than in robots.txt.

### What is the difference between GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/gptbot-vs-oai-searchbot

They are three OpenAI agents doing different jobs. GPTBot collects content for model training — blocking it costs nothing in search rankings or AI answer visibility. OAI-SearchBot builds the search index ChatGPT answers from — blocking it removes you from AI answers. ChatGPT-User is a live fetch made on behalf of a specific person asking about you right now — blocking it turns away a customer mid-question. A merchant should block at most the first.

### How do you check whether AI crawlers are visiting your site?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/how-to-check-ai-crawler-traffic-in-server-logs

Grep your access logs for the user-agent strings of the three crawler classes and count them separately: training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, Bytespider), answer engines (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot) and live agent fetches (ChatGPT-User, Perplexity-User). Seeing zero answer-engine hits over a week is the finding that matters — it almost always means a CDN or WAF rule is refusing them before your origin ever logs the request.

### Does blocking AI crawlers hurt your Google rankings?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/does-blocking-ai-crawlers-affect-seo

Blocking model-training crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and CCBot has no effect on Google Search rankings. Google does not use those crawls; its index comes from Googlebot, a different agent. What blocking can cost you is presence in AI answers, and only if you block the wrong class — answer-engine crawlers like OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. Those two outcomes are frequently conflated, and conflating them is how a training-crawler decision accidentally removes a brand from a growing referral channel.

### How do merchants implement UCP and ACP at the same time?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/implement-ucp-and-acp-together

They are not an either-or, and most of the implementation is shared. Both require the same foundation — a machine-readable catalog with product identity, variants, and price and availability that are accurate at read time. UCP then specifies discovery and cart construction; ACP specifies the checkout session and delegated payment inside an AI interface. Build the catalog layer once, and the remaining protocol-specific work is the transaction path, which is also the part still moving.

### What is ACP, the Agentic Commerce Protocol?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/what-is-acp-agentic-commerce-protocol

ACP — the Agentic Commerce Protocol — is a specification published by OpenAI and Stripe covering how merchants expose product feeds and checkout sessions so an AI agent can complete a purchase, including delegating payment processing. Its April 2026 revision spans checkout, payment delegation, cart, feed and authentication, plus a hook letting ACP-aware agents advertise checkout capability through MCP tool discovery. Its practical centre of gravity moved to discovery during 2026 after OpenAI shut down Instant Checkout.

### What is UCP, the Universal Commerce Protocol?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/what-is-ucp-universal-commerce-protocol

UCP — the Universal Commerce Protocol — is an open standard developed by Google and Shopify that lets AI agents read merchant catalogs, retrieve real-time pricing and inventory, manage shopping carts and complete purchases. Its design goal is cross-platform reach: any conformant agent should transact with any participating merchant, rather than each assistant negotiating bilateral integrations with each retailer. For merchants the core obligation is a machine-readable catalog whose price and availability are genuinely current.

### What is AP2, the Agent Payments Protocol?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/what-is-ap2-agent-payments-protocol

AP2 — the Agent Payments Protocol — uses verifiable digital credentials and cryptographic mandates to prove that a specific human authorized a specific agent-initiated purchase, within limits they set. Announced by Google in September 2025, it addresses the question the commerce protocols leave open: how anyone later establishes that the cardholder actually consented. Google released v0.2 and donated the protocol to the FIDO Alliance on 28 April 2026, moving it out of single-vendor control.

### What are the best agentic commerce platforms in 2026?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/agent-ready-commerce-platforms-compared

There is no defensible single ranking of agentic commerce platforms, and nearly every published list places its own author at the top. Four shipped capabilities are what actually separate them: whether product data is machine-readable by default rather than via a plugin, whether an open protocol (UCP, ACP, AP2) is implemented in production rather than on a roadmap, whether agents can perform write operations through scoped credentials with an audit trail, and whether irreversible actions pass a human approval gate. Most platforms ship the first two; far fewer ship the last two.

### When should a DTC brand look for a Shopify Plus alternative?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/shopify-plus-alternative

Most brands evaluating a Shopify Plus alternative should stay on it. Replatforming is justified in four situations: your subscription or fulfilment logic has outgrown what an app-integration boundary can express reliably; per-order platform and app costs have become a material margin line at your volume; you need agents to perform write operations under scoped, audited credentials; or a required capability is structurally unavailable rather than merely awkward. Slow themes, app sprawl and reporting gaps are usually implementation problems that survive a migration.

### What should you evaluate when looking for a Recharge alternative?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/recharge-alternative

Evaluating a Recharge alternative comes down to four structural properties rather than features, which converge quickly across serious vendors. Whether stored payment credentials are portable determines whether you can ever leave without asking every subscriber to re-enter a card. Whether dunning branches on issuer decline codes determines how much involuntary churn you recover. Whether subscription state shares a database with orders and inventory determines whether you manage a permanent class of reconciliation bugs. And ownership stability now matters after the April 2026 consolidation.

### How do AI assistants decide which products to recommend?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/how-ai-assistants-choose-products-to-recommend

AI assistants rank product recommendations organically rather than through paid placement, weighing four signals: the quality of your structured product data including GTINs and schema markup, consistency of brand information across channels, content that answers shopper questions directly, and third-party authority from reviews, press and community discussion. The constraint most guidance omits is that brand-owned sites account for only 5–10% of the sources AI search draws on — affiliate content, publishers and user-generated content exceed 65% in key categories.

### What is a good ecommerce conversion rate?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/ecommerce-conversion-rate-benchmarks

Global ecommerce conversion rates sit between 1.4% and 3.0%, with wide industry variance: food and beverage converts at 4.5–6.1% while luxury and jewellery runs 0.87–1.46%. For Shopify stores the average is 1.4%, with 3.2% placing a store in the top 20% and 4.7% in the top 10%. Cart abandonment averages 70.22% globally, and the most-cited single cause is unexpected costs appearing at checkout, named by 39% of shoppers.

### How do you reduce involuntary churn on a subscription business?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/how-to-reduce-involuntary-churn

Involuntary churn is recurring revenue lost when a renewal payment fails rather than when a customer chooses to leave. It is reduced by four things in order of impact: honouring the issuer decline code instead of retrying blindly, since a hard decline will never succeed and burns network trust; enrolling cards in account updater services so expiry and reissue are handled before the charge; timing retries against the issuer's replenishment cycle rather than fixed intervals; and pre-dunning outreach before the renewal, not after the failure.

### What is dunning in subscription billing?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/what-is-dunning

Dunning is the automated process a subscription business runs after a renewal payment fails: retrying the charge on a schedule, notifying the customer, requesting an updated payment method, and eventually pausing or cancelling if recovery does not succeed. Effective dunning branches on the issuer decline code rather than applying one schedule to every failure, because a hard decline such as a closed account will never succeed on retry while an insufficient-funds decline usually will.

### What is the best subscription platform for a DTC brand?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/best-subscription-platform-for-dtc-brands

There is no single best subscription platform, but the criteria that predict long-term fit are consistent: whether you own the payment credential or the vendor does, how deeply dunning branches on decline codes, whether subscription state lives in the same system as orders and inventory or is synced across an integration boundary, and what migrating away would cost. Feature checklists converge quickly between vendors; those four structural properties do not, and they determine your options later.

### How do you migrate an ecommerce store to a new platform without losing revenue?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/how-to-migrate-ecommerce-platform

Ecommerce migrations lose revenue in three places, and the storefront is not one of them. URL structure changes destroy accumulated search equity unless every old path 301-redirects to its new equivalent. Stored payment credentials frequently cannot move between platforms, which forces active subscribers to re-enter cards and permanently loses a share of them. And subscription state — next bill date, plan, discount history — is the hardest data to reconcile. Sequence the migration so each of these is proven before anything is cut over.

### What is a good subscription churn rate for a DTC brand?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/subscription-churn-rate-benchmarks

Average monthly churn for DTC subscription ecommerce in 2026 runs 6.5% to 8.5%. Below 7% is good and below 5% is top-quartile. Category matters substantially: supplements and consumables run 5–8%, coffee 5–10%, pet 6–10%, meal kits 8–15%, beauty boxes 8–14%. The more useful number is the split — involuntary churn from failed payments is typically 25–40% of the total, and unlike voluntary churn it is a payments-infrastructure problem with a technical fix.

### Which subscription metrics should a DTC brand actually track?
https://platformdtc.com/answers/subscription-metrics-to-track

The subscription metrics worth a standing report are cohort retention curves, contribution-margin LTV, the voluntary/involuntary churn split, and payment authorization rate. Each one changes a specific decision. The widely-tracked metrics that most often mislead are blended churn, which averages cohorts behaving nothing alike; gross-revenue LTV, which flatters thin-margin subscriptions; and conversion rate, which moves with traffic mix as much as with anything you control.

## Glossary

Definitions of commerce and agentic-commerce terms.

- **Agentic commerce** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/agentic-commerce): Agentic commerce is commerce where an AI agent, acting on a shopper's instructions, performs the discovery, comparison and purchase steps a person would otherwise do by hand.
- **ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol)** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/acp): ACP is a specification from OpenAI and Stripe defining how merchants expose product feeds and checkout sessions so an AI agent can complete a purchase.
- **UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol)** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/ucp): UCP is an open standard from Google and Shopify that lets AI agents read merchant catalogs, retrieve live pricing and inventory, manage carts and complete purchases.
- **AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol)** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/ap2): AP2 is a payment-authorization protocol using verifiable credentials and cryptographic mandates to prove a human authorized a specific agent-initiated purchase.
- **MCP (Model Context Protocol)** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/mcp): MCP is an open specification published by Anthropic that standardises how an AI agent discovers the tools a system exposes and calls them with typed arguments.
- **Machine-readable catalog** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/machine-readable-catalog): A machine-readable catalog is product data exposed so price, availability, variant and identifier can be parsed reliably without executing JavaScript or reading a layout.
- **Structured data** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/structured-data): Structured data is machine-parsable markup — usually schema.org vocabulary in JSON-LD — that states facts about a page explicitly rather than leaving them to be inferred.
- **llms.txt** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/llms-txt): llms.txt is a convention placing a markdown file at a site's root that summarises what the site is and which URL answers which question, so assistants need not crawl it all.
- **AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/aeo): AEO is the practice of structuring content so that AI assistants quote it and cite the source, as distinct from optimising for a ranked list of blue links.
- **GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/geo): GEO is the practice of making a brand and its claims present, consistent and verifiable across the sources generative AI systems draw on, not just optimising one site.
- **Agent gateway** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/agent-gateway): An agent gateway is the control plane through which AI agents act on a live system, enforcing scopes, idempotency, audit logging and human approval on irreversible actions.
- **Idempotency key** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/idempotency-key): An idempotency key is a client-supplied identifier that lets a server recognise a retried request as the same logical operation, so submitting it twice takes effect once.
- **Involuntary churn** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/involuntary-churn): Involuntary churn is subscription revenue lost when a renewal payment fails and recovery attempts are exhausted, rather than because the customer chose to cancel.
- **Voluntary churn** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/voluntary-churn): Voluntary churn is subscription revenue lost because a customer actively chose to cancel, as distinct from a subscription ending due to payment failure.
- **Dunning** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/dunning): Dunning is the automated process a subscription business runs after a payment fails: retrying the charge, notifying the customer, and requesting an updated payment method.
- **Pre-dunning** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/pre-dunning): Pre-dunning is contacting a customer to update their payment method before a renewal predicted to fail, usually because the stored card expires before the next bill date.
- **Decline code** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/decline-code): A decline code is the reason an issuing bank gives for refusing a card authorization, and it determines whether retrying that card could ever succeed.
- **Account updater** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/account-updater): Account updater is a card network service that pushes reissued or renumbered card details to enrolled merchants so stored credentials keep working without customer action.
- **MIT (merchant-initiated transaction)** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/merchant-initiated-transaction): A merchant-initiated transaction is a charge submitted against a stored credential without the cardholder present, such as a subscription renewal or a retry after failure.
- **Network token** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/network-token): A network token is a card-network-issued substitute for a card number that lets a merchant charge a stored credential without holding it, and survives card reissue.
- **Payment tokenization** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/payment-tokenization): Payment tokenization is replacing card details with a reference token so a merchant can charge a stored credential repeatedly without holding the card number itself.
- **Authorization rate** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/authorization-rate): Authorization rate is the share of attempted card charges that issuers approve, and it is a direct revenue lever for any business billing on stored credentials.
- **Chargeback** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/chargeback): A chargeback is a forced reversal of a card payment initiated by the cardholder through their issuing bank rather than through the merchant.
- **Representment** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/representment): Representment is the process of contesting a chargeback by submitting evidence to the issuer that the original transaction was valid and authorized.
- **Churn rate** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/churn-rate): Churn rate is the share of subscribers or subscription revenue lost over a period, most commonly reported monthly for DTC subscription businesses.
- **Cohort retention** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/cohort-retention): Cohort retention measures what share of customers acquired in a given period are still active after each subsequent period, tracked separately per acquisition cohort.
- **LTV (customer lifetime value)** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/ltv): LTV is the total contribution a customer is expected to generate over their whole relationship with a brand, best measured net of goods and fulfilment rather than gross.
- **Contribution margin** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/contribution-margin): Contribution margin is revenue minus all variable costs of fulfilling an order — goods, processing, shipping, packaging and returns — leaving what covers fixed costs.
- **COGS (cost of goods sold)** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/cogs): COGS is the direct cost of the products sold in a period — typically unit cost plus inbound freight and duties — excluding marketing, overhead and outbound shipping.
- **AOV (average order value)** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/aov): AOV is total revenue divided by number of orders over a period, measuring how much a customer spends per transaction.
- **Abandoned checkout** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/abandoned-checkout): An abandoned checkout is a session where a shopper entered the checkout flow and provided identifying information but did not complete the purchase.
- **3PL (third-party logistics)** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/third-party-logistics): A 3PL is an external provider that stores inventory and picks, packs and ships orders on a brand's behalf.
- **Destination-based fulfilment routing** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/destination-based-routing): Destination-based fulfilment routing picks which warehouse or 3PL ships each order from the delivery address, stock and cost, rather than using a fixed default location.
- **Merchant of record** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/merchant-of-record): The merchant of record is the legal entity on the customer's statement, responsible for payment processing, tax remittance, chargebacks and compliance for a sale.
- **Prepaid subscription** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/prepaid-subscription): A prepaid subscription is one where the customer pays upfront for a fixed number of future deliveries — commonly three, six or twelve — rather than being billed at each cycle.
- **MER (marketing efficiency ratio)** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/mer): MER is total revenue divided by total advertising spend across all channels, measured at the business level rather than per campaign.
- **ROAS (return on ad spend)** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/roas): ROAS is revenue attributed to advertising divided by the spend that produced it, usually reported per campaign or channel.
- **Incrementality** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/incrementality): Incrementality is the share of conversions that happened because of a marketing activity and would not have happened without it.
- **CAC (customer acquisition cost)** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/cac): CAC is the total cost of acquiring one new customer, calculated as acquisition spend divided by new customers acquired in the same period.
- **Payback period** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/payback-period): Payback period is how long it takes for the contribution margin from a customer to recover what it cost to acquire them.
- **Attribution window** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/attribution-window): An attribution window is the period after an ad interaction during which a resulting conversion is still credited to that interaction.
- **First-party data** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/first-party-data): First-party data is information a business collects directly from its own customers and its own properties, rather than obtaining it from a third-party source.
- **Server-side tracking** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/server-side-tracking): Server-side tracking sends conversion and behavioural events to analytics and ad platforms from a merchant's own server rather than from the shopper's browser.
- **RFM (recency, frequency, monetary)** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/rfm): RFM is a segmentation method that scores customers on how recently they purchased, how often they purchase and how much they spend.
- **Win-back** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/win-back): A win-back is a campaign aimed at customers who have lapsed or cancelled, intended to restart a relationship that has already ended.
- **Replenishment subscription** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/replenishment-subscription): A replenishment subscription delivers the same consumable product on a repeating schedule matched to how quickly the customer uses it.
- **Proration** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/proration): Proration is adjusting a subscription charge to reflect a mid-cycle change, so the customer pays only for what applied during each part of the period.
- **Grace period** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/grace-period): A grace period is the interval after a failed payment during which a subscriber keeps access or continues to receive deliveries while recovery is attempted.
- **ARPU (average revenue per user)** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/arpu): ARPU is total revenue in a period divided by the number of active customers in that period.
- **Cohort** (https://platformdtc.com/glossary/cohort): A cohort is a group of customers who share a starting characteristic — most often the period in which they made their first purchase — and are then tracked together over time.

## Core

Start here — what the product is, what it costs, and what shipped recently.

- [The Autonomous AI Commerce Platform for DTC Brands](https://platformdtc.com/)
- [Blog](https://platformdtc.com/blog)
- [Pricing](https://platformdtc.com/pricing)

## Platform

Individual capabilities: storefront building, catalog, ads, marketing, checkout, fulfilment, analytics.

- [Agentic Plan - AI-Powered Commerce](https://platformdtc.com/agentic-plan)
- [Agentic Readiness - Is Your Store AI-Ready?](https://platformdtc.com/agentic-readiness)
- [Agentic Storefronts — Selling to AI Shoppers](https://platformdtc.com/agentic-storefronts)
- [Analytics and Reporting Dashboards](https://platformdtc.com/analytics)
- [Answers — Agentic Commerce and DTC Operations](https://platformdtc.com/answers)
- [Audiences — Find More Customers With Retargeting](https://platformdtc.com/audiences)
- [B2B Demo Store - B2B Built for a New Era](https://platformdtc.com/b2b-demo-store)
- [Build and Run Your Store From Any AI Tool](https://platformdtc.com/build-with-ai)
- [Add your products to any site or blog with the Buy Button](https://platformdtc.com/buy-button)
- [Checkout — Built to Convert](https://platformdtc.com/checkout-feature)
- [Compare PlatformDTC - Built for Brands at Scale](https://platformdtc.com/compare)
- [Customer Accounts](https://platformdtc.com/customer-accounts)
- [Discounts: Boost Sales with Promotions](https://platformdtc.com/discounts-feature)
- [Domains: Set up shop with the perfect domain](https://platformdtc.com/domains-feature)
- [Dropshipping and Supplier-Fulfilled Products](https://platformdtc.com/dropshipping)
- [DTC Agents — Agents That Run Your Store](https://platformdtc.com/dtc-agents)
- [DTC Pay — Checkout on Your Own Domain](https://platformdtc.com/dtc-pay)
- [Messaging — Email and SMS Marketing Campaigns](https://platformdtc.com/email-marketing)
- [Examples](https://platformdtc.com/examples)
- [Explore PlatformDTC](https://platformdtc.com/explore)
- [Find Products and Vetted Suppliers](https://platformdtc.com/find-products)
- [From First Day to First Sale](https://platformdtc.com/first-sale)
- [Flow — Automate the Work You Repeat Every Day](https://platformdtc.com/flow)
- [Forms](https://platformdtc.com/forms)
- [Fraud Prevention and Chargeback Protection](https://platformdtc.com/fraud-solutions)
- [Free Trial - Your Business Starts Here](https://platformdtc.com/free-trial-offer)
- [Fulfillment Network - Fast, Reliable Shipping](https://platformdtc.com/fulfillment)
- [Commerce Glossary — Agentic Commerce to Payments](https://platformdtc.com/glossary)
- [Inbox — Free Live Chat for Stores](https://platformdtc.com/inbox)
- [International: Grow around the globe](https://platformdtc.com/international)
- [Inventory Management](https://platformdtc.com/inventory-management)
- [Manage: Manage your growing business](https://platformdtc.com/manage)
- [Marketing Automation on Real Commerce Data](https://platformdtc.com/marketing-automation)
- [Marketing Automation Tools](https://platformdtc.com/marketing-automation-tools)
- [Markets — A Store That Fits Every Market You Sell In](https://platformdtc.com/markets)
- [Migrate to PlatformDTC: Move Your Catalog, Keep Your Revenue](https://platformdtc.com/migrate)
- [Mobile App: Run your business from your phone](https://platformdtc.com/mobile)
- [Online Store](https://platformdtc.com/online)
- [Order Management Software for Ecommerce](https://platformdtc.com/orders-feature)
- [Online Payment Gateways & Payment Providers](https://platformdtc.com/payment-gateways)
- [Payments: Accept credit cards online](https://platformdtc.com/payments)
- [POS: The point of sale built for retailers](https://platformdtc.com/pos)
- [Pre-Orders — Sell Products Before They Land](https://platformdtc.com/pre-orders)
- [Print on Demand for Brands](https://platformdtc.com/print-on-demand)
- [Product Network: Turn bounces into buyers](https://platformdtc.com/product-network)
- [DTC AI Crawler Index — Per-Brand Data](https://platformdtc.com/research/dtc-ai-crawler-index)
- [Retail: One system for online and in-store](https://platformdtc.com/retail)
- [Segmentation](https://platformdtc.com/segmentation)
- [Sell Online - Start Selling with PlatformDTC](https://platformdtc.com/sell)
- [Shipping: All the rates and tools you need](https://platformdtc.com/shipping)
- [Social: Sell more on social media](https://platformdtc.com/social)
- [Start Today - Be Selling by Tomorrow](https://platformdtc.com/start)
- [Free Plan — A Simple Store in Minutes](https://platformdtc.com/starter)
- [Subscriptions on PlatformDTC — Subscribe & Save](https://platformdtc.com/subscriptions-feature)
- [Agent Readiness Checker — Free, No Account](https://platformdtc.com/tools/agent-readiness)
- [Website Builder](https://platformdtc.com/website)

## Channels

Selling surfaces PlatformDTC publishes a catalog to.

- [Sales Channels — Sell Where People Search and Scroll](https://platformdtc.com/channels)
- [Sell on Google and YouTube](https://platformdtc.com/channels/google)
- [Marketplace Connect](https://platformdtc.com/channels/marketplace)
- [Sell on Facebook and Instagram](https://platformdtc.com/channels/meta)
- [Sell on Spotify](https://platformdtc.com/channels/spotify)
- [Sell on TikTok](https://platformdtc.com/channels/tiktok)
- [Sell on Walmart Marketplace](https://platformdtc.com/channels/walmart)
- [Sell on WordPress with PlatformDTC](https://platformdtc.com/channels/wordpress)

## Company

Company, enterprise, and partner programme information.

- [About Us](https://platformdtc.com/about-us)
- [Affiliate Program — Join. Refer. Earn.](https://platformdtc.com/affiliates)
- [Collabs: Your content, our commerce](https://platformdtc.com/collabs)
- [Collective: Sell at scale with brands you love](https://platformdtc.com/collective)
- [Contact](https://platformdtc.com/contact)
- [For Enterprise - Replatform Without a Rebuild](https://platformdtc.com/enterprise)
- [Become a PlatformDTC Partner — Build. Earn. Grow.](https://platformdtc.com/partners)
- [Plus - Enterprise eCommerce Platform](https://platformdtc.com/plus)
- [Professional Services](https://platformdtc.com/professional-services/enterprise)

## Legal

Terms, privacy, and policy documents.

- [Acceptable Use Policy](https://platformdtc.com/acceptable-use)
- [AML & Compliance Policy](https://platformdtc.com/compliance)
- [Dispute Resolution Policy](https://platformdtc.com/dispute-resolution)
- [Dropshipping Policy](https://platformdtc.com/dropshipping-policy)
- [Privacy Policy](https://platformdtc.com/privacy-policy)
- [Refund Policy](https://platformdtc.com/refund-policy)
- [Brand Owner Agreement](https://platformdtc.com/seller-terms)
- [Shipping & Delivery Policy](https://platformdtc.com/shipping-policy)
- [Terms of Service](https://platformdtc.com/terms-conditions)

## Writing

Engineering and product notes.

- [What an AI Agent Sees on Your Product Page — and Two Ways We Got It Wrong](https://platformdtc.com/blog/what-an-agent-sees): We built a free checker that reads your page the way a crawler does, with no JavaScript. It passed a 113-character bot-challenge page as healthy before it was right. Here is what it measures and why the bugs matter.
- [We Checked 30 DTC Brands’ robots.txt. None Block AI Answer Engines.](https://platformdtc.com/blog/dtc-brands-blocking-ai-crawlers): The number everyone repeats is that a quarter of ecommerce sites block major LLM crawlers. Among these 30 brands, in robots.txt, we measured zero — but four refused our request outright at the edge, where nobody audits. Since superseded by a 147-brand replication that found two who do block.
- [We Scored 23 DTC Product Pages. Machine Readability Is Almost Binary.](https://platformdtc.com/blog/product-page-readability-study): Median score 100 out of 100 — and no middle of the distribution at all. Pages either emit schema.org Product and land at the top, or emit none and sit in a narrow band below. A quarter had no Product markup, including brands you know.
- [Shopify Quietly Shipped Live Agentic Commerce to Its Whole Merchant Base](https://platformdtc.com/blog/llms-txt-adoption-study): We checked 58 DTC brands for llms.txt and found 73% have one they did not write. Then we read the generated file: it is a protocol handshake. Every Shopify store we tested answers a UCP discovery request and returns 13 working MCP checkout tools.
- [Agentic Checkout Is Already Live on Half of DTC. We Called the Endpoints.](https://platformdtc.com/blog/ucp-live-on-half-of-dtc): 31 of 58 well-known DTC brands serve a live UCP discovery document, and all 31 answer a Model Context Protocol request with 13 fully schema-d commerce tools — catalog search, cart, checkout, orders. Discovery is open; execution is gated on agent identity. Most of these brands do not know any of it is there.
- [Eight Stores Accept an Agent Checkout. Their Own llms.txt Never Says So.](https://platformdtc.com/blog/llms-txt-hides-agent-checkout): We requested /llms.txt and /.well-known/ucp on the same 58 hosts. Four stores that take a full agent checkout serve no llms.txt at all, and three that hand-wrote a careful one never mention the endpoints their store answers on. A quarter of agent-transactable stores are invisible to the audit method everyone is using.
- [We Re-Ran the Study on 147 Brands. Two of Our Numbers Were Wrong.](https://platformdtc.com/blog/147-brands-agent-commerce): 70 of 147 DTC brands serve a live agent-commerce discovery document — the headline held at 2.5x the sample. Two findings did not: some brands do block AI answer engines in robots.txt, and edge refusal is far more common than the first sample showed. The collection is a script now, so anyone can re-derive both.
- [Your Store’s agents.md Recommends a Cross-Store Shopping Skill. You Didn’t Write It.](https://platformdtc.com/blog/agents-md-shop-skill): The generated /agents.md on 57 of 147 DTC domains tells a shopping agent to recommend its user install a cross-store shopping skill. We read the skill: checkout still completes on the merchant domain, but a store that cannot take agent payments has the agent search for alternatives. And the claim that every store on the platform serves this file is false — eleven brands answer a UCP request and 404 the agents.md path.
- [Enterprise-Grade Autonomy: The Agent Gateway Security Model](https://platformdtc.com/blog/agent-gateway-security-model): The Agent Gateway is live. Here is the control plane that makes it safe to let an autonomous agent touch real budgets, real customers, and a live store — four gates on every call, and a spend gate we verified on real data.
- [Agent-Native Commerce: Introducing the PlatformDTC Agent Gateway](https://platformdtc.com/blog/agent-native-commerce): Chatbots talk. Agents act. Meet the enterprise control plane that lets autonomous agents build stores, launch ads, run marketing, and fulfill orders — safely.