How stores get listed on Mahhala (and how they stay listed)

Every discovery platform eventually faces the same fork: accept everything and become a phone book, or hold a line and become worth browsing. We picked the second one, and we'd rather be specific about what that means than vague and reassuring.

So here's the whole process, start to finish.

Getting on

There are two doors.

You list your store yourself. Go to List your store, pick your country, paste your website, and we'll read the store's own public page metadata to pre-fill the name, description and logo for you. Fix whatever we got wrong, and you're done. You own the listing from the moment you create it. It does not sit in limbo waiting for someone to approve it.

You claim a store that's already here. Some stores are indexed before their owner ever hears of us. Those listings have no owner attached, and the store's actual owner can claim it. Nobody else can.

Verifying that it's really yours

Ownership is not "type the name of a store you like." There are three ways to prove it, and you only need one:

1. Email domain match. If your account email is on the same domain as the store, say you@yourshop.com for yourshop.com, and that email is verified, you're the owner instantly. Free webmail domains don't count, for obvious reasons.
2. DNS TXT record. Publish a token we give you as a TXT record on the domain. Only someone with DNS control can do that.
3. A file on your domain. Serve a token from a .well-known path on the store's own site. Only someone with server access can do that.

If a store is verified, its page carries a verification badge. If you change your account email to a different domain and that email match was the only thing verifying your store, we tell you before you save, and the store reverts to pending until you re-verify. We would rather annoy you with a dialog than quietly let an unverified listing keep a badge it no longer earns.

What we ask of a listing

Nothing exotic. Accurate information, products you actually have the right to sell, prices and availability that reflect reality, and imagery that's yours. Stores start with a cap on live listings, quality bar first and catalog size later, and you can rotate items between live, paused, and draft freely.

You can bring a team in, too: invite people by email and give them a role, so the person managing inventory doesn't need the keys to billing or the domain.

What gets a listing pulled

Any signed-in shopper can report a product or a store, and reports are confidential. We never tell the subject who filed one.

When several different people report the same thing within a short window, it's automatically hidden from discovery pending a human look. That's a circuit breaker, not a verdict. A person reviews it, and the outcome is either reinstatement or removal.

Two details worth knowing:

Hiding a store hides its products everywhere. Not just the store page: the listings come out of search too. A block that leaves the products findable and clickable isn't a block, it's a speed bump.

We don't let evidence disappear. A store under an open report can't be deleted out from under the review. That's deliberate: the easiest way to escape a moderation queue would otherwise be to nuke the account.

Reporting in bad faith, to knock a competitor down for instance, is itself a violation. The system watches the reporters as well as the reported.

Why publish all this?

Because a quality bar that nobody can inspect is just a marketing claim. If we say stores on Mahhala are vetted, you should be able to read exactly what "vetted" means and hold us to it.

Ready? List your store, or read the Help Center for the step-by-step version.