How can we help?

No. Mahhala is a discovery platform. We help you find independent stores and what they sell. When you click through to buy, you leave Mahhala and complete the purchase on the retailer's own site, under their terms, pricing and returns policy. We are not part of that transaction.

No. Browsing, searching, and store pages are open to everyone. An account lets you save favorites, build collections, follow people and stores, and report anything that looks wrong. Profiles and the profile directory are signed-in only.

Tap the heart on any product to save it. Everything you save lands in your My Favorites collection, which every account has and which cannot be deleted. From there you can create as many additional collections as you like. Think of them as boards: kitchen rebuild, gifts, whatever fits how you think. A product can sit in several collections at once, and un-hearting it removes it from all of them.

Yes. Any individual favorite can be marked private from the eye icon on the card in your dashboard. It stays visible to you and disappears from every stranger-facing view: the profile grid, the collection, and even the collection's cover image and item count. You can also make a whole collection private, or make your entire profile private.

Following someone means following their eye: their public collections and favorites are what you are subscribing to. Following requires an account: unlike favorites, there is no signed-out version, because a follow is a relationship with a real person on the other end. You can also favorite stores, which is tracked separately from following people.

From real engagement over a recent window: impressions, views, click-throughs to the retailer, shares, and saves. It is recalculated regularly from actual behavior. Ranking is not for sale. Retailers can pay for promoted placements, but those are always labeled “Promoted”, are chosen by product category rather than by profiling you, and never change where anything else ranks.

Usually the retailer removed it, paused it, or the store went offline. Listings mirror what the store publishes. It can also be moderation: a product or store that is under review is hidden from discovery until a human reviews it. Your saved item is not lost; it simply stops being publicly visible.

On any product card, open the ⋯ menu and choose Report. On a store page, use the ⋯ menu next to the favorite button. Reports are confidential. We never tell the subject who reported them. Enough reports from different people within a short window automatically hide the listing from discovery pending human review.

Yes, and we would love that. If there is an independent store you think belongs on Mahhala, tell us through Help Us Improve. The form opens with Request a store already selected; paste the store's link, add anything you want us to know, and we will take a look. No account needed.

Signed in, use Appearance in your settings; the choice follows you across devices. You can also set it to follow your operating system.

Both are in your account settings. Export gives you a copy of your data; deletion is permanent and removes your profile, favorites, collections, follows and uploaded files. See the Privacy Policy for what we are required to retain and for how long.

Two ways. Either list it yourself, which means picking your country, pasting your website, and we will read the Open Graph tags your site publishes, the same ones that build the preview when someone shares your link, to pre-fill the name, description, and logo. If your site does not publish them there is nothing to read, so you type those fields in yourself. Or, if your store is already indexed here without an owner, claim it from its store page. Either way you own the listing immediately; it does not sit in a queue waiting for approval.

Three methods, any one is enough. Email domain match: if your verified account email is on the store's own domain, you are verified instantly (free webmail domains do not count). DNS TXT record: publish a token we give you on your domain. File on your domain: serve a token from a .well-known path. Verified stores show a badge on their store page.

If email-domain match was the only thing verifying your store and your new email is on a different domain, we warn you before you save and the store returns to pending until you re-verify by DNS or file. Stores verified by DNS or file are unaffected.

Mahhala is curated, not exhaustive. A cap on simultaneously live listings keeps the quality bar meaningful while a store is establishing itself. You can rotate freely between live, paused and draft at any time, so the cap constrains what is visible, not what you can prepare.

One at a time from Add product: paste the product URL and press Fetch details and we will pre-fill what we can read from the page. Or in bulk from the Import menu on your inventory, using the CSV or XLSX template. Imported rows arrive as drafts so you can review before they go live. Import progress and any per-row errors appear on your store's Activity page.

Yes. Invite people by email from your store's Team page and give each one a role. A viewer sees activity and analytics only; a member manages inventory and settings; an owner-role member can do everything except be removed as the store's registered owner. Only the store owner can manage the team, the domain and API keys.

Impressions, views, click-throughs to your site, shares, and saves, with a daily trend and your best-performing products. Everything is aggregate: you see counts, never who the individual shopper was.

A promoted placement puts one of your live products into a high-visibility slot on Explore and on its category page. It is always labeled “Promoted”, it competes only for that slot, and it does not change the organic ranking of anything else. Promoted products are held to the same quality and moderation standards as every other listing.

A store hidden by moderation is removed from discovery everywhere, including product search, not just from its own page. That happens automatically when several different people report it in a short window, and it is a pause pending review, not a verdict. You will keep access to your dashboard throughout. Reviews resolve in reinstatement or removal.

Yes, from your store settings. It asks for the store name and your password, and it is permanent. One exception: a store with an open moderation report cannot be deleted until that report is resolved, so that deletion cannot be used to erase evidence. Download your store's data export first if you want a copy.

Stores must be real, claimed and verified by their actual owner. Listings must be accurate: price, availability, description, and imagery. Sellers must hold the rights to what they list and to the images they upload. Counterfeit, unsafe, illegal and deceptive listings are removed.

Counterfeit or infringing goods; prohibited or unsafe items; misleading claims, prices or availability; offensive or illegal content; spam and engagement manipulation. Repeated violations can result in the store being suspended.

Reports are confidential. We never disclose who filed one to the store or the seller. Reporting in bad faith, for example to damage a competitor, is itself a violation of our Terms of Service.

We comply with the DMCA and remove infringing material we become aware of; accounts that repeatedly infringe are terminated. The notice requirements and our designated agent are in the Terms of Service.

Yes. You must be 18 or older to hold a Mahhala account, and we ask you to confirm this when you register.

Mahhala runs no third-party advertising trackers and no cross-site analytics tags, and we never sell your personal information. Our analytics are first party and exist to run the platform, not to build advertising profiles of you. The full details are in the Privacy Policy and the Cookie Policy.

We recommend a browser that treats privacy as a default, such as Firefox, together with extensions like uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger. This short video guide explains how tools like these reduce tracking across the wider web. Mahhala works fully with all of them enabled.

No. Mahhala works fully with an ad blocker or tracker blocker enabled. You may not see promoted placements, and that is fine with us. We will never ask you to disable a privacy tool to use the site.

The Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, Cookie Policy, and Refund Policy are written in plain English and are always linked from the site footer.