Frequently asked questions

Althemax is an AI-Commerce Hub. We bring products from independent brands, Shopify merchants and curated affiliate catalogues onto a single shopping surface that humans, marketplaces and AI agents can all use the same way.

Every merchant signs up through a vetted onboarding flow before their catalogue is listed. Stripe Connect onboarding is required before a seller can take payments through Althemax checkout, which means each seller's identity, business address and bank account have been independently verified.

You can add items from multiple sellers to a single cart and check out in one go on althemax.com using card or Apple/Google Pay through Stripe. For curated affiliate items (e.g. Amazon picks), the Buy button takes you straight to the source where you complete the purchase.

Prices auto-detect from your location and switch between GBP / USD / EUR / JPY and 10+ others. Shipping is quoted per-seller at checkout — many sellers ship internationally; the cart will tell you up front if any item can't reach your address.

Shipping costs come from each seller's published shipping policy and are shown live at checkout. The platform-wide return window is 30 days; some sellers offer longer windows on their own storefront. See /shipping and /return-policy for the full text.

No. Guest checkout is supported. Creating an account lets you save addresses, payment methods, see order history and track delivery across multiple sellers in one place.

The chat bubble in the bottom-right corner runs against the same live catalogue you can browse manually. Ask it to find something specific ('waterproof hiking jacket under £80') and it will search every seller at once and show matching products with direct buy links.

Any registered business with the right to sell its products. You can join two ways: install our Shopify channel app and your catalogue syncs in minutes, or onboard directly via Stripe Connect if you're not on Shopify.

There's a 7-day free trial on every plan. Pricing scales with active listings — see /pricing. Stripe processing fees apply at standard Stripe rates; Althemax does not add a markup on payment processing.

When a shopper checks out on althemax.com you receive the order in real time via webhook, your connected channel (Shopify / TikTok / eBay), or both. You fulfil from your existing systems — Althemax never holds your inventory.

Yes. The same catalogue is exposed through a public agent API, OpenAPI spec, .well-known files and llms.txt. LLM-powered shopping agents (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity Shop, etc.) can discover and surface your products without you doing anything extra.

Yes. The default is direct-fulfilment: the marketplace links shoppers to your storefront and you keep the customer relationship. Hosted Althemax checkout via Stripe Connect is opt-in.

Shopify (your own store as a sales channel), eBay (Sell + Trading APIs), TikTok Shop, and an Amazon affiliate import path. New channels are added quarterly — see the Channels section of the merchant dashboard for the live list.

Yes. Every product is published with structured Schema.org data, BreadcrumbList, OfferShippingDetails and MerchantReturnPolicy markup so it is picked up by Google Merchant Center, Pinterest, and AI shopping agents that read open product graphs.

Standard discovery: /.well-known/api-catalog (RFC 9727), /.well-known/agents.json, /.well-known/ai-plugin.json, /openapi.json and /llms.txt are all served from althemax.com. No registration or developer key is required to read the catalogue.

Health check, search products with filters and pagination, fetch full product detail by handle, check per-variant availability. All endpoints live under /api/agent/* and are documented in the OpenAPI spec at /openapi.json.

Read endpoints are open. Cart and checkout endpoints will require an OAuth-style token once write access is opened to agents — currently agents drop the shopper at the cart/PDP for human-completed checkout.

Yes. The agent API uses a versioned JSON shape that we explicitly preserve through internal refactors. Breaking changes are coordinated via the OpenAPI spec and a deprecation header on the affected endpoint.

Not yet. Today the surface is read-only product discovery + a deep-link to the human storefront for checkout. Agent-initiated write actions (reviews, returns, support tickets) are on the roadmap.

Althemax was designed agent-first from day one: every product carries identifiers (GTIN / SKU / master SKU), explicit shipping offers per country, an explicit return policy, and a stable canonical URL per merchant. Agents and humans hit the same catalogue, no parallel data plane.