A Commitment to Independent Retailers

Your brand is yours.

You control:

• Your imagery
• Your product descriptions
• Your pricing
• Your merchandising voice
• Your policies within platform guidelines

We will not alter your messaging, dilute your brand, or reduce your business to a commodity competing solely on lowest price.

Our infrastructure supports your identity — it does not replace it.

Predictability is foundational to trust.

Any change to pricing or fee structure will:

• Be communicated clearly and in advance
• Include a defined effective date
• Never be retroactive

We will not introduce hidden fees, backdoor percentage increases, or sudden structural changes designed to trap merchants.

If our pricing changes, you will know exactly what is changing and why.

MarketCroft will never require you to run discounts, flash sales, or promotional pricing.

You choose:

• If you discount
• When you discount
• How you discount

We will not pressure you into race-to-the-bottom tactics to drive short-term platform growth.

Advertising on MarketCroft is optional.

Paying for advertising may increase visibility in clearly labeled sponsored placements relevant to the customer's search. However:

• Merchants who do not buy ads will not be algorithmically buried.
• Organic ranking will not be manipulated to coerce ad spending.
• Search results will prioritize relevance, quality, and customer experience — not ad dependency.

Advertising is an enhancement tool, not a survival requirement.

MarketCroft will not develop, manufacture, or sell private-label products that compete directly with merchants on the platform.

We will not use merchant data to identify high-performing products and replicate them under a MarketCroft brand.

We exist to provide infrastructure — not to become your competitor.

Your customers remain your customers.

You retain access to:

• Order data
• Customer contact information (in compliance with applicable privacy laws)
• Transaction history relevant to your store

MarketCroft will not block you from communicating with your customers or restrict reasonable relationship-building activities.

We do not believe in creating artificial barriers between retailers and their communities.

Our policies will be:

• Written in plain language
• Publicly accessible
• Consistently enforced

We will not rely on vague enforcement standards or discretionary rule changes to manage merchants.

If a policy changes, the change will be documented and dated.

Data generated on MarketCroft will be used to:

• Improve platform performance
• Enhance customer experience
• Provide merchants with meaningful insights

We will not:

• Sell merchant-level performance data to competitors
• Use individual merchant data to undercut their business
• Exploit sensitive operational information for unrelated purposes

Aggregated, anonymized data may be used to improve the platform as a whole.

MarketCroft will prioritize thoughtful, sustainable growth over rapid scale that compromises retailer health.

We will not:

• Flood markets in ways that destabilize existing merchant ecosystems
• Incentivize race-to-the-bottom pricing wars
• Optimize solely for transaction volume at the expense of business quality

Our long-term goal is to strengthen local economies — not extract from them.

If MarketCroft fails to uphold these commitments, we will:

• Acknowledge the issue publicly
• Provide a clear remediation plan
• Implement corrective action transparently

This Compact is not marketing language. It is an operational standard.

Profitability matters. Sustainability matters. But neither will come at the expense of undermining the independent retailers who make this platform possible.