Merchandising

Merchandising is how your storefront sells: pulling the right products, reference material, and policy together to answer a buyer brief. It is the how of selling, distinct from a product, which is what gets sold. Your Merchandising Agent does the selling; merchandising is the configuration it sells by. Three Pages steer it. Each owns a different kind of fact, and all three are authored the same two ways — in chat with Apostra, or in a portable Page you can open from any MCP Apps host. Per-buyer terms remain separate in buyer instructions and buyer discounts.

​

Live managed campaigns come with Merchandising

A Media Company on a current Merchandising plan (Storefront agent, Storefront agent + Distribution, or Enterprise — Storefront agent) can create live advertisers and campaigns for its own inventory and launch them. A live campaign still passes the same source-currency, account-mapping, publisher-authorization, creative-approval, funding, standing, and seller-approval checks as any other live buy; the plan opens the capability and bypasses none of them. A Listing or Listing + Distribution plan includes sandbox campaigns only. Sandbox campaigns spend nothing and are available to every Media Company on every plan, so you can try the workflow before moving to Merchandising. An account created before plans existed keeps the live-campaign access it already had until it is placed on a plan. Accounts still on a legacy Merchandising revision that includes Custom sources keep their current access, which does not include live managed campaigns, and get them when they move to a current plan. Product Marketing material — what the industry calls a “media kit” — can supply positioning, verticals, and other merchandising context. It is source material, not a structured configuration owner, and does not replace the Listing’s coverage declaration.

​

One fact, one owner

Each fact has exactly one place it can be written. This is not a style preference — a proposed Lesson that restates a structured price, a discount, a market, or an acceptance rule is rejected, and you are told which surface owns it. The reason is drift. Lessons are seller guidance your agent reads; Playbook pricing is structured data the pricing engine enforces. If a $25 floor lived in both, the two would eventually disagree and the agent would have to choose between them mid-negotiation. Lessons may refer to Playbook pricing, the Listing, Product Marketing source material, or AI Business Rules — “lead with premium packages”, “follow the structured pricing” — but they may not restate their facts. If a rules version you saved earlier does contain such a fact, it stays readable and returns an ownershipIssues list naming the conflict. While that version is active, the conflicting lines are omitted from the copy your agent reads, and the structured surface stays authoritative. You cannot re-activate a flagged version; you save a cleaned-up one instead.

​

Versions and activation

AI Business Rules policy and Selling Settings are versioned and immutable. Lessons are proposed, then reviewed before they become active. Historical operating-instructions versions remain readable while Playbook prose retires. A version that has been saved but not activated has no effect at all. Activation is what puts a document to work, so the ordinary path is save and activate in one step — your version history never contains a half-applied update. Earlier versions remain readable for audit, and the Page lets you preview one, restore it, or reuse it as the starting point for a new version. Playbook pricing and AI Business Rules approval gates are not versioned. A save takes effect immediately.

​

What changes when you save

Merchandising configuration is not inert — each surface changes what your storefront does on the next buyer request.

• Listing changes the next discovery card buyers see on Apostra and the filtered storefront result. Its channels and accepted countries are declared coverage for a managed storefront; for a pure pass-through storefront, coverage remains upstream-owned.
• Playbook pricing changes the quote. Floors marked hard_floor are never crossed; a proposal composed after the save uses the new anchors.
• Lessons change what gets offered and how it is described after review.
• AI Business Rules policy changes which briefs are eligible. Every managed storefront applies it during product discovery; Listing pass-through storefronts apply Brief Acceptance before forwarding eligible work to their connected sales agent. Manual media-buy approval evaluates the submitted buy again before Approval Mechanics. Clearly on-policy buys auto-forward; ambiguous results, evaluator errors, and deterministic hard findings enter the human queue before any source write.
• AI Business Rules approval gates change which work needs human review. With mediaBuyApproval: manual, clearly on-policy buys auto-forward and exceptions queue; with auto, create_media_buy preserves the established auto-forward contract after the buyer has passed product discovery.

​

Reading your current configuration

Every surface is readable before and after you change it:

• Ask Apostra, or open the surface’s Page, to see the current document.
• GET /api/v2/storefront returns compositionPricing, creativeApproval, and mediaBuyApproval.
• The Brief Acceptance policy and operating-instructions endpoints return the active version, the full version history, and each version’s ownershipIssues.

​

Next steps