Methodology

What is measured, how, on what schedule, and where it stops.

Adoption figures

On a fixed monthly schedule the public app marketplaces are read with a browser and the adoption figure each one publishes is recorded per app: review counts on the Shopify App Store and Wix App Market, active-install counts from the wordpress.org plugin API for WooCommerce. Each reading is stored with its date, so every app page carries a series rather than a single number. Readings are never edited after the fact; a correction is a new entry in the corrections log.

Review counts measure how many merchants bothered to write a review, which correlates with installs but is not installs. Install counts on wordpress.org are rounded bands published by the directory. Neither figure says anything about revenue or satisfaction.

Regulation coverage per app

An app is tagged with a regulation when its own listing says it addresses that rule. Tags are proposed from the listing text and approved by a person before publication. A tag means "the vendor declares coverage", never "verified to comply". No app on this site has been tested for legal sufficiency.

Native platform coverage

For each regulation and platform a status is recorded: native, partial, app needed, manual, or not applicable. The status and its note come from the platform's documentation and from direct experience shipping apps on each of the three platforms. Platforms change; each note carries the date it was last checked and is revised in place.

Regulation pages

Each rule is summarised in plain terms from the legal act and the responsible authority's guidance, with sources linked. Pages are living documents revised in place, not articles. They describe obligations in general terms and are not legal advice for any specific business.

What the data cannot tell you

• Whether an app actually makes a store compliant.
• Whether merchants who did not install an app are non-compliant. Many rules are met by hand or by a general-purpose plugin.
• Anything about apps outside the three marketplaces scanned.
• Anything with a time resolution finer than one month.

Schedule and versions

Marketplace scan: monthly. Last scan: 20 September 2026. Regulation and native-coverage pages: revised as rules change, with a dated changelog per page. A quarterly index summarising the dataset is planned; its first issue will be announced here.

Licence and citation

Data tables on this site are published under CC BY 4.0. Cite as: Mercatlas, [page title], scan of [date], mercatlas.com. Redistribution with attribution is welcome; the CSV downloads will appear alongside each table.

Corrections

Errors are corrected publicly. Send them to [email protected]. Corrections log: none yet.