Introducing Open Commerce

Open Commerce is a framework for secure, permissioned sharing of consumer purchase data across commerce.

The premise is simple. Shoppers should control their own purchase data, wherever their purchases happen, whether at a retailer, a marketplace, or a pure-play channel. They should decide which brands and apps get access to that data, and they should get better experiences in return for sharing it.

That shift carries significant implications across the ecosystem. Consumers gain real agency over their personal data and a direct role in deciding how it's used. Brands gain verified visibility into the purchases that represent most of their business, across every channel those purchases occur in. Retailers and marketplaces gain a stronger foundation for the loyalty, media, and measurement programs built on top of their platforms. And the industry as a whole moves away from fragmented workarounds and toward infrastructure designed for how modern commerce actually works.

Open Commerce is modeled on Open Banking, which transformed financial services by making permissioned, consumer-driven data sharing the default across banks, brokerages, and card issuers alike. Commerce is now positioned for a similar shift, and the case for it starts with a problem the industry has lived with for too long.

The Loyalty Exists. The Recognition Does Not.

Consumers are already loyal to most of the brands they buy. They reach for the same toothpaste, the same deodorant, the same cereal, the same snacks, the same beverages, purchase after purchase, year after year. That loyalty is real. Brands feel it in their sales every day.

What's missing is the recognition.

The shopper who has bought the same brand of shampoo for a decade gets treated the same as a first-time buyer. The household that stocks the same snack brand every week gets no acknowledgment of that relationship. The consumer making daily choices in favor of a brand has no way to be seen for it, and no way to benefit from it.

This isn't anyone's fault. It's a byproduct of how consumer commerce works. Most brands reach shoppers through distribution: Walmart, Amazon, Target, Sephora, and countless other retailers and marketplaces. The shopper's relationship is with the retailer, where they browse, check out, and come back. Brands create the product and drive the demand but don't participate in the transaction. Recognition has nowhere to land.

Brands have spent years trying to bridge that gap. QR codes on packaging. Alphanumeric codes printed under bottle caps or inside boxes. Receipt upload programs that ask shoppers to photograph and submit proof of purchase. Each of these was a reasonable response to a real constraint, but each also asks the shopper to do extra work in exchange for recognition they arguably should have received automatically. Adoption stays low. Signals stay weak. And the underlying gap stays open.

What's needed isn't another workaround. It's infrastructure.

What Open Banking Taught Us

Financial services faced a structurally similar problem a decade ago. Connecting a bank account to an app was slow and unreliable, often requiring users to manually verify small test deposits over several days. The process worked, but it kept fintech innovation bottled up and left consumers with little real control over how their financial data was accessed or shared.

Plaid and companies like it replaced that workflow with permissioned, consumer-driven account linking. What followed wasn't just a better onboarding flow. It was an entirely new category of products. Venmo, Robinhood, Credit Karma, and countless others were built on top of a shared connectivity layer that didn't exist before. "Connect your bank account" went from a novel edge case to standard consumer behavior in a handful of years.

The lesson isn't that commerce is the same as banking. It's that when consumer-permissioned data sharing becomes simple, secure, and genuinely useful, new categories of products and experiences follow. And that consumers, when given real control over their own data, will use it in ways that benefit them.

Commerce is now in a position to undergo the same shift. Consumers have been trained by a decade of Open Banking flows to expect and trust permissioned account linking. Retailers and marketplaces have modernized their digital infrastructure. Brand budgets for loyalty, retail media, and measurement have grown to the point that partial data is no longer acceptable. And the old workarounds are buckling: generative AI now makes it trivial to produce realistic fake receipts, and the economics of manual verification are collapsing as a result.

The conditions are in place. What's been missing is the infrastructure to make Open Commerce real.

Closing the Loop

That's where Subtotal comes in.

We help brands connect with their shoppers by making it possible for consumers to securely share purchase data from the retailers and marketplaces where they already shop. A shopper links their account directly inside a brand's website or app, grants permission, and their eligible purchases are recognized automatically. No codes to enter, no receipts to upload, no friction.

For the first time, the loyalty a shopper already exhibits in retail becomes something a brand can see, acknowledge, and build on. And for the first time, the shopper gets credit for behavior they were going to exhibit anyway. Recognition now has its place.

Like Plaid in financial services, Subtotal is positioned as infrastructure, not as a consumer destination. We aren't trying to own the shopper relationship. We're enabling brands, retailers, marketplaces, and developers to build on top of a shared, permissioned data layer that didn't exist before.

What Open Commerce Makes Possible

For consumers, the most important shift is control. Today, purchase data is collected and used largely without meaningful input from consumers. Open Commerce inverts that. Shoppers decide which brands get access to their purchase behavior, and they get faster rewards, more relevant engagement, and a cleaner experience in return. Less friction is the surface benefit. Real agency over personal data is the deeper one.

For brands, Open Commerce closes the recognition gap. Loyalty programs can work across every channel a shopper buys in, not just owned sites. Purchases can trigger rewards and other events automatically, wherever they occur. Lapsed customers can be re-engaged based on actual behavior rather than inferred signals. And measurement, retention, and personalization decisions can finally be grounded in a complete picture of customer activity.

For retailers and marketplaces, Open Commerce strengthens the foundation underlying retail media, measurement, and brand partnerships. Verified, permissioned purchase behavior is a more durable basis for those strategies than modeled or partial data. It also aligns retailer, brand, and consumer incentives rather than putting them in tension.

And as with Open Banking, the most consequential applications are likely the ones that are hard to predict today. Once the infrastructure exists, developers and operators will undoubtedly find uses for it that weren't obvious at the outset.

The Inevitable Shift

The gap between consumer loyalty and brand recognition isn't a problem any single workaround can fix. It's a symptom of something deeper: commerce has never had the infrastructure to support permissioned, consumer-driven data sharing at scale. Every attempt to route around that missing layer, from packaging codes to receipt uploads to modeled data, has been a partial answer to a structural question.

That gap is closing. Consumer expectations have already shifted. The technology exists. The economics of the old workarounds are collapsing. And the industries that have already made this transition have shown what happens when permissioned data sharing becomes the default: new products, new relationships, new business models, and outcomes that are better for everyone involved.

Open Commerce is how that shift happens in commerce. Subtotal is building the infrastructure to make it real. What gets built on top is the part that will matter most.