# Platform API

> The Platform API is for platforms that provide payments as an embedded feature within their own application. The platform owns the payment experience — merchant

The Platform API is for platforms that provide payments as an embedded feature within their own application. The platform owns the payment experience — merchants interact with the platform's UI, and Shuttle operates in the background. Merchants have no direct relationship with Shuttle; the platform provisions and manages everything on their behalf.

This is a deep integration. The platform controls the full payment flow, creates and manages merchant instances, and accesses all payment APIs using its own credentials scoped to a specific merchant.

## Platform Endpoints

These are platform-level operations not available to individual merchants:

- **[List instances](/platforms/reference/platform/operations/listinstances/)**: search across all your merchant instances
- **[Create an instance](/platforms/reference/platform/operations/createinstance/)**: provision a new merchant
- **[Get an instance](/platforms/reference/platform/operations/getinstance/)**: retrieve a specific merchant instance
- **[Update an instance](/platforms/reference/platform/operations/updateinstance/)**: update instance configuration
- **[Delete an instance](/platforms/reference/platform/operations/deleteinstance/)**: archive a merchant (irreversible)

## Accessing the Merchant Instance API

The entire [Merchant Instance API](/platforms/reference/merchant-instance-api/) is available to platforms by scoping requests under the instance path:

```
/c/api/instances/{instance_key}/...
```

For example, to create a payment for merchant `M12345`:

```
POST /c/api/instances/M12345/payments
```

Or to list accounts:

```
GET /c/api/instances/M12345/accounts
```

Every endpoint documented in the Merchant Instance API is available this way — payments, checkouts, accounts, contracts, gateways, and more. The `instance_key` is your identifier for the merchant, as set when you created the instance.