What is agentic commerce and how do you get your store ready for it?

For years, customers did the shopping themselves. They searched, compared options, and clicked "buy." Now, a growing number are handing over that tedious work to AI agents.

Instead of browsing dozens of websites themselves, they are simply asking an AI agent something like, "Buy the best running shoes under $100 with good arch support," and having the agent complete their purchase in seconds, without even visiting your website.

While this autonomous shopping is still in its infancy, statistics reveal 50% of shoppers are expected to use AI agents by 2030, showing its momentum.

To stay ahead of this shift, businesses need to understand how agentic commerce works and what it takes to prepare for it. This guide will cover how AI agents make purchases and the practical steps you can take to get your store ready.

What is agentic commerce?

Agentic commerce is a form of online shopping where an AI agent takes care of the entire process of shopping, from searching and comparing to checking out, acting on instructions a human gave it. It is also referred to as "aCommerce" (short form for agent-based commerce or autonomous commerce).

Here is the flow of how an AI agent works:

This is not hypothetical. It's, in fact, already being adopted by companies that are involved across the buyer's journey.

In late 2025, OpenAI added Instant Checkout to ChatGPT, letting its over 700 million weekly users buy from merchants without leaving the chat. Payment gateways like Stripe have also built specific toolkits to accept payments from AI agents.

Agentic commerce vs. Conversational and generative AI

These terms often get mixed up, so it helps to separate them based on what the AI actually does for ecommerce:

How does agentic commerce work? (At a store-owner level)

For online businesses, agentic commerce changes how products are discovered and purchased. Instead of customers manually browsing an ecommerce website, AI agents interact directly with your store's systems to complete transactions.

Product discovery

AI shopping agents don't rely on your website design, banners, or navigation menus. Instead, they access structured product information such as product catalogs, inventory availability, pricing, reviews, and shipping details through machine-readable data formats like JSON-LD and schema markup.

The opportunity here is significant. During the 2025 holiday season alone, AI-powered product discovery generated $262 billion in sales, highlighting the growing role of AI in helping shoppers find and evaluate products based on their intent.

Purchase

Once a product is selected, the AI agent communicates directly with your commerce infrastructure through agent-to-agent commerce protocols such as the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) or Agent Commerce Protocol (ACP).

An AI agent can:

• Build shopping carts automatically.

• Compare pricing and delivery options.

• Negotiate discounts or purchasing terms, if supported.

• Complete checkout and payment on behalf of the customer.

Merchant-side operations (beyond the purchase)

While the shopper's AI agent journey ends once the purchase is complete, businesses can also deploy their own AI agents to for ecommerce automation in back-end operations.

These merchant-side agents can monitor inventory levels, automatically reorder stock when supplies run low, dynamically adjust pricing based on demand and market conditions, and handle routine customer support tasks.

The protocols that make AI agents possible

For AI agents to shop on behalf of customers, they need a common way to communicate with online stores, access product information, and complete payments securely. That's where protocols come in.

Protocols can also be explained as shared rules that allow different AI agents, payment providers, and ecommerce platforms to work together, even if they were built by different companies.

Three important protocols are emerging in the agentic commerce ecosystem:

These protocols are designed to work together. For example, a shopper's AI agent can use MCP to access product information, AP2 to prove it has permission to make a purchase, and ACP to send the order and complete checkout.

NOTE: It's important to know that this ecosystem is still evolving, and new standards may emerge. For online businesses, the key takeaway is not to focus on a single protocol, but to ensure their store's product data, inventory, pricing, and checkout systems can be accessed securely by AI agents as these standards become more widely adopted.

How to get your store ready for agentic commerce

With nearly 93% of ecommerce businesses viewing AI agents as a competitive advantage, getting your store ready is no longer something to put off.

A fun fact is that optimizing for agentic commerce does not actually require heavy rebuilding. Given where the technology stands today, just three key steps cover most of what you need to do.

1. Make your online store data machine-readable

AI agents care about structured data, not flashy designs or marketing jargon. Give every product a clear title, complete attributes, accurate pricing, and well-maintained structured data.

If your product catalog is incomplete, inconsistent, or difficult to interpret, AI agents may struggle to understand and, instead, favor competitors with cleaner and more accessible data.

This goes beyond product information. Trust signals like shipping and return policies, FAQs, or customer reviews should also be optimized for AI agents to access, so they can determine whether your business is trustworthy enough to purchase from.

2. Prepare your store for agent-initiated payments

For an AI agent to complete a purchase, it must be able to access your checkout flow programmatically. This means key functions such as cart creation, pricing, shipping options, inventory availability, and order submission are accessible through APIs.

On the payment side, agentic commerce relies on tokenized credentials and delegated authorization. Instead of handling a customer's card details directly, AI agents use secure payment tokens and pre-approved spending permissions to initiate transactions on the customer's behalf.

Online store owners should ensure their ecommerce platform, payment gateway, and checkout infrastructure can support API-driven transactions, secure tokenized payments, and automate order confirmations.

3. Keep track of traffic from AI agents

As AI agents become a new source of traffic and purchases, it's important to monitor and track their interaction with your store. You can review your server logs, analytics platform, or CDN tools to identify traffic from AI agents. Many AI crawlers and agents identify themselves through user-agent strings or IP ranges, allowing you to separate them from traditional visitors and malicious bots.

You should also review your bot management and security rules. Aggressive rate limits, CAPTCHA challenges, or anti-bot systems may accidentally block legitimate AI agents from accessing product information or completing purchases.

Finally, create dedicated reports for AI-driven traffic and conversions. Tracking metrics such as referral sources, product views, cart creations, and completed orders from AI channels will help you understand which agents are driving revenue and where further optimization is needed.

Behind every AI agent is still your customer

Agentic commerce may change how purchases happen, but it doesn't change who you're selling to. An AI agent may compare products and complete purchases, but it's still acting on behalf of a real person with real preferences, expectations, and trust in your brand.

While a well-structured product catalog and an agent-friendly checkout can help you get discovered in agentic commerce, it is factors like product quality, pricing, and the customer experience that will continue to influence whether customers keep coming back.