Agentic Commerce
Imagine your customer’s next purchase doesn’t start with a search bar, a category page, or even your website.
Instead, it starts with an AI agent.
A customer tells their personal AI assistant they’re planning a ski trip. The agent selects the right gear, matches brands, sizes, and colors to past preferences, checks availability across merchants, places the orders, schedules delivery before 6 PM – and completes payment. The entire transaction happens without a single click, page view, or promo banner.
For retailers and marketers, this is the critical shift: your products are still being discovered, evaluated, and purchased – but your storefront may never be visited.
This isn’t a sci-fi scenario. It’s already happening.
Welcome to Agentic Commerce – a new commerce model where AI agents act as the primary interface between customers and merchants, handling discovery, comparison, and checkout on the customer’s behalf.
For brands and retailers, agentic commerce isn’t just a technology change – it’s a marketing and merchandising transformation. Success is no longer driven by on-site conversion tactics alone, but by how well your product data, content, and checkout capabilities are optimized for AI decision-makers.
What is agentic commerce?
Agentic commerce is an emerging online shopping model where AI agents take care of all shopping activities like product discovery, comparison, and checkout on behalf of a customer.
Another example, instead of browsing dozens of websites and comparing products, prices and detailed characteristics, the customer just provides simple instructions like “find a new laptop for work with 14 screen and long battery under $350” and an AI agent will handle the search, filter all relevant options and check best price and availability.
Then the customer can choose to navigate the website to review the product or ask the agent to complete the purchase without visiting the website. AI agent will collect all the shipping information, make payment and complete the checkout process itself.
What components of agentic commerce?
First of all, it is the merchant who provides products catalog available for discovery by agents. Merchants should also prepare an interface for the agent to allow shopping cart actions and checkout.
AI agents consume the catalog and discover merchant’s checkout capabilities.
Customers use their favorite AI agents to search for products and confirm purchase.
And the last one is payment gateway which should support agent-native payment options.
Who are the main players?
The leaders among AI agents are ChatGPT and Google (including Gemini and AI Search). Also, Perplexity and Copilot – also support agentic commerce already.
Amazon is not a conventional AI agent, but its shopping app supports product discovery and “buy-for-me” even for products not listed on the Amazon catalog.
PayPal and Stripe already support agentic checkout protocol. Where PayPal can also act as proxy (aggregator) for multiple AI agents.
Does SEO and traditional marketing work?
SEO and traditional marketing remains valid for non-agentic channels… Meanwhile, AI agents require a different approach.
Any on-site tools, like promo-banners, promo-rules, CTAs and cross-sells won’t work, as customers will not reach the website. Also, the role of emotion-based content will go down.
AI agents will have access to customers’ behavior and provide product recommendations based on their previous purchases and prompt history.
SEO was already aimed at machine algorithms, but it branched inside AI agents and already passed several evolution stages:
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) -> AEO (Answers Engine Optimization) -> ACO (Agentic Commerce Optimization).
- Modern CEO is a combination of the content and cross-site linking. Where the content part should be unique, well formed and looks natural.
- AEO is more focused on the structured content, broken into theses and paragraphs, or even questions and answers (FAQ sections are good examples).
- ACO is more about structures, granularity and details.
Content should be well structured with lots of detailed characteristics, it should make the product comparable – an AI agent will do a reasoning and should understand why this specific product is the best offer for the customer.
Also, AI agents should not only find the product, but also purchase it, so ACO also includes capabilities discovery. The agent should clearly understand what it can do with the product? Is it able to select shipping options? Does your payment gateway support agentic checkout?
SEO only requires search engines to navigate your website by links, ACO requires agents to use your APIs and actions.
Important information: while traditional SEO and marketing continue to work, AI is already acquiring a significant percentage of organic traffic.
What challenges of agentic commerce?
There are several challenges that will arise during this journey.
Short term: first of all you need to implement integration with AI agents. It does not require any replatforming, just some extension of your current ecommerce platform:
- Generate product feed.
- Implement cart & checkout APIs.
The main challenge here is that it requires separate implementation for each major agent. Alternatively, you can choose an aggregator (proxy) that provides access for several agents within a single implementation.
Content enrichment and data quality is the main challenge in the mid term.
Here new tools may be introduced with focus on product data, like PIM systems.
In the long term, the biggest challenge is analytics – it is hard to track customers’ behavior when they don’t even reach your website and yet current agents do not provide much guidance here.
No Time to Wait!
It is time to bring agentic commerce to your business right now.
We’ll help you implement agentic integration, connect your systems, and turn autonomous transactions into real revenue.
