This quickstart guide translates agentic commerce into a practical starting point for AI platforms. To learn more about Stripe’s agentic commerce offerings, see our primer for agentic commerce.

AI platforms: Help consumers discover and buy in your website or AI experience

Stripe’s agentic commerce solutions support different types of AI platform use cases, including:

• LLM shopping experiences: An AI assistant helps humans find products and complete purchases in chat or another consumer-facing interface.
  
• Consumer websites that embed commerce: A website or platform can promote products, like in an on-site chatbot, and let customers complete purchases without navigating away.
  
• Headless agents buying on behalf of humans: An agent uses APIs or other programmatic flows to find, compare, and buy products or services on a person’s behalf.
  

Here’s a look at how AI platforms can get started:

1. Connect to Stripe Directory. Stripe Directory surfaces businesses that have built agent-ready interfaces. Use Directory to route your agent toward businesses with defined checkout endpoints and machine payment support, rather than relying on browser automation.

2. Build trust into your agent. If your agent needs to provision third-party software such as hosting, databases, authentication, or analytics, integrate with Stripe Projects to create accounts, retrieve credentials, and manage billing programmatically. Use Shared Payment Tokens (SPTs) to transact without exposing underlying payment credentials. Sellers can also include risk signals within an SPT, so agentic orders get the same fraud review as any other Stripe transaction.

For LLM shopping experiences and consumer platforms that embed commerce:

3. Ingest structured catalog feeds. Sign up for Stripe as an agent to receive structured product feeds from participating businesses. This gives your agent accurate prices, inventory status, availability, and product details rather than relying on web scraping or information that may be stale or incomplete. Businesses control what they publish; Stripe syncs updates in near real-time so they see current data.

4. Embed checkout with Delegated Checkout. Let consumers complete purchases without leaving your product surface. Once a consumer selects a product, your agent requests fulfillment, shipping, and payment options from the seller; presents the available choices to the consumer for confirmation; and submits the completed order. Payments use SPTs to protect customer credentials. Rather than sending a customer’s underlying payment credential, your agent sends a scoped, time-limited payment credential. The seller remains the merchant of record and continues to handle fulfillment, tax, and refunds through its existing systems.

For headless agents buying on behalf of humans:

5. Enable machine payments. To let an agent pay on a human consumer’s behalf, use the payment capability appropriate to the funding model. Link's wallet for agents authorizes an agent to make requests on behalf of a human consumer, with payment-method details wrapped in an SPT. Issuing for agents provisions virtual cards that can be wrapped in an SPT and spent by an agent. Privy wallets provide stablecoin wallets that agents can spend onchain. Stripe Crypto Onramp lets consumers fund stablecoin wallets using fiat payment methods.

6. Give your agent a funding mechanism. Before your agent can buy anything, a human needs to fund a wallet for it to use on agentic transactions. The simplest path is to integrate the Link's wallet for agents: the agent submits a spend request to the customer it's assisting. For a specific transaction, the consumer approves a spend request using their preferred payment method, and Stripe creates a one-time use card or SPT that lets the agent complete the purchase without accessing the consumer’s underlying payment credentials.

Glossary

Agentic commerce: Stripe's solution that allows businesses to sell to and through agents, making their products discoverable, giving them controls to manage fraud and enabling agentic payments.

Discovery:

• Catalog feed: Structured product data that businesses connect to Stripe to distribute their products across agents in near real-time.
  
• Stripe Directory: A universal registry for machine-ready businesses that allows agents to discover and interact with them.
  
• Stripe Projects: A developer platform that lets software providers connect structured product data to Stripe, making their software services—hosting, databases, authentication, AI, and analytics—discoverable and available to people and their agents in near real time.
  

Fraud:

• Stripe Radar: Fraud-prevention tools that help detect bot abuse so businesses can distinguish between legitimate agentic payments and fraudulent bots.
  

Checkout:

• Optimized Checkout Suite: A suite of ecommerce tools that reduce friction and improve conversion for consumers referred to a business’s website by an agent, before or instead of embedded checkout.
  
• Delegated Checkout: An API that allows agents to embed secure checkout within their AI interfaces.
  
• Machine payments: Programmatic payments that let agents pay directly for products or services without browser checkout or human approval for every transaction. Using protocols such as the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), they support machine-speed, usage-based purchases like per-request or per-session payments. They can be initiated and settled in fiat while using stablecoins for processing.
  
• Stripe Tax: A compliance solution that calculates tax in embedded checkout flows based on tax registrations, product details, customer location, and fulfillment information.
  

Payments and wallets:

• Shared Payment Tokens (SPTs): A payment primitive for agentic commerce that lets agents initiate payments with a customer's preferred payment method without exposing the underlying credentials. Scoped to a specific seller, amount, and time window.
  
• Link's wallet for agents: A machine-native way to let agents make purchases on behalf of a human without sharing the underlying payment credentials.