This quickstart guide translates agentic commerce into a practical starting point for businesses beyond retail and software. To learn more about Stripe’s agentic commerce offerings, see our primer for agentic commerce.

Businesses beyond retail and software: Prepare for agent-led discovery and transactions

Your business is in travel, hospitality, services, subscriptions, food, or another non-retail vertical. Agents are already becoming a discovery and booking surface for these categories, and that will accelerate.

1. Make your business discoverable. Publish a profile to Stripe Directory so agents can find your business, understand what you offer, and identify your available payment capabilities. Keep your website, pricing, service descriptions, availability, and policies structured and current so agents can represent them accurately. Answer engine optimization, or AEO, is often the most accessible first step for improving how a business appears in agent responses.

2. Prepare your operating data for structured commerce. Stripe is expanding beyond retail. Businesses that structure their catalog or service definitions, availability, and checkout flows now will be better positioned to adopt agent-ready integrations as support becomes available for their vertical.

3. Consider machine payments for early agentic traffic. While consumer demand in this space is still growing, businesses can prepare for a world where headless agents transact on behalf of consumers for many types of products and services. To accept these machine payments, configure PaymentIntents with Stripe, return a 402 payment required response when payment is needed, and accept payment through the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) or x402. Shared Payment Tokens (SPTs) enable users to pay with supported saved payment methods, while stablecoin flows support internet-native payment models.

6. Improve conversion for agent-referred traffic. Adopt the Optimized Checkout Suite to optimize checkout on your website when an agent sends a customer there to make a purchase. If your catalog is broad or complex, consider adding a first-party conversational agent with embedded checkout. It can help customers find the right product and buy without leaving your site.

6. Turn on Stripe Radar. Radar helps protect your business from automated fraud attempts today and provides a consistent fraud foundation as you add more agentic commerce capabilities.

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.