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

Retailers and ecommerce businesses: Sell wherever customers discover products

You sell physical or digital goods and want and want to make them discoverable and available for purchase wherever customers browse, including AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Meta.

1. Publish your product catalog through Stripe. Connect a structured product feed with current prices, inventory, availability, and product details. Stripe distributes the catalog to participating AI platforms without requiring a separate integration for each one. You control what you publish and maintain control over pricing and availability.

2. Publish your business profile to Stripe Directory. Directory helps agents discover your business, understand what you sell, and identify available checkout endpoints.

3. Enable agent-ready checkout. Delegated Checkout lets agents complete purchases from your catalog through a programmatic interface. The agent retrieves product, fulfillment, shipping, and payment options; presents the relevant choices to the customer; and submits the confirmed order. You remain the merchant of record, with your existing pricing, inventory, shipping, tax, refund, and dispute processes intact. Shared Payment Tokens provide a secure, time-limited payment credential scoped to your business, while Stripe Tax and Stripe Radar support tax calculation and fraud controls in the embedded flow.

4. Turn on Stripe Radar. Agentic orders have different risk patterns than conventional ecommerce. Some automated ordering is fraudulent; some is entirely legitimate and high-intent. Radar evaluates each SPT-based transaction with signals including dispute likelihood, card testing patterns, and stolen card risk, and applies your existing rules and custom logic to agentic orders. You don't need to build separate fraud review flows.

5. Complement catalog feeds with AEO. Answer engine optimization helps ensure agents accurately understand and surface your products in conversational responses, especially for AI platforms that don't directly integrate catalog feeds. Work with your SEO partner or an AEO specialist to audit how your catalog, policies, and product descriptions appear in agent responses.

6. Improve conversion from agent-referred traffic. Use Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite to optimize checkout on your website when an agent sends a customer there to make a purchase. Businesses using Stripe’s latest checkout optimizations see an average 11.9% increase in revenue. 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.

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.