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

Software providers: Sell services to developers and agents

You sell software such as APIs, developer tools, data, or infrastructure, and want developers and agents to find, provision, and pay for your service programmatically.

1. Publish to Stripe Directory. Publish directly to Stripe Directory so agents can find your service and understand your payment and checkout capabilities.

2. Accept machine payments. Headless agents can transact on behalf of consumers. To accept these 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.

3. Join Stripe Projects when your service requires provisioning. People and their agents can discover your service, create accounts on behalf of humans, retrieve credentials, and manage billing, all programmatically and without browser automation.

4. Protect against fraudulent agentic traffic. Legitimate agents can look similar to malicious scrapers, credential testers, and automated attack traffic. SPTs protect customers' underlying payment credentials by replacing them with scoped tokens, and Stripe Radar evaluates transaction risk for agentic purchases using the same controls you use for conventional payments.

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:

• Catalogue 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 e-commerce 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 fulfilment policy 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