Agentic commerce is changing how consumers and businesses discover products. It’s re-engineering the checkout experience in the process. Some agents let customers complete purchases natively within the chat interface, while others redirect to your website. Either way, you need to be ready to meet these user experience requirements—regardless of how agents handle product discovery or checkout. This creates a significant opportunity for sellers, but it also requires rethinking how to approach discovery, payments, and fraud.

Over the past 6 months, we’ve sat down with dozens of businesses preparing for agentic commerce, from SaaS startups to Fortune 500 retailers. Agentic commerce is evolving quickly, but the questions remain the same: which channels should I launch first? How do I get discovered by agents? How do I manage fraud and risk in this new channel? And how do I do all of this without building a separate integration for every new agent that launches?

This guide draws on those conversations and Stripe’s work with leading businesses getting ready to sell through agents.

Whether you’re exploring agentic commerce for the first time or refining your approach, we outline practical steps you can take to prepare your business—from aligning your organization around agentic commerce, to optimizing your catalog, to choosing the right technical partner. This guide isn’t exhaustive; rather, it covers key tactics that we’ve seen businesses implement successfully.

1. Align on what you want to achieve with agentic commerce

Agentic commerce shows up in at least three key modalities, each solving for different outcomes: conversational chat for product discoverability, in-ad shopping for conversion optimization, and first-party assistants for engagement and retention. You need to understand which goals you’re solving for with agentic commerce.

First-party agents, such as NikeAI or Ask Ralph from Ralph Lauren, are primarily about engagement. They deepen relationships with known customers, preserve brand control, and make it easier to maintain customer context like identity and preferences. Third-party agents, such as Microsoft Copilot, are largely about acquisition. They meet customers where they already are and help capture net-new demand.

Agentic in-ad shopping represents a newer opportunity, allowing agents to complete transactions directly from advertising surfaces. For example, Stripe is helping bring a new checkout experience to Facebook, where buyers can purchase products from businesses such as Fanatics and Quince in just one click—whether from a business’s website or within the Facebook app after clicking on an ad. This modality is particularly valuable for businesses focused on improving ad performance and measurement.

Our recommendation: focus on the opportunities that align with your immediate business goals—whether that’s acquisition, engagement, or conversion—rather than trying to address every modality at once. But prepare for this landscape to change quickly. As new modalities emerge and agent behaviors evolve, partnering with a vendor that can adapt alongside you and abstract away the technical complexity will become increasingly important.

2. Structure your organization around agentic commerce

Many businesses approach agentic commerce as a purely technical project, but the companies seeing the fastest progress have recognized that the real bottleneck is organizational. Siloed teams with conflicting priorities, executives who view data differently, and the absence of a clear agentic product owner can all create challenges internally.

The businesses moving fastest have realigned leadership priorities, created new roles, and changed how departments collaborate around nonhuman traffic.

• Align the C-suite around data as infrastructure. In businesses that have successfully prepared for agentic commerce, we’ve observed a common pattern: alignment between the chief information officer (CIO), chief technology officer (CTO), chief data officer (CDO), and chief marketing officer (CMO) around a fundamental shift in how data is used. These organizations have moved beyond viewing data purely as an analytics tool and started treating it as transactional infrastructure. For example, the CIO might expand their focus from internal compliance to external API availability, while the CDO might take ownership of data hygiene as a revenue function.
  
• Adjust how marketing and IT operate. Marketing teams are prioritizing structured data and clear specifications alongside persuasive storytelling. SEO teams are hiring agentic engine optimization (AEO) specialists. IT and security teams are learning to differentiate between malicious scrapers and legitimate agents, ensuring valid machine traffic gets prioritized rather than blocked.
  
• Consider hiring an agentic product manager. Leading businesses are defining a new role to own the agentic experience. These individuals typically blend API engineering with merchandising expertise. Unlike traditional PMs who own visual interfaces, agentic product managers test how agents perceive the brand, optimize machine-readable content, and monitor conversion rates of agent-driven transactions.
  

3. Ensure agents know you exist

As you prepare for agentic commerce, one of the first technical considerations is discoverability. Agents discover products differently than human shoppers; they don’t browse websites visually or click through navigation menus. Instead, they read structured data, parse text files, and rely on technical signals to understand what you sell and whether you’re open to agent traffic.

If your infrastructure isn’t configured for this kind of discovery, you risk being invisible to customers shopping through agents.

• Make sure your website welcomes agents. Check that your robots.txt file and firewall settings allow known agent crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and Google-Extended. If your business model is content itself—like news publishers or data providers—you might want to be more selective about what you expose, or consider using machine payments to license your data rather than giving it away.
  
• Optimize how agents read your content. Agents struggle with websites that rely heavily on client-side rendering, where content loads through JavaScript in the browser. They also have difficulty parsing heavy HTML pages cluttered with navigation menus and ads. Consider making your product information more accessible by rendering content server-side (so it’s immediately readable without executing code) or publishing a simple text file at your root directory—such as /llms.txt—that lists your core product categories, policies, and key information in plain language.
  

For more information on how to optimize your technical infrastructure for agentic commerce, read our technical field guide on preparing for agentic commerce.

4. Invest in product catalog feeds for agents

While product feeds are not available for all agents yet, we expect them to be an important entry point for agents to discover your products. While agents can crawl your website to gather product information, direct product catalogs ensure agents receive your product changes immediately, rather than waiting on slow, sometimes unpredictable crawling cycles. They give you precise control over launch timing, allowing you to set exact dates for when products appear on agentic surfaces. And product catalogs can help to reduce hallucinations—like if an agent were to present a broken product link—by ensuring agents get the most accurate pricing, availability, and specifications.

One challenge: different agents will likely want your data in different formats. One might need an SFTP file drop. Another might want a custom API integration. A third could have its own feed spec entirely. We’ve already seen brands reformat the same product catalog in six different ways to get listed across multiple agents, creating an ongoing maintenance burden that drains time and resources.

You can prepare by partnering with a commerce provider that can distribute your catalog anywhere. Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Suite lets you upload your catalog directly to Stripe or connect your existing syndicator. We’ll distribute your product information to each AI agent automatically.

5. Prepare for new fraud and risk patterns

Traditional fraud signals are tuned to human behavior, such as browsing patterns, typing speed, and mouse movements. Agents don’t exhibit these patterns, which means they can be misflagged as fraudulent even when they’re legitimate. At the same time, agents introduce new fraud vectors. Bad actors can manipulate agents to place risky orders, bypass normal guardrails, or exploit the speed at which agents can transact. Without the right systems in place, you risk increased chargebacks, lost revenue, and eroded customer trust.

• Build controls for unpredictable agent behavior. Agent behavior can be unpredictable, either due to bugs in the agent’s logic or how a specific agent interprets your catalog. For example, an agent might interpret a pricing rule or product attribute differently than intended. As you scale agentic commerce, you’ll want granular controls that let you respond to issues without disrupting your entire operation. This might include the ability to revoke specific payment tokens or adjust access for specific agents without affecting human shoppers.
  
• Establish policies for edge cases before they happen. Finance and legal teams should define policies for handling unusual agent-driven transactions before you launch. Let’s say an agent processes a transaction with unexpected parameters, like an unusual discount code or shipping destination. Predefined thresholds, such as automated approval for variances under $50 and manual review above that, can help your team respond consistently rather than making decisions under pressure.
  
• Use payment primitives built for agentic commerce. Many businesses are addressing these challenges with Stripe’s Shared Payment Tokens (SPTs), a payment primitive designed for AI commerce. SPTs let agents initiate payments using a buyer’s permission and preferred payment method without exposing credentials. When used on Stripe, SPTs are powered by Stripe Radar and relay underlying risk signals—including the likelihood of fraudulent disputes, card testing, stolen cards, and other fraud indicators—that help differentiate between high-intent agents and low-trust automated bots.
  

6. Assess your tech stack

As agentic commerce takes shape, the checkout experience itself is also evolving. In some cases, agents redirect customers to your website to complete transactions; in others, they enable checkout natively within the agent. This means you need to understand how to embed in agent checkouts and make sure you have a fast, optimized checkout on your own site.

The technical complexity extends beyond checkout. Each AI agent has different requirements for how they want to receive product data and process transactions. Supporting multiple agents means building and maintaining separate integrations—work that can take several months per agent, with ongoing maintenance as requirements change. It’s still unclear which modalities will dominate—embedded checkout, redirecting to a business’s checkout, or in-ad purchasing. As a result, businesses face a difficult question: what do they build for?

Look for a partner that can flex with the ecosystem. Unless you want to staff a team dedicated to tracking every protocol shift and checkout pattern, you need a partner that can abstract that complexity. This means more than just a payment processor; you need infrastructure that handles product feeds, checkout optimization, fraud protection, and protocol translation. The most proactive businesses are looking for partners that support interoperability across protocols and checkout modalities, so they can prepare once and remain compatible regardless of which direction the ecosystem moves. Stripe, for example, supports multiple protocols, including Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) and Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), and provides optimized checkout infrastructure that works whether agents redirect to your site or transact natively. This lets you build once and adapt to whatever comes next.

How Stripe can help

The Agentic Commerce Suite gets you ready to sell on AI agents by making your products discoverable, simplifying your checkout, and allowing you to accept agentic payments via a single integration. Leading brands are already onboarding to the Agentic Commerce Suite, such as URBN (including Anthropologie, Free People, and Urban Outfitters), Etsy, Ashley Furniture, Coach, Kate Spade, Nectar, Revolve, Halara, and Abt Electronics.

The Agentic Commerce Suite allows you to build once and adapt as new modalities, protocols, and agents emerge—future-proofing your business against the inevitable changes in agentic commerce.

Make your products discoverable by agents
The Agentic Commerce Suite provides dedicated hosted ACP endpoints to share near real-time product, price, and availability information with AI agents—with minimal changes required to your existing systems. You can upload your product catalog directly to Stripe or connect your existing product catalog from leading product syndicators. We can then syndicate your product information to each AI agent, and with one click, you can automatically start taking payments across any supported agent.

Simplify your checkout and retail control over the customer relationship
The Agentic Commerce Suite is powered by Stripe’s Checkout Sessions API, which helps with aspects of the checkout, including shipping and taxes. You can choose to have Stripe manage this on your behalf via built-in Stripe products, such as Stripe Tax, or you can use your existing commerce stack to upload tax codes, manage near real-time inventory checks, and set dynamic shipping rates—with minimal changes to your systems.

Once a customer completes an agentic transaction, you simply use your existing in-house order and fulfillment process. As the merchant of record, you also retain all control over customer relationships, including how refunds and disputes are managed.

Accept agentic payments and protect against emerging fraud
To help protect businesses, the Agentic Commerce Suite handles and processes SPTs, a new payment primitive for agentic commerce. Every token can be scoped to a specific seller, bounded by time and amount, and observable throughout its lifecycle to prevent unauthorized agent actions and reduce the likelihood of disputes.

When used on Stripe, SPTs can also be powered by Radar to relay the underlying risk signals using transaction and payment method details that help differentiate between high-intent agents and low-trust automated bots. The result is enterprise-grade fraud protection that works without needing weeks of seller-specific data history.

The Agentic Commerce Suite will help significantly expand the number of businesses that can start selling on AI agents. Sign up for the waitlist and read our integration guides to learn more.