Agentic commerce is already reshaping how customers discover, decide, and transact. Agentic use cases are quickly entering the mainstream, with major launches such as Amazon’s Buy for Me and Perplexity’s Buy with Pro having functionality going as far as in-chat transactions. With 24% of customers using AI chatbots when researching retail brands or products, retailers who adapt early will capture a disproportionate share of this rapidly growing channel. For retailers, this shift opens up a powerful new surface for engagement and growth—but it also introduces new questions and technical considerations. How do you maintain your brand’s voice? Where should automation end and human interaction begin? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, but now is the time to explore, experiment, and stay close to what your customers value.

What is agentic commerce?

Agentic commerce involves enabling AI-driven agents to undertake shopping tasks for customers, including finding products, tailoring recommendations, and completing transactions automatically. Advances in AI allow these digital assistants to meet customers’ demands for seamless, customized shopping. This model requires moving from traditional search engine optimization techniques to Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), ensuring products are visible and appealing to AI systems. At the core of these processes is the integration of sophisticated payment solutions to facilitate smooth transactions.

Retail’s next big leap

After years of margin pressure and competition, agentic commerce offers retailers a new growth opportunity. Innovative retailers who make their systems agent-compatible will gain significant competitive advantage in this rapidly expanding channel. If intent continues to move upstream from search engines to AI, customers might opt for agents to manage their shopping and optimize across vendors for pricing and delivery.

This is a first-mover moment—happening faster than the mobile or SEO transitions. While many unknowns remain about how agentic commerce will evolve, retailers can take early measures to adapt—from creating resilient checkout flows and data structures to enabling branded AI experience—to improve conversion in both direct and agentic channels.

Three ways retailers can activate agentic commerce:

• Business to agent (B2A): Participate in agentic channels by making your product catalogs and checkout flows accessible to third-party AI platforms such as Perplexity or ChatGPT—business to agent (B2A) commerce.
  
• Agent to consumer (A2C): Embed agentic experiences on your own site or app through branded shopping assistants (agent to consumer, or A2C) or natural-language interfaces—such as Saks Fifth Avenue’s AI agent—to both improve your customers’ experience and conversion.
  
• Agent to agent (A2A): Power autonomous purchasing agents by enabling secure, software-triggered transactions via subscriptions or replenishment flows—such as a personal grocery AI agent automatically replenishing across multiple retailers when items are low—thus getting ready for agent to agent (A2A) shopping.
  

Each of these approaches requires varying levels of technical readiness, but all share a common requirement: structured data, secure transactions, and agent-compatible checkout flows.

Here’s where to start:

1. Make your product catalog agent-readable

AI agents need structured, accessible product data to surface your offerings in relevant contexts—whether they’re curating a shopping list, engaging in deep research, or assisting with gifting.

Start by:

• Structuring product metadata (e.g., features, inventory, price, delivery windows) in machine-readable formats (via APIs, feeds, or structured markup)
  
• Standardizing product names and descriptions to reduce ambiguity
  
• Ensuring discoverability through tools that agents are already using (e.g., public APIs)
  

How Stripe can help: Using Stripe Payments or Stripe Billing, retailers will be able to structure their product catalog in a way that’s accessible to agents. We’re also building toward finer-grained access controls, such as giving agents permissioned access to specific products or broadcasting restocks to agents that previously visited your site.

2. Curate agent-driven experiences inside your own digital properties

You don’t have to wait for agents on third-party platforms to carry your products. Retailers can deploy branded agents within their own environments to personalize search, tailor bundles, and reduce friction.

Consider:

• Building a lightweight shopping assistant into your app or site
  
• Enabling agents to suggest or auto-complete purchases based on preferences, history, or seasonality
  
• Experimenting with AI-native merchandising (e.g., “shop this look” agents)
  

How Stripe can help: Stripe’s agent toolkit enables you to embed payments and financial services directly into on-site agentic experiences. For example, use Payment Links in chat interfaces or Stripe Issuing to support agent-triggered actions such as returns.

3. Enable agent-friendly checkout

An agent can drive and expedite purchasing intent—surfacing a product, making a recommendation, even deciding what to buy—but without a flexible checkout, conversion will stall.

To ensure agents can complete transactions:

• Use API-first checkout solutions that work without a visible browser session.
  
• Support virtual cards for secure payment execution.
  
• Minimize dependency on step-based flows that require human confirmation (e.g., re-entering shipping information).
  
• Collect key information such as email, without requiring account creation. This helps preserve the customer relationship without adding friction to agent-initiated checkouts.
  

How Stripe can help: Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite and Link—Stripe’s accelerated checkout—provide structured, agent-compatible flows. With Link enabled, retailers will also be able to recognize the same customer across different AI channels, thereby maintaining the customer relationship and personalized experience, regardless of how they choose to shop.

You don’t need to rebuild your stack. Just extend it.

Many enterprise retailers already have the pieces in place: structured catalogs, APIs, personalization engines. Agentic commerce is about adapting those systems to interact with a new class of buyer—autonomous, software-based, and always-on.

Agentic commerce introduces new possibilities, but also new complexities. Agents operate differently than humans: they don’t browse, they query; they don’t click through pages, they act on structured prompts. That means the systems behind the scenes—catalog, checkout, and payments—need to evolve in tandem.

What’s next

Agentic commerce is still early, but it’s accelerating fast. Some estimates have over half of consumers opting for product recommendations from gen AI over search engines. As more discovery, decision-making, and purchases shift to autonomous agents, retailers will need infrastructure that doesn’t just keep up—but develops new advantages.

Stripe is building infrastructure to facilitate a new kind of commerce—making every part of the stack more programmable and extensible, so any businesses can adapt quickly, plug into new surfaces, and stay ahead as buying moves across interfaces, agents, and platforms.

• For businesses creating agentic product discovery experiences within their platform, Stripe’s Order Intents API brings commerce logic closer to the point of decision, allowing product discovery channels to programmatically initiate and complete complex purchases.
  
• Stripe’s global network spans millions of businesses, customers, platforms, and financial partners. It can help protect against fraud by detecting abnormal patterns—even when the buyer is an agent, not a person.
  

We’re already working with leading retailers and facilitators of agentic commerce, from experimentation to scale. If you’re thinking about where to start—let’s talk: retail@stripe.com.