Retail & E-commerce// topic
Agentic commerce and AI shopping assistants
In short
Selling inside AI surfaces — the ACP and UCP handshakes, MCP servers over a catalogue, and what an assistant needs before it can be trusted with price, stock and a checkout.
9 pages
diagnostics
- Agents fetch your manifest and still skip your storeA file that loads in your browser can be unreachable, unparseable or disqualifying to an agent. Three verdicts, and the ordered checks that tell them apart.diagnostic9 min
- The agent confirmed the order and the charge failed afterwardsAn order exists, the shopper was told it is placed, and no money moved. The cause is almost never the card: it is one of the 4 constraints on the delegated token refusing the charge.diagnostic11 min
- The agent shows one total and your checkout session returns anotherThe shopper saw one number and your server charged another. Replay the call sequence: the agent is nearly always displaying a response that a later call replaced.diagnostic10 min
- The assistant keeps recommending products you stopped sellingA shopping assistant naming products you withdrew is rarely hallucination. It is a stale index, a missing lifecycle field, an unenforced tool call or a tool returning unpublished rows.diagnostic10 min
- Your bot protection is blocking the AI surfaces you sell throughThe rule that keeps scrapers off your catalogue is the same rule keeping buying agents off it. Telling the two apart — before you widen anything — is the whole job.diagnostic10 min
definitions
- The agentic checkout session: a cart your server ownsA server-side basket the merchant owns and an AI agent only renders. Every create, update or complete call returns the merchant's full current state — the property that makes agent buying safe to allow.definition6 min
- The catalogue tool server: what it may expose, what it must never returnA read-only surface an agent may call over your catalogue. The definition is the boundary: published data and coarse availability in, cost price and customer-keyed data out.definition6 min
- The commerce manifest: the file an agent reads before anything elseA machine-readable declaration of what your store can do, served at a fixed path. It is not marketing, it carries no prices, and 3 serving conditions decide whether an agent can read it at all.definition6 min
- The delegated payment token: an allowance with an expiry, not a card numberThe credential an AI agent hands your checkout is not a card number. It is a reference to a vaulted card wrapped in 4 constraints, and those constraints — not the encryption around them — are what limit an agent's spending.definition6 min
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