Are AI Agents shopping your products?

A new kind of customer has started showing up in online stores: AI assistants that shop on a person’s behalf. September brought several large changes that make this easier, and some of them may already apply to your store. This article explains what happened, how it works, and what you can do about it.

What is agentic commerce?

“Agentic commerce” is the industry term for AI assistants, often called agents, that shop for people. A shopper tells an assistant such as ChatGPT what they want, for example “find me a waterproof jacket under $150.” The agent searches stores, compares options, and recommends one. With the shopper’s approval, it can also complete the purchase. The store still ships the order and handles returns and customer service. intelliasretailgazette

What changed in September

Four of the largest companies in payments and online retail each made it easier for agents to buy:

  • Stripe, which processes payments for millions of online stores, updated its hosted checkout pages so agents can complete purchases on them. The change covers more than 7.8 million businesses.
  • Shopify turned on agent checkout automatically for eligible stores.
  • Mastercard expanded Agent Pay, its system for purchases made by agents, on September 30. It now includes a scoring system for transactions started by an agent.
  • Meta released Muse, an AI assistant that can shop and check out at about a million businesses. Amazon blocked Muse from its site shortly afterward.

Together, these changes mean the technology that lets an AI assistant pay a store now exists at large scale. It was put in place in about four weeks.

Why this matters even if you did nothing

If your store runs on Shopify or uses Stripe’s checkout, some of these changes may already be active for you. On Shopify, sharing your products with Meta and allowing direct checkout are both switched on by default, and you can turn each one off in your admin. Take a few minutes to look at those settings so you know what your store currently allows. stellagent

How merchants and shoppers feel so far

Most are cautious. In survey data reported by FinTech Weekly:

  • 93 percent of merchants said the AI company should cover the cost when an agent buys the wrong item.
  • 28 percent are willing to show agents their full catalog on the same terms as human shoppers.
  • About 3 percent of the surveyed merchants’ transactions involve an agent.

Shoppers are cautious too. Forrester found that 24 percent of consumers trust agents with routine purchases.

The main unresolved question is who pays when something goes wrong. If an agent orders the wrong size or misreads a return policy, the store handles the return. For now, that cost generally stays with the merchant.

Amazon has taken the firmest stance. It blocked Muse and sued Perplexity, another AI company, over agent access to its site. Amazon can afford to turn agents away because 90 percent of its shoppers already begin their search on Amazon. Smaller stores depend more on being found, so the choice deserves careful thought.

What an agent sees when it visits your store

An agent reads the written information about each product: the title, sizes and options, materials, price, stock level, shipping time, and return policy. Photos, videos, and page design play little or no part in its decision.

Many product listings were written to rank in search results and to be skimmed by people. Details are often missing, out of date, or different from one place to another. When an agent quotes a wrong price or says a sold-out item is in stock, it is usually repeating information the store published. Amazon’s CEO has raised the same complaint about agents getting prices and delivery details wrong.

Three things help:

  1. Complete product details on every page. Use structured data, a standard way of labeling details such as price and availability in a page’s code so software can read them reliably.
  2. The same information everywhere. The product lists you send to Google, Meta, and other sales channels (called feeds) should match what your website says.
  3. Prompt updates. When a price or stock level changes, it should change in all of those places.

We cover the basics in our guide to what an agent-ready website actually requires. The same steps now apply to your product and checkout pages.

Your three options

  1. Allow agents and keep track. Let agents buy, and track those orders separately so you can see how often they convert and how often they are returned. Add a section on agent purchases to your terms of sale.
  2. Limit what agents can see. Make some products and policies available to agents and keep others for human shoppers. Many merchants already do this informally.
  3. Block agents. This is Amazon’s approach. It avoids the risks, and it means shoppers who use agents won’t find you.

Any of these can be the right choice for a given business. We made a similar point when Cloudflare’s AI defaults started deciding for site owners: review the default settings and pick the option that fits your store.

Where to start

Agent purchases are still a small share of sales, so there is time to prepare. A reasonable first month looks like this:

  • Check your Shopify and payment settings to see what is currently switched on.
  • Review your best-selling product pages for complete, accurate details.
  • Decide which of the three options fits your business.
  • Update your terms of sale to match.

If you’d like help with any of it, that’s work we do every day.