Hussnain Shahid

Posted on Sep 8

Preparing for Agentic Commerce: A Practical Guide for Ecommerce and Shopify Merchants

Worldpay recently announced its active work across emerging agentic commerce standards, including OpenAI's Agent Commerce Protocol (ACP) and Google's Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). This move signals a critical shift: the infrastructure required for AI agents to autonomously execute checkout is actively being built, even if the end state of fully autonomous payments remains hypothetical. For ecommerce founders, fintech teams, and Shopify merchants, the era of agentic commerce is approaching faster than the underlying payment standards can keep up.

Agentic commerce involves AI agents autonomously managing the entire shopping lifecycle on behalf of consumers. From product discovery to checkout, these systems are evolving from simple search assistants into autonomous buyers. While we are not yet at a point where AI can independently complete a purchase without human intervention, the foundational layers are being laid today. Ecommerce brands must prepare by ensuring their product data is machine-readable, adopting API-first payment infrastructure, and addressing critical trust, authorization, and liability issues.

What is Agentic Commerce and How Close Are We to Agentic Payments?

Agentic commerce envisions AI agents managing the entire shopping lifecycle, from discovery to checkout.

Agentic commerce represents a transformative shift in digital retail. Instead of a customer manually browsing, comparing, and checking out, intelligent agents powered by machine learning and large language models act on the consumer's behalf to discover, negotiate, and complete purchases. This shift moves the primary interface for customers from a brand's website to an AI system.

Tech leaders categorize agentic maturity into distinct tiers. Level-0 represents static, rules-based chatbots that cannot make independent decisions—the kind already common on retail websites. True agentic capability starts at Level-1, where agents retrieve information and recommend specific choices. This scales up to Level-4, where a single agent can split orders, negotiate pricing, and execute multi-step transactions autonomously.

The market potential for this shift is massive. Agentic commerce is projected to generate between $3 trillion and $5 trillion globally by 2030, potentially representing up to 25% of total eCommerce. However, true "agentic payments"—where an AI autonomously executes a checkout without human input—are currently hypothetical.

According to Forrester, agentic payments challenge the core principles of our established online payment processing system. Traditional checkout flows rely on human authentication and authorization. When the entity initiating the payment is an AI agent acting on behalf of a human, the entire framework of user verification, consent, and liability must be reimagined. The infrastructure and trust layers required to support this are actively being developed, but merchants cannot wait for the final standards to be written before they begin preparing.

The Trust and Authorization Gap: Why AI Can't Just Pay Yet

The leap from AI-assisted commerce to autonomous agentic payments hinges on solving a complex web of trust, authorization, and liability issues. When a human is not physically pressing the "buy" button, traditional security measures like CAPTCHAs, 3D Secure, and biometric scans lose their efficacy.

Key trust and authorization issues include:

Authentication and Authorization: How does a merchant verify that an AI agent has the explicit, current authorization of the consumer to execute a payment? Current payment systems are designed for human-initiated actions.
Data Security and Privacy: Agents require access to consumer credentials, payment tokens, and personal data to function. Securing this data against breaches while allowing machine access is a significant challenge.
Liability: If an AI agent makes an unauthorized purchase, makes an error in negotiation, or is compromised by a malicious actor, who is liable? The consumer, the agent developer, the merchant, or the payment processor? The liability framework for agentic payments is still being written.
Agent Verification: Merchants need the ability to distinguish legitimate AI agents from fraudulent ones. Bad actors will inevitably use AI to exploit systems at scale, making bot detection and agent verification critical components of the trust stack.

For agentic commerce to scale, brands must be able to trust the agents transacting with them. This requires a new layer of transaction-level visibility, allowing merchants to see the provider status, verification, and intent behind every machine-initiated order.

How Merchants Can Prepare Their Infrastructure Today

Merchants must build API-first infrastructure and ensure product data is machine-readable to support agentic transactions.

While agentic payments are still emerging, merchants can take concrete steps today to ensure their infrastructure is ready for machine-initiated orders. The goal is to make your store readable, accessible, and transactable by autonomous systems.

Ensure Product Data is Machine-Readable

AI agents do not navigate visual UI elements or marketing copy the way humans do. They rely on structured data. Merchants must ensure their product catalogs are accessible via clean APIs and tagged with structured data formats like JSON-LD. This includes accurate pricing, availability, specifications, and shipping information. If an agent cannot read your product data, it cannot recommend or purchase your products.

Adopt API-First Payment Infrastructure

Your payment infrastructure must be capable of handling machine-initiated orders without human intervention. This means moving away from rigid, UI-bound checkout flows and adopting API-first payment orchestration tools. Payment orchestration platforms can route agent-initiated purchases, manage wallet and alternative payment transactions securely, and handle the complexities of cross-border settlements and FX conversions.

Build for Multi-Currency and Global Transactions

Agentic commerce is inherently global. An AI agent may compare prices and execute purchases across borders. Merchants need global infrastructure and multi-currency accounts to capture these machine-driven sales without FX markups and settlement delays that could cause an agent to abandon the transaction.

Implement Adaptive Fraud Prevention

Traditional fraud prevention tools may flag machine-initiated traffic as suspicious. Merchants need adaptive fraud prevention systems that can differentiate between a legitimate AI shopping agent and a botnet attack. This requires integrating bot detection and agentic reporting into your security stack.

The Role of AI Support Agents Like Fetchply in the Agentic Journey

While the industry works toward autonomous payments, merchants can begin integrating AI agents into the shopping experience today through customer support and guided flows. Tools like Fetchply are paving the way by integrating AI agents into Shopify stores, representing an early step in AI-assisted commerce.

Fetchply offers AI agents that handle customer questions and guided shopping flows. Rather than autonomously executing payments, these agents help stores answer questions, provide instant answers to repeat inquiries, and guide users through predictable requests. This functionality builds the foundational trust and AI integration needed before agentic payments can be adopted.

By deploying AI agents in a support capacity, merchants can:

Improve the Shopping Experience: Provide instant, accurate answers to customer questions without adding workload for the support team.
Gather Data on AI Interactions: Understand how customers interact with AI and what information they need to make purchasing decisions.
Build Consumer Trust in AI: Gradually introduce customers to AI-assisted shopping, making them more comfortable with the concept of an agent acting on their behalf.

This phased approach allows merchants to test the waters of agentic commerce, refining their AI strategy and infrastructure before the leap to fully autonomous payments.

Emerging Standards and Protocols for Agent-Led Transactions

For agentic commerce to scale, the industry needs standardized protocols for agent-to-merchant communication. Several key players are actively developing these standards.

Worldpay, now Global Payments, is working across agentic commerce standards like OpenAI's ACP and Google's UCP. These protocols aim to create a common language that allows AI shopping agents to discover merchants, read product data, and initiate transactions securely. By adhering to these emerging standards, merchants can ensure their checkout remains ready for agent-led traffic.

Recent developments highlight the momentum in this space:

Indian E-commerce Groundwork: Indian e-commerce firms are actively laying the groundwork for agentic commerce, investing in the infrastructure needed to support AI-driven transactions.
Adobe's Acquisition of Rilo: Adobe recently acquired AI startup Rilo to add AI workflow orchestration capabilities for enterprise marketing, signaling a broader investment in automating the work surrounding commerce and marketing.

These developments indicate that the infrastructure for agentic commerce is moving from concept to reality. Merchants who begin aligning with these emerging standards today will be better positioned to capture the projected $3 trillion to $5 trillion market opportunity by 2030.

Conclusion

The shift toward agentic commerce is an active infrastructure build happening right now. While true autonomous agentic payments remain hypothetical, the standards, protocols, and trust layers required to support them are rapidly taking shape.

For ecommerce founders, fintech teams, and Shopify merchants, the time to prepare is today. By ensuring your product data is machine-readable, adopting API-first payment infrastructure, and integrating AI agents into your customer support flows with tools like Fetchply, you can build the foundational trust and technical readiness needed for the agentic payments shift.

The brands that win in the agentic economy will be those that make their systems readable, trusted, and transactable by autonomous agents.

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