Preparing for Agentic Commerce: What Brands Need to Do Now

Understanding Agentic Commerce

Agentic commerce represents a fundamental shift in how consumers discover, evaluate, and purchase products online. Rather than customers manually browsing websites and clicking through checkout flows, AI agents autonomously handle the entire transaction on behalf of the user—from product research and comparison to payment and delivery coordination. Real-world examples like Perplexity Buy with Pro and OpenAI Operator demonstrate this emerging capability, where agents can navigate e-commerce platforms, understand product specifications, and complete purchases based on natural language requests. This shift transforms commerce from a human-driven, interface-dependent process into an API-driven, agent-native ecosystem where machines communicate directly with merchant systems.

Business Impact of Agentic Commerce

The transition to agentic commerce will reshape customer acquisition, conversion, and lifetime value metrics across industries. Traditional e-commerce relies on human-driven discovery through search engines, social media, and direct browsing—a process that’s time-consuming and prone to abandonment. Agentic commerce, by contrast, enables instant product discovery, comparison, and purchase completion without human friction, potentially increasing conversion rates while reducing customer acquisition costs. Early adopters will capture significant market share as agents become the primary commerce interface, while brands that fail to adapt risk becoming invisible to AI-driven purchasing decisions.

Machine-Readable Catalogs: The Foundation of Agent Commerce

For AI agents to effectively evaluate and purchase your products, your catalog must be machine-readable and semantically rich—far beyond traditional product feeds. Agents need access to standardized, structured data that enables them to understand product attributes, make comparisons, and verify availability in real-time. This requires moving beyond basic SKU and price information to include comprehensive product intelligence that machines can parse, interpret, and act upon.

Agents require the following critical data elements to function effectively:

• Detailed product specifications (dimensions, materials, compatibility, certifications)
• Real-time inventory levels across all channels and locations
• Dynamic pricing including volume discounts, promotions, and regional variations
• Structured product relationships (variants, bundles, alternatives, complementary items)
• Fulfillment options (shipping methods, delivery times, return policies)
• Authentication and compliance data (certifications, regulatory compliance, authenticity verification)
• Rich media assets (high-resolution images, videos, 3D models for visual verification)
• Customer reviews and ratings in structured format for agent evaluation
• Availability and backorder information with estimated restock dates

Implementing these standards requires investment in your product information management (PIM) systems and data governance practices. Brands that establish comprehensive, accurate, machine-readable catalogs will become the preferred vendors for agent-driven purchases, while those with incomplete or outdated data will be systematically deprioritized by AI decision-making algorithms.

Agent-Ready Payments: Enabling Autonomous Transactions

Agent-initiated payments represent a critical capability that fundamentally differs from traditional e-commerce transactions. Rather than a customer entering payment information through a web form, agents must be able to initiate and complete payments programmatically through secure APIs, with proper authorization and fraud prevention mechanisms in place. This requires implementing tokenized payment systems where agents can securely transmit payment instructions without handling raw card data, ensuring compliance with PCI-DSS standards while enabling frictionless transactions.

Security becomes paramount in this model, as agents will be making purchasing decisions and payments on behalf of customers without real-time human oversight. Brands must implement multi-layered authentication including agent identity verification, transaction amount thresholds, and anomaly detection to prevent fraudulent agent-initiated purchases. Payment processors like Stripe have developed agentic commerce-specific payment flows that enable merchants to accept agent transactions while maintaining the same security standards as traditional customer payments. The key is establishing trust between your payment infrastructure and authorized AI agents through cryptographic verification and transparent transaction logging.

Real-Time Inventory & Pricing: Operational Readiness

Agentic commerce operates at machine speed, meaning your inventory and pricing systems must be capable of real-time updates and queries. When an agent is evaluating your product against competitors, it needs instantaneous visibility into current stock levels, pricing, and availability—not batch-updated information from hours or days prior. This requires moving beyond traditional inventory management systems to implement API-first inventory infrastructure that provides sub-second response times and accurate stock counts across all sales channels.

Dynamic pricing becomes both an opportunity and a necessity in agentic commerce. Agents will automatically select products based on price-to-value ratios, meaning brands that can adjust pricing in real-time based on demand, competition, and inventory levels will capture more agent-driven sales. However, this also requires sophisticated pricing engines that can maintain profitability while remaining competitive in agent-driven comparisons. Your operational infrastructure must support these capabilities without manual intervention, as agents operate 24/7 and won’t wait for business hours to complete transactions.

Trust & Security: Building Agent Confidence

Trust is the currency of agentic commerce, and security breaches or fraudulent transactions will rapidly damage your brand’s reputation in the agent ecosystem. Agents will be programmed to avoid merchants with poor security records, payment failures, or inconsistent product quality, creating a competitive advantage for brands that demonstrate reliable, secure operations. Implementing comprehensive fraud prevention systems that can detect and prevent agent-based fraud attempts—such as bulk purchases, unusual patterns, or suspicious account behavior—is essential to maintaining agent trust.

Customer trust must also be preserved, as agents will be making purchasing decisions on behalf of users. Brands must ensure that agent transactions are transparent, that customers can easily review and dispute agent-initiated purchases, and that return and refund processes work seamlessly for agent-purchased items. This requires implementing clear transaction logging that shows customers exactly what agents purchased on their behalf, why those decisions were made, and how to reverse them if needed. Additionally, brands should implement verification mechanisms that allow customers to set spending limits, product category restrictions, or approval requirements for agent purchases above certain thresholds, giving users control over autonomous purchasing behavior.

Checkout Optimization: API-First Experiences

Traditional checkout optimization focused on reducing friction in the user interface—simplifying forms, minimizing steps, and improving mobile responsiveness. Agentic commerce checkout requires a fundamentally different approach: API-first design where the entire checkout process is accessible through structured APIs rather than web interfaces. This means your checkout system must support programmatic product selection, address validation, shipping method selection, and payment processing without requiring any human interaction with your website or app.

Brands should audit their current checkout infrastructure to identify API gaps and modernize systems that rely on web scraping or UI automation. The most agent-friendly merchants will expose their entire checkout flow through well-documented, RESTful APIs that agents can integrate with directly. This includes real-time shipping rate calculation, tax computation, inventory reservation, and payment processing—all accessible through machine-readable endpoints. Checkout optimization in the agentic era means ensuring your APIs are fast, reliable, and capable of handling the high transaction volumes that agent-driven commerce will generate.

Monitoring Agent Traffic: Visibility and Analytics

As AI agents become a significant portion of your traffic and revenue, visibility into agent behavior becomes critical for business intelligence and fraud prevention. Unlike human customers, agents operate with perfect consistency, making thousands of identical decisions per second, which can either indicate healthy automation or signal fraudulent activity. Brands need sophisticated analytics platforms that can distinguish between legitimate agent traffic and malicious bot activity, track agent-driven conversion rates separately from human conversions, and identify which agents are driving the most valuable transactions.

AmICited.com provides essential monitoring capabilities for brands navigating the agentic commerce landscape. By tracking AI agent references and traffic patterns across your digital properties, AmICited enables you to understand which agents are discovering your products, how they’re evaluating your offerings compared to competitors, and what factors influence their purchasing decisions. This intelligence is invaluable for optimizing your product information, pricing strategy, and competitive positioning in the agent-driven marketplace. Additionally, AmICited’s monitoring helps identify unauthorized agent access, suspicious purchasing patterns, and potential fraud attempts, providing the visibility necessary to maintain security and profitability in agentic commerce.

Team Preparation: Organizational Readiness

Successfully transitioning to agentic commerce requires cross-functional organizational alignment that extends far beyond your e-commerce team. Your product, engineering, operations, finance, and customer service teams must all understand how agentic commerce will impact their functions and be prepared to adapt their processes accordingly. Product teams need to focus on creating machine-readable, comprehensive product information; engineering teams must build and maintain robust APIs; operations teams must ensure real-time inventory accuracy; and customer service teams must be equipped to handle agent-related inquiries and disputes.

Leadership should establish an agentic commerce task force that brings together stakeholders from across the organization to develop a readiness plan, identify technology gaps, and prioritize investments. This team should conduct regular audits of your current systems against agentic commerce requirements, establish metrics for tracking agent-driven revenue and conversion rates, and develop contingency plans for managing high volumes of agent traffic. Training programs should be implemented to ensure all relevant teams understand the implications of agentic commerce and their role in preparing the organization for this transition.

Preparation Checklist: Your Agentic Commerce Readiness Plan

The following checklist provides a structured approach to preparing your brand for agentic commerce. Work through each item systematically, assigning ownership and establishing timelines for completion. This checklist should be reviewed quarterly as the agentic commerce landscape evolves and new capabilities emerge.

1. Audit your product catalog for completeness, accuracy, and machine-readability; identify gaps in structured data
2. Implement or upgrade your PIM system to support rich, standardized product information and real-time updates
3. Develop API-first checkout infrastructure that enables programmatic product selection, shipping, and payment processing
4. Establish real-time inventory management systems capable of sub-second query response times across all channels
5. Implement dynamic pricing capabilities that allow real-time price adjustments based on demand, competition, and inventory
6. Deploy fraud detection and prevention systems specifically designed to identify and prevent agent-based fraud
7. Establish agent authentication and authorization protocols to verify legitimate agent access and prevent unauthorized transactions
8. Integrate with monitoring platforms like AmICited to track agent traffic, behavior, and competitive positioning
9. Develop customer-facing controls that allow users to set spending limits and approval requirements for agent purchases
10. Create cross-functional governance structure with clear ownership, metrics, and accountability for agentic commerce readiness