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Field guide No. 03 · Discover

Selling to shopping agents

When the buyer is an AI agent, your catalog is your storefront.

Structured catalog · agent feeds · protocol fit

Field guide No. 03Discover

Selling to shopping agents

Structured catalog · agent feeds · protocol fit

The problem

Visual merchandising and persuasive copy do not matter to an agent. It compares attributes, price, availability, delivery and return terms. Products with thin or inconsistent data are not chosen. This is the next SEO, and most catalogs are not ready.

The approach

Make the catalog legible to machines first: clean feeds, complete attributes, APIs with live price and stock, explicit policies. Then decide how to show up in assistants, from open checkout protocols to branded retailer apps that bring your own experience into the chat.

How it works

assistant.exampleFind a waterproof jacket under $300that can arrive by Friday.Here are three that match.Ridge Shell$279Arrives ThuCoastal 2L$229Arrives ThuStorm Pro$298Arrives Thu
What the customer sees.What runs underneath.

As shoppers delegate purchases to AI assistants, the agent reading your structured data becomes the buyer. Winning means machine-readable catalogs, live price and availability, clear policies and a branded presence inside the assistant, rather than handing over a generic checkout.

ACPAgentic Commerce Protocol (OpenAI and Stripe). The checkout layer.
AP2Agent Payments Protocol (Google; vendor neutral). The payment-authorization layer.
FeesProtocols are free and open; channels set their own terms. ChatGPT charged merchants 4% on completed sales only, and terms keep shifting.
LessonEarly in-chat checkout reportedly converted about a third as well as redirecting to the retailer's site. Branded retailer apps in chat (for example Walmart's 'Sparky') bring the retailer's own experience into the assistant.

About five months, end to end

  1. Launch

    ChatGPT Instant Checkout launches (US, single item, Etsy sellers first)

  2. About four and a half months in

    Expanded to Shopify merchants (1M+); PayPal added

  3. About five months in

    Instant Checkout deprecated

Watch-outs

  • Protocols, fees and programmes are changing month to month. Invest in the data foundation before betting on any one channel.
  • Price and stock accuracy become contractual. An agent will hold you to what your feed said.
  • Brand dilution: a generic checkout inside someone else's assistant gives away the relationship.

Accelerators and stack

  • Product information management (PIM) and feed tooling
  • Commerce platform APIs (Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Shopify, Adobe Commerce)
  • Agent standards: ACP, AP2, MCP

What it takes to start

A catalog export, your feed and API landscape, and policy pages. An agent-readiness scorecard takes two to three weeks; enrichment and feeds follow.

No reliable benchmarks yet. Anyone quoting agentic conversion uplift today is guessing.

In short

Questions

Is this only relevant for big retailers?

No. Structured data is cheaper for a mid-sized catalog to fix than for a giant one, and agents do not care about brand size.

What is the first step?

An agent-readiness audit of your catalog data. It also improves on-site search and filtering immediately.

Next step

Bring one number you want to move.

Thirty minutes with the founder. You'll leave with a straight answer on whether AI is the right tool for it.

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AI is… the Future.