Agentic Commerce Planning for SMBs
If you are involved in any way in digital commerce, you will have heard talk about agentic commerce – essentially using AI to help customers make purchases. The purpose of this article is to give you a way to think about agentic commerce and suggest some of the questions you should be ready to ask your platform providers, regardless of which you use (Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, WooCommerce, etc.)
Let’s start with some terms; you do not need to be an engineer, but you should be comfortable with them so you can ask smart questions.
- Agentic commerce – AI agents that discover, compare, and sometimes buy products on a shopper’s behalf, not just show recommendations.
- Structured product data – Product details in consistent fields (attributes, variants, price, inventory, shipping, returns) instead of only in long descriptions as is typical in today’s ecommerce.
- Product feeds / APIs – How your products are seen by systems (Google Merchant Center, marketplaces, AI agents, etc.)
- Agent‑referred traffic/orders – Visits or orders that originate from AI agents or agentic channels and which should be identified separately from organic web or ad-generated traffic.
- ACP / UCP (agentic protocols) – Emerging standards (Agentic Commerce Protocol, Universal Commerce Protocol) that define how agents talk to merchants and payment providers; you do not need to implement them, but your platform/PSP might.
What are examples of questions you should be asking your platform provider?
A. Data and the “agent‑readiness” or the platform you use
- “What are the most important product fields your system offers to enable search, recommendations, and feeds? How can I make sure each of my products has them filled in?”
- “How does your platform generate structured data and product feeds that AI systems and search engines can understand? Which plugins/apps or built‑in tools do you recommend?”
- “If I improve my product attributes (e.g., materials, fit, compatibility, delivery windows), where in your platform should that data live so agents can see it?”
B. Agentic / AI channels
- “How will your platform help my store show up in AI shopping experiences (e.g., through Google’s UCP, OpenAI’s ACP, or your own AI integrations)?”
- “Do you already support ACP or UCP through your payment partners or catalog tools? If not yet, what is on your roadmap for the next 12–24 months?”
- “When an AI agent drives a sale, what tags or metadata will I see in my orders and analytics so I can tell that it came from an AI channel?”
C. Measurement, logging, and disputes
- “How can I track AI/agent‑origin traffic and orders separately from other channels like search, social, and marketplaces?”
- “What logs or audit trails exist if an AI‑initiated purchase goes wrong and a customer disputes it? How long is that data retained?”
- “Do you or your PSP (is a third-party company that allows businesses to accept electronic payments: e.g., Stripe) provide any special tools or flags for agentic commerce disputes or fraud patterns?”
D. Roadmap and responsibilities
- “For a business of my size, which three things should I prioritize this year to be ready for agentic commerce?”
- “What will you handle at the platform level (feeds, protocols, AI integrations), and what will I or my agency need to do (data cleanup, content, policies)?”
This all can sound a bit daunting, but with a few of the general concepts and language, you’ll be able to get started putting in place what you need as agentic commerce grows
If you’d like to know more,– or just talk about agentic commerce,– contact David True at dtrue@paygility.com and/or Dean Sheaffer deanshea@ptd.net