What Is Agentic Commerce and What It Means for Your Business?

Agentic commerce means an AI agent completes the shopping/transaction on a human buyer’s behalf. Learn how to optimize your business for this new technology and consumer behavior.

Key concepts to know

If you’re new to agentic commerce, here are the ideas worth getting familiar with. This section won’t cover everything, but it’ll give you the mental framework to understand how this new mode of commerce actually works.

Agents

AI agents are autonomous or semiautonomous software programmes that use artificial intelligence to act on a user’s behalf. What they do goes far beyond surfacing search results – they decide what to buy, when to buy it and where. They can follow instructions, weigh trade-offs and transact. In other words, they don’t assist with the purchase – they actually are the purchaser.

Agentic economy

As agents become capable of transacting, they stop being behind-the-scenes helpers and start becoming active participants in the economy. That changes who businesses are talking to (sometimes it’s large language models (LLMs), not a human) and what systems need to be in place. Discovery, conversion, attribution, fraud prevention – it all gets reshaped.

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When you ask ChatGPT or Gemini to “find running shoes below $200,” it can search across online retailers, compare product options, and complete checkout on your behalf—while you never leave the chat.

There is an accelerated shift toward autonomous AI-assisted shopping—called agentic commerce. McKinsey released an article which shows AI agents could facilitate $3 trillion to $5 trillion in global commerce by 2030.

For businesses, agentic commerce represents a new channel to show your products/services and reach buyers that are ready to pay. For example, if you run an ecommerce business, agentic commerce starts from being discoverable through AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google’s AI Mode and transactable by the agents.

Here’s what to know about agentic commerce and how to optimize your business for this new era of AI-powered shopping.

What is agentic commerce?

Agentic commerce means an AI agent acts as an autonomous handler, doing product research, discovery, comparison, and even the purchase on behalf of a buyer. What makes this software agentic is its ability to:

• Act autonomously. Complete shopping tasks with minimal human input, following predefined spending limits or other guardrails.
• Reason and adapt. Adjust recommendations based on changing conditions like price drops, stock availability, or delivery timelines.
• Integrate across platforms. Connect to multiple retailers and payment providers through open APIs and protocols.

For example, a buyer might tell ChatGPT, “I need a trenchcoat under $200 before my trip on March 15.” The agent then searches product catalogs across online retailers, evaluates relevant products based on reviews, pricing, inventory, and delivery timelines, and, if the item falls within the shopper’s pre-set spending threshold, the agent can complete the purchase without requiring approval for each step.

This differs from traditional chatbots that simply answer questions or provide an assortment of links. Autonomous agents take action on the shopper’s behalf, executing the entire shopping journey and interfacing with multiple systems.

How do agentic commerce agents work?

Imagine a shopper opens an LLM and prompts it with: “Find the best earbuds with noise cancellation under $200, that can be delivered by Thursday.” Instead of providing the shopper with a roundup of links to browse on their own, an AI-powered personal shopper moves through the following steps independently:

• Interpret consumer intent and constraints. Understand the product type, required features, budget, and delivery deadline.
• Query data. Scan seller product catalogs via APIs like the Model Context Protocol and filter options across multiple leading retailers based on the shopper’s criteria.
• Curate recommendations. Produce a list of suggestions with real-time pricing, availability, and relevant discount codes, drawing on what the agent has learned about the shopper from previous conversations.
• Refine based on feedback. Adjust recommendations when the shopper provides feedback like “over-ear, not earbuds.”
• Execute the transaction. Complete checkout using secure payment methods through protocols like the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), either after explicit approval or automatically if the shopper has pre-authorized purchases within certain parameters.

Why agentic commerce matters for your business

Agentic commerce is the next generation of product/service discovery and purchasing. Customers can go from a conversation to a completed order, without ever clicking through to a business’s website. This transformative shift creates several advantages for digital commerce businesses:

Reduce friction and decision fatigue

Complex checkout processes and decision fatigue are major friction points that can prevent or delay online purchases.
According to the Baymard Institute, the average online shopping cart abandonment rate is approximately 70%. Common reasons include complex checkout flows and the need to create an account. Agents handle this workflow autonomously, reducing friction for shoppers that could drive abandonment.

Agentic commerce also reduces friction by making purchase decisions and handling checkout on a shopper’s behalf. A Columbia University study found that when shoppers were offered six jam options instead of 24, their purchase rate increased from 3% to 30%. Agentic commerce goes further than simply curating options; it eliminates decision fatigue by delegating both the research and the decision to an agent. This removes the burden of making a choice from dozens of similar products.

Keep the customer relationship

When a shopper buys through an AI agent, you’re still the seller. Orders placed through agentic storefronts flow directly into your admin, and you retain responsibility for the customer relationship and post-purchase experience—just as you would with orders from your online store.

You can add those customers to your email list, send product recommendations, offer rewards, boost brand loyalty and customer engagement, and drive growth over time.

Is Agentic Commerce related to AI Visibility?

Yes, your business’ success at agentic commerce is highly correlated with your brand’s AI visibility. Agentic journey (according to Opttab’s definition) is focusing on below pillars in a structured way for your business and optimize for each and every one of them.

Discoverability

Your brand, products, services or another offering should be reachable by AI model agents to retrieve the necessary data/information. Being discoverable means that when an agent visits your website/catalogue/WebMCP/remote MCP, you need to welcome the agent and be able to provide the necessary info or tools that it needs. This way your online presence which is open to public will be easily disvered by AI agents.

Visibility

Once you make sure you’re discoverable, next step is to check if your brand/products/services are visible in the responses that your potential buyers get from AI assistants. This heavily depends on your content/catalogue quality, being able to answer the questions that users ask and have a coverage in the sources (web pages) that are cited in the responses. Opttab’s AI visibility feature lets you discover where your brand or products are visible with competitor, prompt volume, platform level details.

Optimization

In order to increase your discoverability and visibility scores, you need to work on optimizing your content, catalogue, agent readiness, website settings, external coverage and agent readibility. So the goal is to optimize for your target topics which get more traffic in AI search, get our web pages in the sources, citations and then our brand/products in the mentions (to be mentioned in the response). Opttab’s Optimize module is focusing on optimization in depth like no other alternatives out there.

Agentic Commerce

Imagine your products are visible in AI search and your target buyers are seeing your products. When your products are mentioned in the responses, users still visit your website. However, they might want to complete the whole transaction in the chat with the assistant. Opttab’s Agent module helps brands create a remote MCP, webMCP, publish ChatGPT plugin/Claude connector so their product catalogue, user auth service (securely) and agent tools are available wherever their buyers need them. If a buyer comletes a transaction, Opttab Agent captures and shows it in the merchant agent in Agent Insights. More importantly, when a cart is abandoned, Opttab can let brands connect that journey with their customer data platform to orchestrate the journey from there with Insider One, Klaviyo or Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

So, the whole journey is called Agentic Journey and Opttab, as a Agentic Journey OS, lets brands manage this smartly and efficiently.

How to prepare your business for agentic commerce

• In your product feed, write product descriptions for Al discovery
• Help Al agents answer shoppers’ questions
• Update your inventory and pricing information

If you are using Opttab, we let you optimize your product feed in our Shopping Insights section. We identify the gaps in your catalogue and let you enrich it.

The strategies below can help you improve your discoverability for AI agents. Many align with what you may already do for search engine optimization (SEO) and customer experience—writing clear product descriptions, answering shopper questions, and maintaining accurate inventory.

Write product descriptions for AI discovery

To make shopping decisions, agents need comprehensive product information they can reason about. When a shopper says, “buy me the best insulated travel mug under $30,” the agent needs to assess what makes one mug better than another. Your product description provides that data.

Instead of a vague description like “premium insulated travel mug” or a keyword-stuffed list like “ceramic mug dishwasher safe microwave safe 12 ounce coffee mug lead-free,” write in clear, natural language that AI can parse. Include factual information and benefits that explain why a shopper might choose your product and what sets it apart from others.

For example: “This 16-ounce stoneware mug keeps drinks hot for six hours or cold for 12 hours, earning hundreds of five-star reviews. The lead-free glaze won’t chip in the dishwasher. It’s microwave safe for easy re-heating. Double-wall insulation prevents condensation, with a leak-proof design that fits standard cup holders.” This version gives intelligent agents the context they need to evaluate whether your product is a good match: Does it meet the temperature retention requirement? Does it fit in a car cup holder?

Help AI agents answer shoppers’ questions

In addition to anticipating questions about your products, think about questions shoppers and their agents might have about your store’s policies, such as your shipping options, delivery timelines, return windows, or whether you offer exchanges.

Update your inventory and pricing information

AI agents pull real-time data when making recommendations and purchase decisions, including:

• Stock levels across all variants (size, color, etc.)
• Pricing, including any promotional rates or temporary discounts
• Shipping estimates based on actual fulfillment capacity

For high-volume or frequently changing inventory, consider setting up automated inventory management or integrating with your warehouse management system to prevent overselling during busy periods when AI agents may be making multiple consumer purchasing decisions simultaneously.

Agentic Commerce FAQ