Notes on agent commerce

It's the first question every investor asks and the first thing a prospect says to stall. Yes — the platforms will build the checkout rail. No — that doesn't make you agent-ready. Here's the part they structurally won't touch.

For a large catalogue, agent-readiness isn't a yes/no — it's a coverage number. Most of your range is fine; a silent slice is missing the one field that makes it un-buyable. Here's how to find it without checking a million pages.

Agents don't read your pages — they read your data. A site can look flawless to every human who visits and still be un-buyable to the agent making the call. We checked the flagship agent-commerce brands; even they have the gap.

A growing share of buying — B2B and B2C — starts inside an AI assistant. Here's how the agent actually chooses, and the two stages where sellers lose the deal before a human ever shows up.

Every checklist frames agent-readiness as something you complete. It isn't — it's something you maintain, and the decay is faster than anyone is admitting.

The best-resourced attempt at letting people buy inside ChatGPT got switched off — not because the payment rails were wrong, but because the data behind them was. That's the whole game.

Getting mentioned by an AI is the easy half. Everyone's optimising to be found. Almost nobody's checking whether the agent that finds them can actually complete the purchase.

In B2B, agents rarely fail at discovery. They fail in the messy middle — gated pricing, approval routing, PO requirements. Here's the map of where they walk away.