Agentic commerce
Agentic commerce is shopping carried out by an AI agent acting on a person’s behalf. The shopper states an intent, software finds candidate products, compares them and completes the purchase, and the shopper may never load the storefront at all.
The distinction from ordinary ecommerce is who reads the page. For two decades a storefront has been built for a human eye arriving on a layout. An agent reads data: text, structured markup, feeds and forms. It cannot hover, it will not wait for a carousel to rotate, and it will not infer a returns policy from a graphic.
So agentic commerce is a second audience with a different set of requirements, sitting on top of the same catalogue. A store can be excellent for shoppers and unreadable to agents, and nothing on the storefront says so.
Why it matters to a store
An agent purchase you lose is lost silently. There is no bounce to inspect, because the agent never rendered a page your analytics were counting. The only way to know how a store performs with agents is to have one attempt the journey and report where it stopped.