The 4 Building Blocks for a Successful Merchant Agentic Strategy

As agentic commerce continues to move at a rapid pace, agentic protocols and start-up consortia are at the center of the dialogue, often leaving merchants out of the conversation. One of the biggest unanswered questions remains: 'How will agentic commerce impact merchants?'

VGS takes the point of view that agentic commerce is an overwhelmingly positive development for merchants. If prepared, merchants can capitalize on new traffic sources and safeguard themselves from fundamental shifts in consumer behavior. We do not think it's wise for merchants to take the approach of preventing agentic commerce.

At VGS, we have been filtering through the noise and talking to countless agent platforms, protocol creators, PSPs and networks, and enterprise merchants to narrow down a list of what merchants should focus on when it comes to agentic commerce.

In this blog, we'll explore four essential pillars merchants should focus on when developing their agentic commerce strategy:

• Bot detection/agent identification
• Searchability
• Cart creation
• Transacting

Bot Detection/Agent Identification

The first step to enabling agentic commerce on any merchant website is making sure the agent can access and navigate the merchant website.

Agentic commerce involves agents, which can often look like “bots” on a webpage. Merchants appropriately spent years implementing software to detect and block malicious bots.

So how do they decipher between bots and agents?

Merchants may need to retrain their bot detection models to ensure that legitimate transactions made by an agent on behalf of a real person are not blocked. This is particularly relevant for recurring billing, travel companies, and ticketing sites that utilize sophisticated bot detection and blocking software. However, all merchants need to be able to detect agents in order to transact securely on agentic commerce platforms.

What to track: Cloudflare, 402 initiative with Coinbase, the Networks

Searchability

The second step is to ensure that, once an agent arrives at a merchant website, they can easily find what they are looking for.

Whether it's a SKU, product description, or pricing, merchants need to enable agents to find their products on their website easily.

When an agent visits a merchant's website, the merchant wants to ensure that the agent can retrieve specific details to surface relevant products as options for customers. If the agent cannot obtain accurate product details, it will not display the merchant's products to consumers. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) was established to define these standards, which merchants should understand and build to.

Early adoption of MCP standards by merchants will lead to increased visibility on AI platforms. Do this now if you haven't yet.

Cart Creation

The third step is to guarantee that agents can successfully create a shopping cart on the merchant's website.

Agents need the ability to create, manage, and process a cart on a merchant's website. Without this, an agent can't check out on behalf of a customer.

For cart creation to occur, merchants must remove friction points on checkout pages that hinder an agent's ability to place an order. This includes eliminating redundant screens, streamlining inputs, offering a headless checkout API or embedded flow, and avoiding CAPTCHA, as well as other puzzles that keep agents from creating a cart.

Transacting

Lastly, once an agent has cleared all of the above hurdles and is ready to complete a purchase, merchants need to verify that the transaction goes through and that they receive payment credentials in their desired form.

Merchants need to ensure that every purchase goes through seamlessly when their customer is ready to buy through an agent.

There is a litany of options available today that aim to define the final mile of commerce for merchants; however, when you break it down to its core, merchants simply want to be able to determine how they receive and process agent-based transactions, just as they do today.

There are only a few payment options:

• Primary Account Number (PAN)
• Network Token
• Agentic Token (Visa Intelligent Commerce, MasterCard Agent Pay)
• Virtual Card
• PSP Tokens
• Wallets
• Blockchain

But not all payment options are created equal. Let's take a look.

Transacting is a crucial step in the payment journey, as it ensures the merchant receives payment from the customer through an agent. Our reaction so far is that merchants seem to be searching for a singular path. We think the reality is that any merchant interacting with different agents may need to support multiple options. It's not crazy to imagine a world where an agent uses Apple Pay or PayPal to perform the User Agent handshake, and a second agent uses network-generated agentic tokens. Our advice is to analyze your current capabilities and ensure they are agent-ready.