Agentic commerce might be reshaping e-commerce. Instead of browsing multiple websites, consumers will soon rely on AI-powered agents that understand their needs and buy on their behalf. These agents will search, compare, and purchase often without the customer ever visiting a webshop.
Online shopping today depends on ads, search traffic, and direct visits. Soon, shoppers will simply tell an AI: “Find sustainable running shoes under €120 that can arrive by Friday.” The agent will then handle everything from comparing prices and delivery options to completing checkout.
This change will reduce traditional web traffic. Instead of clicks and pageviews, retailers will receive data requests from agents and platforms. The new ranking signals won’t be design or copywriting but data accuracy, delivery reliability, and clarity on returns or sustainability.
Agentic commerce will disrupt how retailers interact with customers. When AI agents make decisions, brands lose control over how products are presented. Webshops risk becoming invisible infrastructure rather than shopping destinations.
Without direct visitors, retailers will have fewer chances to influence, inspire, or upsell. Customer insights likewhat people browse, compare, or click will vanish. The ability to create emotional connections through storytelling and design will also fade.
To stay relevant, retailers must project their brand and value through structured data and APIs instead of visuals and UX. Those who adapt will remain visible in the new ecosystem; those who don’t may simply disappear from the agent’s shortlist.
Retailers should start by making product data understandable to machines. Use universal vocabulary of classes and properties for describing content, and optimal formats for markup of products, including GTINs, prices, stock levels, and return policies. Express details like delivery times and warranties as structured data, not text.
Develop agent-ready APIs for quoting, ordering, and availability. They should be secure, have idempotency controls, and provide webhooks for updates. Agents need to trust that your data reflects reality. And as ranking moves from Google to AI ecosystems, reliable data and clear service levels will determine visibility.
It's also important to engage in dialogue with your payment provider to understand their take on what is needed to execute payments when agents are involved, and/or consumer engages with your webshop through an AI-interface.
Retailers can go further by building their own “merchant agents.” These can negotiate, respond to buyer queries, and manage inventory or pricing automatically.
To integrate effectively, ensure your systems support retrieval by LLMs. Keeping product and policy data current and providing structured representations for delivery and returns will become important so agents can reason with certainty.
Agentic commerce offers big rewards: lower acquisition costs, higher conversion from high-intent buyers, and access through new channels like chat or voice. But it comes with risk. Brands could lose identity, pricing power, and customer relationships. Agents may even misrepresent products or policies if data is incomplete.
The fix is transparency. Supply verified, high-quality data and make sure agents can retrieve the latest information. Keep building post-purchase relationships through service, loyalty programs, and personalized follow-ups.
Payment service providers will play a pivotal role in the success of agentic commerce. Retailers will depend on PSPs that can securely process payments initiated not by humans, but by digital agents acting on their behalf. Payments and authentication will take place outside of the webshop, e.g. inside the AI interface. This shift changes how PSPs must design their systems, authenticate users, and think about their own role in the value chain.
Today, large players are launching their take on the future:
• Stripe and OpenAI launching their Agentic Commerce Protocol
• Google with their agentic payments protocol
• Visa actively experimenting with AI agents
• Mastercard launching their Agent Pay
PSPs will need to evolve from simple payment gateways into programmable payment platforms that can support agent-native, API-driven commerce. This means offering intent-based payment APIs that handle quotes, authorizations, captures, and refunds in a way that enables agents to play their role in their transaction. Payments must work seamlessly without a human present, while remaining compliant and secure.
Security and authentication will be central. PSPs must ensure secure payment and authentication to let consumers approve transactions safely through trusted devices or accounts, even if the order was placed by an agent elsewhere. They should also integrate network tokenization to improve security and enable recurring transactions without exposing sensitive card data.
A forward-looking PSP will also need to embrace Open Banking and A2A payments, supporting PSD2/PSD3 and ISO 20022 standards to enable direct account-to-account flows. Agents will increasingly prefer these rails for instant settlement and lower costs. To stay competitive, PSPs must offer unified APIs across cards, wallets, and banking networks.
Risk management must also evolve. PSPs should introduce “agent channel” as a distinct signal in their fraud and AML models, combining device trust, merchant reputation, and cryptographic proof of consent. Every agent transaction must be logged, signed, and auditable — creating a verifiable chain of trust between the consumer, the agent, and the merchant.
Ultimately, to be a good supplier in this new era, PSPs must think less like transaction processors and more like infrastructure partners. They will need to help retailers design agent-ready payment flows, guide them on regulatory compliance for delegated consent, and provide the monitoring and analytics needed to understand agent behavior. Those PSPs that can offer secure, flexible, and interoperable APIs will become the strategic enablers of agentic commerce — while those who cling to legacy checkout models risk being bypassed entirely.
Agentic commerce, if successfull and adopted by users, isn’t a distant future, it’s emerging now as AI agents integrate into phones, browsers, and operating systems. Retailers and PSPs that act early by exposing structured data, agent-ready APIs, and secure payment rails will capture new demand as traditional traffic patterns fade.
The shift rewards clarity, interoperability, and trust. But it also threatens to hollow out the traditional webshop model. The next frontier of e-commerce won’t be about who has the best-looking website, it will be about who agents trust most, and which PSPs enable that trust to translate seamlessly into secure, instant, and verifiable payments.
At Aera Payment and Identification, we make payments and ID services simple, secure, and seamless. Our solutions give businesses more control over transactions and data—whether in-store, online, or through digital wallets.
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