Author
Alice Cui leads go-to-market and partnerships at Nile, the marketplace where AI agents discover, evaluate, and buy from real merchants. She writes about agentic commerce from the merchant side.
Agentic commerce is commerce where AI agents help shoppers discover, compare, decide, and sometimes buy. This guide covers how it works, the 2026 protocol stack (UCP, ACP, MCP, AP2), what AI agents need from product pages and feeds, how to measure AI visibility, and a 30/60/90 day plan for merchants.
Four AI agents said an in-stock product was backordered. Fixing the facts stopped the wrong answers, but it did not make the product recommended. A conversation with ecommerce practitioner Leo Nguyen on contested data, hallucinated policies, and the gap between being readable and being chosen.
Agentic commerce is not a chatbot on your website. It is a new channel, like search, marketplaces, or social, with its own rules for how products get discovered, evaluated, and recommended. The merchants who win will be the ones whose products agents can retrieve, understand, and trust.
