How an AI shopping agent reads a store, the protocols it buys through, and where checkout and payment stop it, with the sources for every claim. Setting up a store on one platform? The guides are step by step.
The basics
The term has no standard meaning: what Cloudflare, specification.website, Shopify and Stripe say, how Storewalk (ours) builds its Ready score, and why other tools’ scores cannot be compared with it.
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The basics
AI agents that find, compare and buy products for people: how Google, Stripe, Shopify, Visa and Forrester word it, how a purchase by an agent works, and which assistants can buy today.
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Choosing a tool
What isitagentready checks and what it leaves out, then ten other tools and test suites, Shopify’s own audit among them, each described from its own pages, with the question each can answer. One of them, Storewalk, is ours.
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Checkout and payment
Which part of a purchase UCP, ACP, MCP and AP2 each define, who backs them, what status each specification gives itself, and where they overlap.
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Checkout and payment
Tokenised and delegated payment: Stripe Shared Payment Tokens, ACP’s delegated payment, what Adyen’s and PayPal’s documents describe, Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol and AP2’s mandates.
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Checkout and payment
Challenges, required sign-in and card authentication: what the vendors’ documents say each does, how UCP and ACP handle sign-in, how ACP handles 3-D Secure, and what OAuth metadata tells an agent.
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Protocols
MCP, A2A and WebMCP: what each specification defines, what it could mean for a store that wants to offer tools to agents, and what status each gives itself.
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Protocols
The Agentic Commerce Protocol: the checkout session a store implements, the delegated payment token with its limits, and how the merchant stays merchant of record.
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Protocols
The Universal Commerce Protocol: the profile a store publishes at /.well-known/ucp, the capabilities it declares there, and the checkout flow from a new basket to a placed order.
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