A path to buy exists

What we check

After reading and rendering your homepage, we look for any path to buy: a cart or checkout URL found during the crawl, a payment provider detected on your pages, or a recognised store platform (Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, PrestaShop, Salesforce Commerce). This check speaks only when none of those is found.

Why it matters

An AI shopping agent that can read your site but finds no cart, checkout or payment path cannot buy anything; it sees the same empty site we saw. However good the rest of the scan looks, a site that lists products with no way to buy them is not ready for agent commerce. This is a floor check: any purchase path counts, traditional or agent-native. The linked protocols give context but do not define it. It overlaps with the guest-checkout and CAPTCHA checks and gives the weakest signal of the three.

How we check

We require that your homepage was actually read (not a bot wall, not an unread page) and that its render completed, so a JavaScript-built checkout is never mistaken for an absent one. We FAIL only when all of that holds and still no cart, checkout, payment provider or recognised store platform was found. We SKIP (never FAIL) when the homepage could not be read, when its render did not complete, or when any purchase path is present (a discovered cart or checkout URL, a detected payment provider, or a recognised store platform).

How to fix it

1. Publish a cart and a checkout an agent can reach at a plain URL that returns the page, not only behind a JavaScript action.
2. Or expose a payment path an agent can discover: a recognised store platform, a payment provider, or an agent-checkout manifest (see TRX-004).
3. If this site is not a store, you do not need to do anything; this check only applies to sites meant to sell.

What good looks like

An agent reaching your site finds a reachable cart and checkout (for example /cart and /checkout that return the page), or a detected payment provider, or a recognised commerce platform. Any one of these is a path to complete a purchase.

Sources

• Agentic Commerce Protocol (agent-native purchase context)
• Universal Commerce Protocol (agent-native purchase context)

Read more

• Why agents stall at checkout

  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.