Agentic Commerce 201:

The challenges with agentic commerce

In order for agentic commerce to work, merchants will need to integrate product feeds, checkouts, fraud controls, delegated payments, and more. All of these integrations will impact the control that merchants have over their commerce experience, and will shape merchant outcomes.

The agentic commerce landscape is fragmented today with multiple agentic platforms, tools, and varying protocols, which make it a challenge for merchants to easily support agentic commerce. Additionally, with most agentic commerce transactions, merchants actually lose visibility into the customer data that they typically receive in a transaction today. For example, transactions via Perplexity Pro’s autonomous AI agent actually hide almost all significant customer data from a merchant – including email address, billing address, payment details, and account ID. The fragmentation of the ecosystem combined with this data loss challenge makes it difficult for merchants to maintain a consistent view of their customers across the entire customer journey.

What are some key questions for merchants to consider?

User Acquisition & Product Discovery

• If consumers are relying more on AI tools for search and discovery, how do you ensure that your products are discoverable and recommended by agentic platforms? Do you change how you acquire customers? Customer Experience
• If user information is hidden and you don’t know who a user is, how do you ensure that you’re delivering a great customer experience and building loyalty?
• With agentic transactions, who will take liability for fraud and customer disputes? Tech Stack
• Can your tech stack integrate with all of the providers and protocols in the agentic ecosystem? Fraud & Risk
• How can you distinguish fraudulent transactions from legitimate ones if they’re coming from an AI agent?

What are some of the key jobs-to-be-done for merchants for agentic commerce?

When it comes to ecommerce businesses, there are several key jobs-to-be-done to help ensure that you’re prepared for an AI future

Optimize for AI search & discovery

• Optimizing how your business and your products show up in AI tools (GEO-agent engine optimization) to ensure that you’re getting in front of your customers Customer Experience
• Ensuring that your product feeds are discoverable by LLMs and AI platforms, your checkout flows and payments infra can support a wide variety of agentic transactions, and protocols. Enhance the user experience
• Make sure that you’re providing the best user experience possible – for both humans and agents. This can range from how you use AI to deliver personalized product recommendations to ensuring that both humans/AI agents are able to navigate your site effectively Invest in building customer loyalty
• Evaluate how your approach to customer loyalty might need to change. Agentic commerce changes how merchants interact with their customers – as they’ll be shopping via AI agents alongside traditional channels and moving between them. Fraud & Risk
• Ensure that you have the right tools and processes to protect your business from the new risk challenges and opportunities for fraud stemming from AI and agentic commerce.

Next Steps:

• Share your business priorities and key challenges with agentic commerce with your Forter contact
• Set up a strategic consultation with Forter to explore different ways that we can support your business
• Sign up to be a member of our merchant coalition