MCP and AI basics
Agentic commerce
Shopping in which an AI agent researches, compares and sometimes completes purchases for a person. It turns product data, policies and checkout reliability into machine-readable priorities for merchants.
Agentic commerce is shopping where an AI agent does part of the work for the buyer: finding products, comparing options, checking policies and in some cases completing the purchase. Instead of a person browsing a storefront, software reads structured data from the store and acts on the person's instructions.
For merchants it changes what 'being found' means. An agent does not look at your theme; it reads titles, descriptions, attributes, prices, availability and policies through endpoints such as Shopify's catalog and cart MCP, and through the commerce protocols built for this purpose. Thin descriptions, missing attributes and unclear return rules make a store easy to skip.
The field is young and the standards are still moving. The practical work today is data quality: audit product data, keep policies clear and machine-readable, confirm which endpoints your platform exposes, and measure whatever sales arrive through these channels so you can tell whether they matter.