TL;DR: True agentic commerce — agents completing purchases autonomously — isn't quite here yet, but it's close. Merchants should start by getting their product catalog in shape, pilot with one accessible protocol (like UCP), and put payment monitoring and agent-intent tracking in place before volume grows. The biggest theme: don't lock into any single protocol. Design for flexibility, keep agent/token strategy decoupled from core business logic, and prioritize auditability, since the landscape is changing month to month.
Agentic commerce is one of the most talked-about shifts in payments today — but what does it actually mean for merchants trying to figure out where to start? I sat down with Jill Willard, CTO of IXOPAY, to talk through what's real right now, what merchants should be building toward, and how to avoid getting locked into the wrong approach.Â
Where to Start
Get the foundation right before you build for autonomous commerce.
Mary Ann: If a merchant wanted to start exploring agentic commerce, where should they begin?
Jill: It really depends on where you are on the maturity scale. But the very first thing to figure out is your product catalog. That's the most important piece. It's how AI agents are going to find you and what surfaces when they search for products. It's a lot like the early days of e-commerce: getting your catalog into good shape was job one.
Once that's in order, it becomes a question of which protocols to support, depending on where you want to show up and how you want your brand represented. Eventually, most merchants will want to support multiple protocols, but if you're just getting started, pick one. The Universal Commerce Protocol is a fairly approachable place to begin. Google provides a strict schema for the product catalog, which gives you real guidance, and the merchant integration process is relatively straightforward. Right now, that flow is still very much human-in-the-loop rather than fully autonomous checkout, which makes it a lower-risk way to get started.
Prepare the Payment Infrastructure
Monitor performance, verify intent, and create an auditable record from the start.
Mary Ann: What about payment infrastructure? Is there anything merchants should have in place specifically for agentic commerce?
Jill: There's real risk here, so you need to understand what you're taking on. Outside of Amex, the card brands aren't currently committing to cover chargebacks if an agent does something the customer didn't intend — that liability is largely falling on the merchant right now.
Monitoring is the number one priority. Payment intelligence and anomaly detection let you see when something's going wrong in your stack, and there are partner products that can get you there without heavy integration work. That's a reactive approach, but it's the easiest one to put in place, and it matters.
The second piece is verifying agent intent, meaning what the customer told the agent she wants to buy and the parameters. For example, I want to buy blue shoes in a size 9 that range in price from 50-100. You need a record of the customer’s original intent when making the purchase so you have a defense against disputes if something goes wrong. But it's also about more than chargebacks. Even without a formal dispute, getting the wrong item means a return and a bad customer experience.
Next, decide whether you want to let agents through — there are integrations, including some through Cloudflare, that can help confirm an agent is part of a recognized program, like the ones Mastercard or Visa are building. Beyond that, if you're using a tokenization solution, use it to store the agent's identity and intent alongside the payment credential. That way you know what the agent did, what it intended to do, and you have a replayable, auditable record sitting right next to the transaction.
Making sure the agent is verified, that it's buying what was actually intended, and that the whole thing is traceable through the platform — that's the goal.
Design for Interoperability
Start with one protocol, but build for a world where you’ll need many.
Mary Ann: Why does interoperability matter so much in agentic commerce? Is it something merchants really need to solve for?
Jill: It depends on the use case, honestly. But generally, merchants want as many customers as possible to be able to shop with them. Every agent coming online will support its own set of protocols, so as a merchant, you want to accept transactions from as many of them as you safely can. That's why it makes sense to start with one protocol and then expand from there. You don't want to block off a whole segment of customers just because you're not supporting a particular standard.
The landscape is changing so fast that a new protocol could show up next month, or an existing one could fade out. You're kind of building the plane while it's flying. Having the flexibility to support multiple protocols and to pivot as the industry shifts is exactly what we're trying to enable for our customers.
Build for Fluid Commerce
Your payment strategy needs to change as quickly as commerce does.
Mary Ann: You've used the term "fluid commerce" before. Can you talk about what that means and how merchants should design for it?
Jill: I really like that term. It captures where we are in payments and commerce right now. Things are constantly moving and never look quite the same from one moment to the next. E-commerce used to be simple: you put up a hosted form on your website and you were done. Since then, we've seen wave after wave of innovations and new strategies to support global businesses — fraud prevention, alternative payment methods, agentic commerce, multi-PSP strategies, expansion into new markets. Each of these forces you to move faster as your business and the industry evolve.
I recently asked someone if they knew what their payment strategy would look like in 24 months, and the honest answer was no. Five years ago, merchants signed multi-year deals with a single PSP and locked into a static strategy. Now most people can't tell you what next year looks like, let alone two years out. That's the fluidity — when your business changes, your payment strategy has to change with it, and when the industry changes, the same thing happens. You need the flexibility to respond to that.
Avoid Lock-In as the Landscape Evolves
Abstract the complexity so you can adopt new protocols without rebuilding.
Mary Ann: So committing too early to one protocol could really lock a merchant in?
Jill: Right. It's fine to experiment with one protocol and build on top of it, but you have to ask whether that's where you want to invest long-term, or whether it makes more sense to integrate with a partner who absorbs that changing landscape for you. That's where we think we provide real value — insulating merchants from a lot of that churn while still letting them participate in what might be the most exciting shift in payments since e-commerce began.
Mary Ann: Is there a good way for merchants to pilot agentic commerce without overcommitting to one platform? Does IXOPAY offer anything there?
Jill: We’ve just released Payment Agent that allows for a single integration supporting all the major protocols. The goal is to integrate once, get insulation across the different protocols, and stay supported as the landscape adds new ones or retires old ones. Our initial launch will support Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol, and we will keep adding on protocols from there.
Apply the Best Practices You Already Know
Decouple, abstract, and make every transaction auditable.
Mary Ann: Are there established best practices yet for agentic commerce specifically?
Jill: Honestly, not really — not ones that are unique to agentic commerce. The best practices are the same ones that have always mattered in payments. You want to make sure your agent strategy and your token strategy aren't tightly coupled to your business logic, so you can adapt as things change. That's been true since the earliest days of tokenization, and it's true here too.
Auditability is another one. You want to replay a transaction end-to-end with an immutable record. For agentic transactions specifically, that means the agent's identity and intent need to ride along with the transaction itself, which is exactly what we're building into our universal token, storing that metadata alongside the token so it's there whenever you need it.
None of this is new. These are core architectural practices that apply to any payment strategy. Agentic commerce just gives you a chance to apply them again. As a technologist, I don't think I've ever gotten it right the first time. There are probably a hundred e-commerce stacks out there where someone's thinking, "I wish I'd decoupled this" or "I wish I'd abstracted that." The good news about agentic commerce is that merchants can build those lessons in from the start.
Prepare Now, Adapt Later
Use this window to experiment, learn, and build flexibility in from the start.
Agentic commerce is still taking shape, but the merchants who benefit most won't be the ones who wait for it to fully arrive — they'll be the ones who use this window to prepare. That means treating the product catalog as foundational, picking one protocol to learn from rather than trying to support everything at once, and building payment monitoring and intent-tracking in from the start. Above all, it means resisting the urge to lock into a single approach in a landscape that's still very much being written. As Jill put it, none of this requires a new playbook — it just means applying the old one the way you always meant to.
None of this is new. These are core architectural practices that apply to any payment strategy. Agentic commerce just gives you a chance to apply them again. As a technologist, I don't think I've ever gotten it right the first time. There are probably a hundred e-commerce stacks out there where someone's thinking, "I wish I'd decoupled this" or "I wish I'd abstracted that." The good news about agentic commerce is that merchants can build those lessons in from the start.
