Agentic Commerce: Why E-shops Should Care Today
AI agents are beginning to shop for customers — finding products, comparing options, and completing purchases. It sounds like the future, but the foundations are being laid right now. How will these changes affect e-shops and their payment processes? Anton Drozda from BigWay and Tina Hanusová from Payout One share their insights.
The idea of an AI assistant shopping for a customer might sound like distant science fiction. In reality, this shift is already starting—in how people search for products, how e-shops manage their data, and how the underlying payment infrastructure is evolving.
Every major shift in online sales has followed the same rule: those who prepared early gained the lead. This was true for the first e-shops, mobile shopping, and instant payments. Agentic commerce will be no exception.
For e-shops, the question isn't *if* this change will arrive, but *when* they should start preparing for it. Let’s look at why now is the right time to address a future where AI will increasingly act on behalf of customers.
A Shift in How People Search and Buy
The way we search for things online is gradually changing. Not long ago, we entered a keyword into a search engine, opened several pages, and compared options ourselves. Today, it’s completely common to open a map app, type "coffee shop nearby," and decide based on more than just the name—we look at distance, ratings, opening hours, or availability. We expect technology to help us choose the best option based on our specific situation.
The same shift is coming to shopping. Instead of clicking through dozens of products, we can tell an AI assistant: "Find me a laptop under €800 for work that can be delivered by Friday." The assistant evaluates options, compares specifications, and can gradually complete the entire purchase.
For e-shops, this represents a fundamental change. Until now, optimization was primarily focused on humans—their eyes, emotions, and on-page experience. Now, a new type of visitor is emerging: the AI agent. It doesn't see design or banners; it reads data, parameters, and information to decide which store to recommend.
Building E-shops Differently Today
The good news is that agentic commerce doesn't mean e-shops have to rebuild everything from scratch tomorrow. Much of what will be crucial for AI agents is already what high-quality websites are working on today.
Just like search engines, AI needs clear signals: well-structured information, accurate product data, real-time availability, fast loading speeds, and content it can understand. These are the same factors that help e-shops gain visibility in search results today.
Anyone building a quality website for customers and search engines today is simultaneously laying the groundwork for a future with AI agents. This isn't a massive reconstruction project for the future; it's how a modern e-shop should be built right now.
When we build a new e-shop today, we address two things at once—how a human will navigate it and how machines/bots crawling the site will understand it. A few years ago, the latter mainly meant Google. Today, AI assistants are joining the mix, but the principle remains the same: if they cannot reliably find the price, availability, parameters, or delivery terms in a format they understand, you simply won't make it into their recommendations. In practice, there’s no revolution behind this, though it might seem so at first glance. It’s about structured data, clean product feeds, correctly filled attributes, real-time inventory levels, and a technically healthy e-shop that loads quickly and doesn’t break with a larger catalog. These are things that help an e-shop today—in search results, price comparison tools, and ad campaigns. The difference is that with the arrival of AI agents, these stop being a 'bonus' and become the 'entry ticket' to being compared at all. The most frequent mistake we see is that an e-shop is handed over after development, and the owner considers the job done. Over time, the catalog grows, variants are added, suppliers change—and the data gradually falls apart. Descriptions contradict each other, availability is wrong, half the attributes are missing. On the surface, the e-shop works, and a customer might not notice. But bots read exactly what is in the data and in what form. That’s why regular work on the e-shop, its products, and categories is just as important as its development: without regular data audits and technical maintenance, even a well-built project will end up exactly where you don't want it within a year. We recommend several basic things to e-shop owners today: keep your data in order, maintain a clear structure, ensure functional analytics, and use reliable payment gateways that allow either real users or their agents to complete the purchase. Thanks to this preparation, they won't have to scramble to catch up when agentic commerce becomes a standard part of e-commerce in our region.
Changes to What Happens After Selection – The Payment Itself
The biggest shift in agentic commerce doesn't happen on the e-shop's landing page, but in the final step: the payment.
Today, a human confirms the payment. However, if an AI agent initiates it, the entire principle of trust changes. It’s no longer just about whether the right user is paying, but whether the agent has the authorization to act on their behalf and send money to the correct destination.
The future of payments, therefore, will not just be about verifying a human, but also about verifying a digital representative, its permissions, and the rules under which it can make decisions.
Imagine we want to buy a new phone today. We open an e-shop, search for a model, compare specs, track the price, and eventually confirm the payment ourselves. In the future, however, this process could look completely different. A person will give an AI agent a simple request—for example: 'Find me the best phone under €500 that can be delivered by Friday and handle the whole purchase.' The AI agent can then search for options, evaluate them based on the criteria, select a specific product, and complete the order, including the payment. This is the new direction we call agentic commerce—trading where the purchase is not performed directly by a human, but by a digital representative acting on their behalf. This fundamentally changes how we view trust in payments. Until now, the main question was simple: 'Is this really the person making the payment?' With AI agents, the question shifts: 'Is this truly my agent, and is it acting within the permissions I granted it?' Suddenly, it's not just about payment verification, but about identity, authorization, and trust between a human and their digital proxy. It will be crucial to know what an AI agent can do independently, what decisions it can make, and where it requires user confirmation. The future of payments, therefore, won’t just be about cards or one-click buttons. It will increasingly be about digital identity, the ability to evaluate risk, understanding user behavior, and safely delegating decisions to technology.
What This Means for E-shops and Why to Prepare Today
Agentic commerce presents two main challenges for e-shops. The first is being understandable to AI—having high-quality data, content, and structure so an agent can find the store, understand the offer, and recommend it to the customer. The second is a reliable payment infrastructure that securely completes the purchase even when the decision is made by software.
These two parts must work together. The best e-shop in the world won't help if the customer or AI agent cannot complete the purchase. Conversely, a high-quality payment process is useless if the customer never reaches it.
Preparing for this change doesn't mean starting from zero. Many of the steps that will be vital for AI—quality data, a clear website, and reliable payments—are the foundations of good e-commerce today.
Agentic commerce won't start in a few years. The first changes are arriving now, and those who prepare in advance will gain an advantage that will be difficult to catch up with later.
Those who start connecting technology, data, and payments today won't just be reacting to change. They will be among those shaping the next era of online shopping.