AI Commerce: Merchants Must Adapt or Be Left Behind
AI commerce is revolutionizing the retail landscape, and merchants must adapt to survive. Failure to meet its technical demands results in exclusion from the agentic web, as outlined by recent industry insights.
To thrive, merchants must master variant-level schema, real-time sync infrastructure, and protocol-ready checkout APIs. Outdated batch feeds and legacy checkout flows will leave them behind. Payment and checkout integration is non-negotiable, requiring support for Google Pay, Stripe, tokenized payments, and API-first checkout across protocols.
Retailers and brands must invest in structured data, overhaul feed infrastructure, align checkout APIs, and design API-first architectures. API-first checkout flows are essential, with programmatic access to cart, shipping, and tax calculation, and no CAPTCHA or bot-blocking measures. Outdated data kills trust in AI commerce, necessitating real-time feed infrastructure with Google-level refresh cycles and instant inventory and pricing updates.
Companies investing in structured product catalogs, real-time data infrastructure, and API-enabled checkout flows can dominate new transaction layers. Schema.org markup is the baseline for structured data, including complete product schema, nested offer schemas, aggregate rating data, brand and organization entities, and individual SKUs with precise pricing and stock availability. In the AI era, structured data is the 'currency of existence' for product discovery.
AI commerce is unforgiving, and the cost of exclusion is existential. Only technically compliant merchants will survive. Those capable of meeting its demands, such as large e-commerce platforms and retailers leveraging advanced PIM systems, will thrive in the new transaction environments.
