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Stripe Inc. continues its push to build an agentic commerce infrastructure late Thursday with the launch of its Agentic Commerce Suite. The new solution helps merchants use artificial intelligence-based agents to sell across multiple AI shopping platforms via a single integration to Stripe.
In addition, Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Suite supports shared payment tokens that allow AI agents to securely pass a consumer’s payment credentials to a merchant or business to enable the transaction.
Several brands, merchants and e-commerce platforms have already committed to integrate Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Suite including fashion brands Coach, Kate Spade, retailer Ashley Furniture, e-commerce marketplace Etsy, and e-commerce platforms Wix.com Ltd., BigCommerce Inc., and WooCommerce.
The launch of the Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Suite builds on the September release of the fintech’s Agentic Commerce Protocol, which was developed with ChatGPT.
For e-commerce platforms such as Wix, integrating Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Suite into its platform helps build the infrastructure needed to support agentic commerce within the e-commerce and payments ecosystems, says Shahar Friedman, head of fintech business development for Wix.
“This is part of the necessary infrastructure work at the industry level to enable businesses to be at the forefront of agentic commerce,” Friedman says.
Wix, which partners with Stripe for payments technology, was an early supporter of Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Protocol. “Adopting Stripe Agentic Commerce Suite is a natural extension of our strategic relationship with Stripe,” Friedman adds.
For Stripe, the push into agentic commerce is a way create new sales channels to help merchants drive traffic and more transactions, and handle existing traffic in an automated fashion, says Cliff Gray, principal at Gray Consulting.
“Why not let an AI agent handle the sale or provide customer service rather than pay a human to do it,” says Gray.
Despite the promise agentic commerce holds, concerns about merchants’ and consumers’ comfort level with the technology have arisen. A recent study by Global Payments reveals that 42% of businesses say they would be concerned if AI agents started buying from them on behalf of consumers, while 36% said no, and 22% said they were not sure. The primary reservations businesses have about agentic commerce are security, fraud prevention, and dispute resolution.
“If agentic commerce is properly designed and implemented it can probably do a better job than a human, but if it is poorly designed and implemented, it can do more harm than good, which is why people need to be careful with it,” Gray says.
One key to overcoming concerns about the use of agentic commerce technology is building trust in the technology. “In order to push agentic commerce forward, trust in the technology needs to be established and that fact that established players in the payments ecosystem such as Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, and Wix are adopting the technology helps build that trust,” Friedman says.
