Something is changing about how your software gets bought – and it is not your pricing page. The customer journey your funnel was built around is being rerouted. In 2026, AI agents are not just helping buyers research software; they are doing the research, making the decision, and completing the purchase.
This is agentic commerce. And for software and digital goods sellers, it is the most structurally important shift in buying behavior since mobile commerce arrived.
What Is Agentic Commerce?
eCommerce has evolved in three distinct stages. In the first generation, a customer opened a browser, searched for a product, and manually completed a checkout form. In the second, AI assists: a tool recommends a product, the buyer evaluates it, and the human completes the transaction. In the third stage, the AI agent acts autonomously. It researches options, selects a vendor, applies a payment token, and confirms the purchase. The human reviews a notification afterward.
This third stage is agentic commerce: autonomous purchasing with delegated authority. The buyer is still in control – they set the parameters and grant permission – but the execution is entirely machine-driven.
This is not a future concept. Alipay processed 120 million AI-agent transactions in a single week in February 2026. Microsoft Copilot Checkout launched in January 2026. Shopify’s Agentic Storefronts – one admin toggle connecting a merchant’s catalog to ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, and Copilot – launched in Winter 2026. Every major payment network – Mastercard, Visa, PayPal – announced an agentic commerce product within a twelve-month window. The infrastructure is live. The question is whether your store is ready for it.
The market numbers reflect the pace. The agentic AI in retail and eCommerce market was valued at $46.74 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $218 billion by 2031. McKinsey estimates agentic commerce could redirect $3-5 trillion in global retail spend by 2030. These are not rounding errors – they are structural redirections of commerce volume.
Why Software Sellers Are in the Crosshairs
Not every business feels agentic commerce equally. Physical goods and location-based services have natural friction that slows AI adoption. Software, digital subscriptions, and SaaS products are the ideal candidates for agentic purchasing – structured data, API-accessible catalogs, programmable billing – and the ones most at risk from becoming invisible to AI agents.
- B2B procurement is already being automated. Gartner projects that by 2028, 90% of B2B buying will be AI-agent intermediated, routing over $15 trillion through agent-to-agent exchanges. Software procurement is at the front of that wave. 67% of B2B buyers already prefer a rep-free purchasing experience, and 45% used AI tools in a recent purchase decision.
- Discovery is moving off traditional search. Adobe Analytics recorded a 4,700% year-over-year increase in AI-driven visits to US retail sites in 2025. AI-referred shoppers convert 31% higher, generate 254% more revenue per visit, and spend 45% more time on-site compared to visitors from traditional channels.
- Subscription management is a natural AI use case. AI agents are ideal for monitoring usage, recommending plan upgrades, executing renewals, and negotiating retention offers. If your renewal flow is not agent-accessible, a competitor with a cleaner API may capture those renewals.
→ Explore how Agentic AI is shaping the future of eCommerce, subscriptions, and digital growth at CommerceNow’25.
The Three Things You Need to Get Right
Agentic readiness comes down to three dimensions: discoverability, transactability, and trust. Get all three right, and you are well-positioned for the wave. Miss any one, and you will lose pipeline you cannot see or measure.
1. Discoverability – Can AI Agents Find and Understand Your Product?
This is the first step of your journey to agentic commerce. The practice of structuring your product data so that generative AI engines surface it in their responses – rather than directing users to a search results page – is called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Think of it as the new SEO imperative for digital commerce in 2026.
GEO is not about keyword stuffing. It is about structured data: accurate pricing, rich schema markup, product descriptions that answer intent-based queries in natural language, and API-accessible catalogs. Adobe reported a 12x jump in AI-referred retail traffic between July 2024 and February 2025. The merchants capturing that traffic have made their product data readable for AI – not just crawlable by search bots.
eMarketer estimates that 31.3% of the US population will use generative AI search in 2026 – a share growing fast enough that the question is no longer whether AI-referred traffic matters, but when it exceeds traditional search for your category.
2. Transactability – Can an AI Agent Complete the Purchase?
This is where checkout design becomes an infrastructure challenge. AI agents cannot navigate multi-step checkout flows, CAPTCHA challenges, pop-ups, or visual redirects. If your checkout requires manual form-filling or hosted payment pages that rely on visual interaction, an agent will likely fail, abandon the flow, or route to a competitor with a cleaner path.
It’s also important to note that in many regions (e.g., under EU PSD2 Strong Customer Authentication rules), payment confirmation requires initial human authentication and explicit user consent. This means fully autonomous end-to-end payments without any human involvement are generally not possible in regulated markets. However, once a payment method is authenticated and tokenized, subsequent transactions can often be executed programmatically within the permissions granted by the user.
Agent-friendly checkout in practice means:
- Clean, API-accessible checkout endpoints – no hosted payment pages requiring visual interaction.
- Token-based payment support – store credentials with user consent and reuse them programmatically.
- Machine-readable order confirmation – structured API responses, not HTML pages meant for human interpretation.
- No CAPTCHA on agent-expected flows – or smart routing that allows legitimate agent traffic while blocking abuse.
If you are already on an API-first commerce platform, you are likely closer to agent-ready than you think. The key question is whether your checkout has been tested against agent-initiated flows.
→ Identify the friction points in your checkout that block both humans and agents: read the 2Checkout Payment Friction Map.
3. Trust – Are Your Transactions Protected When No Human Is Present?
This is the most urgent near-term challenge. 78% of financial institutions expect fraud to spike from AI shopping agents. When no human is in the checkout loop, traditional authentication assumptions break down – the shift from card-not-present to person-not-present creates entirely new risk vectors.
However, in most regulated markets fully autonomous end-to-end payments without human authentication are not yet permitted, so these systems remain in development and testing rather than production use.
The industry is converging on tokenized credentials as the solution. Mastercard’s Agentic Tokens are cryptographically secure credentials scoped to specific agents, merchants, and transaction parameters. Your payment provider needs to support these standards and have agent-aware fraud detection – not just traditional bot-detection logic that flags legitimate agent traffic as suspicious.
The emerging Know Your Agent (KYA) framework – analogous to KYC but applied to software agents – is also in development. It aims to provide clear delegation audit trails so that when an AI agent completes a purchase on a customer’s behalf, the action is cryptographically traceable and disputes can be resolved cleanly, once regulatory and infrastructure frameworks fully mature.
GEO: The New SEO You Cannot Afford to Ignore
Search engine optimization was the defining digital acquisition skill of the 2010s. Generative Engine Optimization is the equivalent for the 2020s – and the window to build early advantage is now.
AI platforms – ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot – are increasingly the first stop in the software buying journey. Merchants who are not structured for AI discovery will lose first-party traffic without knowing it: the buyer never visits your site, never sees your ad, and never triggers an analytics event.
The GEO checklist for software sellers:
- Structured product data with schema markup – price, features, availability, and reviews in a format AI can parse and act on.
- Conversational content answering real buyer questions – the natural-language queries typed into AI assistants, not keyword strings aimed at search crawlers.
- Accurate, current pricing pages – AI agents will not complete a purchase if catalog data contradicts the pricing page.
- API-accessible product catalog – agents that can query your data directly are more likely to surface your products.
- Fast, reliable APIs – agents evaluate response time as a signal of merchant trustworthiness.
BigCommerce has published practical GEO implementation guidance for eCommerce contexts. eMarketer’s 2026 FAQ on GEO and AEO is the most comprehensive framework available for understanding where to prioritize your efforts.
What This Means for Your Payment Infrastructure
You do not need to rebuild your stack from scratch – but you do need to audit it against agentic requirements. The payment infrastructure that works best for agentic commerce shares four characteristics:
- API-first: while some agents can interact with traditional checkout flows, APIs provide the reliability, speed, and programmability needed for scalable autonomous transactions. Clean API endpoints are the non-negotiable baseline.
- Subscription-native: AI agents will manage software subscriptions programmatically – plan changes, upgrades, autonomous renewals. Billing APIs built for human-initiated cycles will not handle agent-initiated lifecycle events gracefully.
- Globally capable: AI agents purchase globally without geographic awareness. Your payment layer needs to handle currency conversion, local payment methods, and VAT/tax compliance invisibly, within the transaction.
- Compliance-managed: when there is no human in the loop, tax jurisdiction and fraud liability cannot be managed manually. A Merchant of Record model handles this at the platform level.
→ Explore the 2Checkout API datasheet to see how API-first billing supports automation, subscriptions, and global scalability.
The Merchant of Record model is particularly well-suited to agentic commerce. In agent-driven transactions there is no human to handle edge cases – no one to respond to a tax jurisdiction mismatch or confirm a VAT number. A platform that absorbs that complexity at the infrastructure level becomes a prerequisite for reliable agentic commerce at scale.
→ Learn how 2Checkout’s Merchant of Record model handles tax, compliance, and cross-border complexity.
For SaaS sellers thinking about subscription revenue protection: as AI agents manage customers’ software portfolios more aggressively – canceling unused subscriptions, renegotiating pricing – merchants with the most resilient retention infrastructure will protect revenue that others lose quietly.
→ See how advanced payment retry logic and smart dunning protect SaaS revenue from involuntary churn.
Where to Start: Your Agentic Commerce Action List
Agentic commerce is not coming. It is already running at scale in markets like China, structurally supported by live infrastructure from every major payment network, and actively intermediating software purchase decisions in enterprise B2B procurement. For Western-market software sellers, the early-mover window is open – but it will not stay open.
The three actions that will have the most impact in the next 12 months:
- Audit your product discoverability for AI. Treat GEO as a current-quarter priority. Start with your pricing page, feature descriptions, and schema markup. Ask: if a buyer described your ideal use case to ChatGPT, would your product appear in the response?
- Test your checkout against agent-initiated flows. Identify the CAPTCHA, redirect, and multi-step friction points that cause agent abandonment. The same friction that costs 2-3% of human conversion will cost 100% of agent-initiated transactions.
- Confirm your payment infrastructure is agent-ready. Token-based credentials, agent-aware fraud detection, invisible cross-border compliance, and subscription APIs built for programmatic lifecycle management.
The merchants who move now will capture AI-referred traffic that converts 31% higher and generates 254% more revenue per visit than traditional channels. The ones who wait will lose pipeline they cannot see or measure – which is the worst kind of loss.
Want to learn more about how AI is transforming software and SaaS businesses?
→ Explore the top AI trends shaping growth, automation, and customer experience.
The post Agentic Commerce 101: What Software Sellers Need to Know About AI-Powered Buying appeared first on The 2Checkout Blog | Articles on eCommerce, Payments, CRO and more.
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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