AI agents already navigate catalogs, assemble carts, and execute purchases; what’s missing is a universal, merchant-controlled interface. The Open Agentic Commerce API defines that interface. It standardizes how agents and services discover a merchant’s capabilities, retrieve products and offers, create orders with deterministic totals (items, tax, shipping, discounts), and settle payments across existing and emerging rails—while preserving merchant security, policy, and brand.
This specification meets merchants where they are. A .well-known Manifest publishes endpoints and policies; Schema.org–aligned data ensures interoperable product and order semantics; order creation returns the full payable amount before settlement; a unified pay endpoint connects to current processors and agent-native rails; and modular authentication maps precise methods to each endpoint. The result is a predictable contract that reduces bespoke integration work, improves observability and control, and accelerates time-to-live for new channels.
What this spec defines:
See How to View for a stakeholder-focused reading guide (merchants, agents, platforms, and aggregators) and the specific value each derives from adopting this contract.
Treat this as your direct path to agent-driven sales without replatforming. You expose a single, predictable interface on top of what you already run, keeping complete control of pricing, inventory, fraud rules, and brand. The spec lowers integration cost for partners, opens new acquisition channels, and lets you turn on richer automation (quotes, carts, and fulfillment) at your pace with clear guardrails.
This gives you one consistent contract to discover products, assemble orders, and settle transactions across many merchants. You integrate once, get clean, machine-readable data, and transact with deterministic totals and clear outcomes. Fewer bespoke adapters, fewer edge cases, faster time-to-live, so you can focus on user experience instead of chasing one-off integrations.
Use the spec as a blueprint to standardize how all your merchants are discovered, queried, and transacted with. You can ship unified SDKs and tooling, reduce custom work per tenant, and add observability, rate limits, and compliance in one place. The result is faster merchant onboarding, new agent-driven channels, and a more straightforward path to platform-wide features.