alt Hacker NewsClaude is finally entering the agentic commerce race, but as a buyer, why would I want to limit myself to stores Claude or even ChatGPT whitelist? LLMs are slowly eating away the moat that marketplaces have since an agent in the terminal can scour the web and find the product you need without the product search dark patterns and sponsored products everywhere.
Automating the checkout is tricky, but with WebMCP, I feel like agents will be able to go and checkout directly on websites soon. I myself am building an open-source agentic commerce chat that uses MCP-UI under the hood and brings the full checkout experience to the chat.
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I would rather not let agent use checkout. I think they are not "smart" enough to tell scam from real website apart. Even recently Claude/Opus referred me to scammers website telling me to buy a product there.
I would suggest that bringing the "full checkout experience" to chat is backward thinking--that approach adds more friction than a traditional checkout. The ideal flow is when checkout happens behind-the-scenes and the chat is simply a confirmation of purchase.