← Stu Mason
live · open source
Agentic commerce

Your next customer
isn't a human.

A storefront built so an AI agent can find it, understand it, and buy from it on its own. No browser, no card form. Here is a complete purchase, unattended.

agent buying, unattended
discoverGET /llms.txt → catalogue, schema, MCP endpoints
selectmcp: search_products("single origin, whole bean")
checkoutPOST /checkout → 402 Payment Required
settlex402: pay 12.00 USDC on Base → tx 0x9f…2a confirmed
fulfilledPOST /checkout (X-PAYMENT: 0x9f…2a) → 200 order #1043
Watch me walk through it

Watch an AI agent discover the shop, fill a cart and pay on-chain with no human in the loop, walked through live.

The hard part

Agents can't shop a normal store.

A human-facing shop assumes eyes, a browser and a card. An autonomous buyer has none of those. Two problems have to be solved at once.

Discovery

Scraping HTML is brittle and rude. An agent needs a declared surface: what is for sale, how to search it, how to buy. That is what /llms.txt and an MCP shopping interface provide, a store that describes itself in a form a model can act on.

Payment

An agent has no card and shouldn't hold one. x402 revives HTTP 402 Payment Required: the server quotes a price in USDC, the agent settles on Base and retries with proof. Payment becomes a protocol step, not a form to fill in.

The surfaces an agent uses

Four ways in, all machine-first.

Each is a real, deployed endpoint, not a diagram. An agent uses them the way a person uses a shopfront.

/llms.txt

A machine-readable map of the store: what it sells, how to search it, where the MCP and ACP endpoints live. The first thing an agent reads, served live.

Shopping MCP

Search, inspect and add to cart as typed tool calls. An agent shops the catalogue the same way a person browses, without scraping HTML.

Agentic Commerce Protocol

A standard surface for agent-driven checkout, so the shop speaks the emerging language of autonomous buyers rather than a bespoke API.

Admin MCP, OAuth-scoped

Order and inventory tools behind OAuth, so an operator (or their assistant) manages the shop through the same typed interface, safely.

The purchase path

One agent, five moves, zero humans.

  1. 01The agent reads the shop

    It fetches /llms.txt, learns the catalogue and the available MCP tools. No human, no browser, no scraping. The store describes itself in a form a model can act on.

  2. 02It chooses and builds a cart

    Through the shopping MCP it searches, compares and adds items as structured tool calls, grounded in real product and stock data.

  3. 03Checkout returns 402

    Instead of a card form, the server answers HTTP 402 Payment Required with x402 payment terms: amount, asset, chain, recipient.

  4. 04The agent settles on-chain

    It pays the quoted USDC on Base, then retries the request carrying proof of payment. Settlement is the authentication.

  5. 05The order is fulfilled

    The server verifies the payment and returns the confirmed order. A complete purchase, start to finish, with no human in the loop.

Built to be trusted
Open source, inspectable

The whole stack is a public repo. A tech director can read the MCP, OAuth and x402 implementation directly.

Live, not a mockup

The demo store, its /llms.txt and the agent surfaces are deployed and responding right now.

Human-in-the-loop where it counts

Support replies are drafted from real order data by the model, then held for a human to approve before they send.

Settlement as auth

x402 over USDC on Base means an agent proves payment cryptographically, no stored cards, no checkout form to phish.

What this means for your bench

Agentic commerce is landing on your clients' roadmaps. This is someone who has already shipped it.

MCP, the Agentic Commerce Protocol and on-chain settlement, working together in a live store you can inspect. One of several production AI systems I have built. Badge it as yours.