Selling to Agents: The Merchant Playbook for Agentic Commerce - Couverture souple

Marinoni Moretto, Francesco

Couverture souple

ISBN 13 : 9791282765008

Editeur : Affero Press, 2026

Synopsis

Your best customer no longer has eyes.

Sales agents. Brokers. Representatives. For two centuries, "agents" belonged to the selling side. In 2026, that preposition flipped: the entity now evaluating your product, comparing it against everyone else selling the same thing, and deciding whether you get seen, is a machine acting on behalf of the shopper.

Adobe Analytics measured a 1,200% year-over-year jump in AI-referred traffic to US retail sites in October 2025. The agentic commerce channel is already projected to reach $20.9 billion in 2026. And it is happening inside a blind spot: your analytics dashboard was never built to see a buyer that doesn't click, doesn't scroll, and doesn't browse.

Selling to Agents is a merchant playbook for this new reality, written by a former SaaS founder who spent eight years building a platform for 1,600 small merchants, then watched an AI trading agent his team built finish eighth in a hackathon for the exact reason this book warns merchants about: it could not forget what no longer applied.

Drawing on more than 200 primary sources, no vendor funded this research and no platform reviewed it, the book maps the shift in three stages:

Part I, The Shift. Why the purchase funnel you optimized for is being replaced by one where a brand is mentioned, then shortlisted, then selected by a machine, and can fail at any stage without a human ever knowing why.

Part II, The Traps. Four structural problems no platform is incentivized to fix: invisible reputations forming across agent silos, premium products stripped of the context that justifies their price, errors that persist in agent memory with no statute of limitations, and liabilities accumulating in a legal framework never designed for them.

Part III, The Response. A seven-item checklist any merchant can execute, in order of dependency: analytics, security and fraud defenses, structured product data, GEO, API readiness, ACP and UCP checkout, policy surfaces. Plus the strategic question the checklist cannot answer: which parts of your catalog belong to the agent channel, and which should stay reserved for the humans who still browse.

What you'll learn:

• Why "ready for humans" and "ready for agents" are two different data problems, and how to close the gap between them
• How ACP and UCP, the two dominant agent commerce protocols, actually work, and what Shopify's early move means for Monday morning
• Why a single round of description optimization moved market share by up to 14.89 percentage points in controlled experiments, with no change to price or photography
• What happens when 145 independent brands report their catalogs scraped and re-listed without consent, and who is left to absorb the fallout
• Which parts of your product line an agent should never be allowed to sell for you

The window is still open. Agents are in what this book calls their "curious" phase: reading, evaluating, forming preferences, not yet buying autonomously. That will not last. This is the moment to become legible to a customer you will never see.

Francesco Marinoni Moretto is an independent consultant on agentic commerce and a former SaaS founder, based in Milan, Italy. He developed Layered Agentic Retrieval (LAR), described in a working paper (SSRN, 2026), and presented it at the W3C/GS1 workshop E-commerce for Humans and AI Agents in Zurich in September 2026. He contributes to open standards work on agentic commerce in the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) community and at the IETF. In 2016 he founded a SaaS platform for mobile apps and spent eight years building it to more than 3,000 published apps and 1,600 customers. He maintains the Agentic Standards Map, an open, dated map of the standards work on agentic commerce. His open-source tools include Stream Coding and Clarity Gate.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Francesco Marinoni Moretto is an independent consultant on agentic commerce and a former SaaS founder, based in Milan, Italy. He developed Layered Agentic Retrieval (LAR), described in a working paper (SSRN, 2026), and presented it at the W3C/GS1 workshop E-commerce for Humans and AI Agents in Zurich in September 2026. He contributes to open standards work on agentic commerce in the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) community and at the IETF. In 2016 he founded a SaaS platform for mobile apps and spent eight years building it to more than 3,000 published apps and 1,600 customers. Before that, he designed and ran B2B go-to-market campaigns for clients such as Kodak and Bayer. His open-source tools include Stream Coding and Clarity Gate.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Affero Press
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 13: 9791282765008
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 320
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible