Shownotes
Every new technology brings a rush to get in early. When mobile phones, apps, and digital wallets emerged, merchants raced to determine which platforms would shape the future of commerce, betting that an early commitment would give them a competitive edge.
While there have been winners and losers, no single platform has ultimately cornered the market in any of these areas. As a result, early adoption does not always provide the anticipated advantage. In many cases, merchants that committed early were instead forced to adjust their strategies downstream.
A similar scenario is now unfolding with agentic commerce, as merchants are being encouraged to commit to platforms with the promise of reaping first-mover rewards.
Merchants should be wary. In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Adam Hiatt, EVP of Product Strategy at Spreedly, and Don Apgar, Director of Merchant Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed how the evolution of agentic commerce will likely follow a similarly fragmented path as other recent innovations.
This does not mean merchants should sit on the sidelines and wait to see how agentic commerce plays out. Instead, it underscores the importance of neutrality. Merchants should develop agent-agnostic infrastructure now so they can remain agile as the ecosystem evolves.
Mirroring the Orchestration Ethos
The fragmentation that has become prevalent across digital wallets and mobile ecosystems is already emerging in agentic commerce. OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, for example, have all developed agentic checkout solutions that integrate with their popular chat interfaces.
Other firms have launched personal AI agent services, such as Muse or RockBot, designed to tak on consumers’ shopping tasks. The rapid splintering of this nascent market suggests that agentic commerce could follow a path similar to the early e-commerce payments environment.
“Merchants had more control over their stack, and they had more options,” Apgar said. “But what a lot of merchants didn’t realize was that debt flows out throughout the organization when it comes to managing multiple vendors in the finance area, in the ops area, in fulfillment, in the customer service chargebacks, returns, and all those things.”
“Every time you add another integration point in the dev shop, you create this waterfall of responsibility and expense throughout the organization,” he said. “This made the case for orchestration clear, to use an orchestrator to leverage one connection into multiple without the downstream responsibilities that flow through the organization.”
Although merchants have the capability to connect with the many protocols and standards emerging in the space, most will not want to maintain individual integrations with all of them.
This could lead some organizations to prioritize one protocol or format. But if the environment shifts and that early protocol does not become the standard that ultimately prevails, merchants could incur significant costs…
Website: paymentsjournal.com
