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theturtletalks 8 hours ago

Claude 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.

timothydl 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

theturtletalks 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes it is a bit awkward going thru the checkout process in the chat. MCP-UI returns the cart UI so you can interact with the cart directly like change quantity or change shipping method. You can also paste in your address and the chat LLM will figure out how to handle the address submission for that specific site.

Also, we bring in the PayPal and Stripe Elements directly into the chat so you can enter your credit card info. Just like entering it on that merchants website.

timothydl an hour ago | parent [-]

Thanks for those extra details, that approach could be useful in many circumstances / scenarios. It almost reminds me of "punch-out" in the B2B world.

7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]
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varispeed 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

dgellow 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Agents checkout + risk of prompt injection => big nop!

What is even the legal basis here? Can the agent sign contracts on your behalf? What if it is tricked by the vendor into signing for a monthly subscription you never wanted?