Agentic commerce readiness: a checklist for operators
Before you let an assistant touch carts and coupons, these are the catalog, identity, and governance checks we run with every merchant team.
Commerce agents fail loudly when product data is fuzzy: stale inventory, ambiguous bundles, or promo rules that live in spreadsheets. Use this checklist as a pre-flight, not as a substitute for integration testing.
Catalog and pricing
- Single source of truth for SKU, price, and availability with sub-minute propagation to assistant context.
- Explicit handling for regional restrictions and age-gated categories.
- Documented fallback when real-time stock is unavailable—never guess.
Identity and session
Assistants should respect the same auth and consent boundaries as your storefront. If a shopper is anonymous, the assistant should not reveal order history. If they are logged in, thread memory must not leak across accounts.
Governance
- Who may approve new prompts or tools in production?
- How are discount and promise policies encoded—API, rules engine, or both?
- What is logged for chargebacks and regulatory inquiry?
When these boxes are checked, you are ready to experiment with assisted selling—not before. We are happy to run the workshop version of this list with your team; the blog version fits on one page intentionally.
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