Chuck Yu is CEO of VGS, a trusted infrastructure powering payment tokenization and agentic commerce for the world’s leading enterprises.
It seems like there are protocols created, updated and evolving almost every week in agentic commerce. Part of my job is understanding them. While this shift unlocks new conversion potential, it also introduces a troubling new reality for merchants: a growing data blind spot at the exact moment they can least afford one.
As agentic commerce scales, merchants risk becoming passive endpoints in a transaction chain they can no longer fully see. I don’t see the problem as the technology itself, but it’s that the current infrastructure, when dealing with an agent, obfuscates data that merchants have historically relied on to detect fraud, build loyalty and understand their customers.
Merchants who understand the pillars and advocate for access to them will be positioned to thrive in agentic commerce.
Pillar 1: Agent Identification And Knowing Who’s At The Door
When a legitimate shopping agent crawls a merchant’s website, it looks virtually identical to a malicious bot. Without a standardized way to distinguish between the two, merchants face an impossible choice: Block automated traffic and lose valid conversions, or accept all traffic and risk fraud. Amazon currently blocks traffic from certain AI platforms for exactly this reason. Until standardized agent identification is universally adopted, merchants remain vulnerable on both ends. Mastercard recently contributed its verified intents framework to the FIDO Alliance. I think this is a wonderful starting point, and we will likely see much of this approach with substantial staying power.
Pillar 2: Identity And Verification And The Consumer Behind The Agent
In traditional e-commerce, merchants use frameworks like 3DS to verify that a real, authenticated person is behind a transaction and tag that user for future fraud detection and dispute resolution. Agentic commerce breaks this model. When an agent handles verification on the consumer’s behalf, the merchant is removed from that process entirely. Most current approaches involve the agent undergoing enhanced consumer verification. They include two-factor authentication, often including the consumer’s financial institution. Shopify and Stripe have been particularly effective at embedding themselves at the point of the consumer-agent handshake.
Pillar 3: Consumer Mandates And The Intent Hidden In Every Transaction
Here’s a scenario every merchant should internalize: A consumer instructs their agent to buy an end table for no more than $500. A merchant sells one for $501. The agent moves on. The merchant never makes the sale and has no idea why.
Scale that across thousands of shoppers with identical agent configurations, and you have a merchant losing significant volume by a single dollar, with zero visibility into the signal. Consumer mandates, such as price ceilings, preferred brands and shipping requirements, govern every decision an agent makes. Today, merchants receive none of this information. If even aggregate mandate data were passed to merchants, the implications for dynamic pricing and real-time promotions would be incredibly informative.
Pillar 4: Payment Credentials And Settlement Without A Story
At the end of an agentic transaction, a merchant typically receives one of two things: an agentic network token or a virtual card. This lets the receiving PSP settle the transaction. Money moves. But the token is single-use, carries no traceable lineage and cannot be stored for loyalty programs, subscriptions or card-on-file relationships. The merchant receives confirmation that a sale occurred, but not the contextual intelligence that would make that sale meaningful beyond its immediate revenue impact.
The Path Forward
If merchants wait for a perfect data infrastructure before engaging in agentic commerce, they will find themselves behind competitors already adapting.
I see the four pillars—agent identification, identity verification, consumer mandates and payment credentials—as a representation of the minimum viable dataset for merchants to participate in commerce not as passive endpoints, but as informed commercial actors.
These data gaps are not inherent to agentic commerce. They are design choices that can be redesigned. Merchants who engage now in standards bodies, protocol conversations and infrastructure decisions will help shape a more transparent ecosystem. Those who wait will inherit whatever architecture others build for them.
The agent economy will create enormous opportunities. The question is whether merchants will be ready to meet it.
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