What you’ll learn:
Navigating commerce in an AI-powered world
For decades, retailers focused on channel expansion: Adding more stores, launching websites, creating mobile apps and tapping into social commerce. While these all remain relevant, a bigger shift is underway — one in which the very definition of “the customer” is evolving.
That’s because your buyers aren’t just people anymore. They’re also AI-powered assistants that can research, compare and purchase on behalf of a human.
These agents don’t browse like we do. They don’t “click around” looking for deals. They go straight to the point, parsing massive amounts of structured product data in seconds, filtering options by highly specific requirements and executing purchases with zero friction.
In this new reality:
Voice, chat, visual and predictive interfaces are replacing traditional navigation.
Discovery often starts in a conversational interface, not a search bar.
The new expectation is to sell simultaneously and consistently to both humans and machines.
This means retailers need to sell smarter, not just everywhere. In other words, retailers must:
Anticipate buyer needs before they’re expressed.
Structure product data so both people and AI can understand it.
Delivering consistent, real-time pricing, promotions and availability across every channel.
This requires technology that can move as fast as your customers — human and digital alike.
commercetools is built for exactly this future: An enterprise-grade platform that gives you full control, flexibility and agility to adapt in an AI-native marketplace with four core drivers
Driver #1: Powerful core commerce capabilities
The foundation for advanced shopping starts with core commerce capabilities — product catalog and discovery, native promotions and personalization, integrated checkout and payments, as well as inventory management at scale. Let’s explore each in detail:
In the AI-assisted shopping era, discovery is less about “searching” and more about understanding. AI agents need highly structured, machine-readable data to find, compare and recommend products accurately.
Why this matters: If your product data is messy, inconsistent or hidden, AI agents can’t confidently surface your products — and you’re invisible to a growing percentage of potential buyers.
The essential capabilities to enable an intuitive product catalog and discovery include:
Structured, semantic product data: Rich metadata, such as product attributes (size, material, color), detailed descriptions and clear product relationships.
Machine-optimized taxonomy and tagging: Ensure clean, consistent classification so products are matched to the right intent, even without exact keyword matches.
Conversational and intent-based search readiness: AI agents handle natural language (“find eco-friendly sofas under $800 for small apartments”) — your discovery systems should too.
API-first architecture: commercetools exposes product, inventory and pricing data in real time via well-defined endpoints.
Decoupled frontends: Easily connect to AI-driven interfaces like ChatGPT, Alexa or Gemini without relying on a traditional storefront.
Dynamic product feeds and metadata enrichment: Keep your product data fresh and improve visibility in AI-powered recommendation engines.
Promotions have always been powerful, but in agent-driven transactions, they need to be readable, comparable and optimizable by algorithms. commercetools’ promotion engine enables this with:
Best deal logic: Groups discounts together and automatically applies the most advantageous one at checkout. Customers trust they’re getting the best price, and merchants prevent “double-dipping.”
Buy & Get discounts — Highly flexible offers like “buy 2, get 1 free” or “buy from category A, get a discount in category B.”
Multiple customer groups per customer — Target overlapping segments for hyper-personalized promotions (e.g., “loyal customer,” “student,” and “NYC resident” simultaneously).
Example: PetSmart uses these capabilities to power its loyalty program, applying Best Deal logic to maximize conversion rates.
The result: Whether an AI agent is evaluating the purchase or a human is browsing, the promotional logic is transparent, optimized and fair.
In addition to promotions, personalization is no longer just about showing the right products to a person — it’s about delivering the right context to both the human and their AI assistant. commercetools enables this with:
500+ customer groups per profile: For deep, overlapping segmentation.
Extensible customer attributes: Size, preferences, location, loyalty tier — whatever matters to your targeting.
Product selections: Curate specific assortments for particular audiences or channels.
Rules-based promotions: Tailor offers in real time based on customer group, location or attributes.
Composable frontends: Adjust page layouts, banners and recommendations dynamically.
Example: A New York City customer with a small apartment might see compact furniture collections, student discounts and localized delivery options — all fed directly into AI agents, so the same relevance applies whether the shopper is browsing on their phone or buying via voice command.
Modern commerce is incomplete without seamless support for digital wallets, shared carts and multi-device checkout flows. Intelligent agents are being increasingly added to this equation, as established payment providers like Mastercard and Visa have launched agentic checkout solutions — Agent Pay and Intelligent Commerce, respectively. PayPal has also introduced an Agent Toolkit, enabling developers to streamline order creation, invoicing and shipping.
In this context, commercetools ensures frictionless checkout for any user — human or not:
Payment Hub for connecting to multiple payment providers and digital wallets.
Shared carts and multi-device flows for cross-channel continuity.
Expanded cart freeze controls allow merchants to freeze not just prices and discounts but even shipping costs, keeping the shopping experience consistent and free from surprises.
Cart viewing in the commercetools Merchant Center enables retailers to easily spot abandoned carts, uncover buying patterns and proactively re-engage shoppers to complete their purchases.
Solution Hub for integrating emerging payment tech as it appears.
Few things frustrate shoppers — human or AI agents — more than finding a product is out of stock after adding it to their cart. A common culprit is the lack of inventory visibility that prevents retailers from leveraging the benefits of endless aisle sales, reducing stockouts and ultimately, increasing conversions.
To manage inventory at scale — and support any fulfillment model, commercetools enables:
Real-time inventory transparency: Trigger instant “out of stock” and “back in stock” alerts to keep customers engaged and teams ahead of changes.
Reserve-on-cart: Automatically lock inventory when added to a cart, with configurable timeframes to prevent overselling during high-demand events.
Multi-location sync: Align inventory across stores, warehouses, and online channels to power BOPIS, ship-from-store, and hyperlocal delivery.
Threshold controls: Set per-SKU quantity limits to manage bulk purchases, exclusives, and restocks while protecting availability and profitability.
Cart-centric inventory logic: Process thousands of real-time reservations per minute with built-in inventory logic for smooth, scalable checkout flows.
Enterprise-grade trust: Ensure products in the cart are available at checkout, reducing cancellations and signaling reliability to AI agents and systems.
Recurring orders: Enable shoppers to avoid the hassle of manual reordering, providing a seamless and personalized replenishment journey.
Driver #2: Unified commerce
More than taking your core commerce capabilities to the next level, brands and retailers need to take the next step: Unified commerce.
By consolidating all data — customer, product, inventory, etc. — in one platform, businesses can leverage not only the omnichannel experiences shoppers are looking for, but also hyper-personalization and even agentic workflows. When data is in one place, instead of disparate systems like POS (point-of-sale) and eCommerce, it’s a no-brainer to sync data across multiple channels, brands, business models and even countries/regions.
commercetools is the only unified commerce platform built to handle the “multi-everything” reality:
Multiple channels: Ensure consistency across all physical and digital channels, with data stored and managed in one place.
Multiple brands: Differentiate products sold across multiple brands with tailored product data, promotions, etc.
Multiple stores: Create any number of stores to represent digital or physical locations, then configure unique pricing, products, carts and more for each store.
Multiple business models: Manage B2C, B2B and D2C operations — and everything in between — from a unified platform.
Multiple countries/regions: Localize products and the checkout experience for different markets with flexible data types, such as currencies, dates, languages and times.
What’s more, when retailers have a unified commerce layer, accurate data can be retrieved and analyzed in real time, making it a lot easier to tap into the immense benefits of agentic AI frictionlessly.
commercetools delivers this by orchestrating all channels through a single commerce backend. That means your in-store associates, your mobile app, your website and your AI interfaces are all working from the same, up-to-date source of truth. This means:
Digital storefronts match in-store pricing and promotions.
AI-driven channels get the same data and logic as your website.
Customer journeys can shift mid-transaction without starting over.
Driver #3: Agentic AI
AI agents are increasingly becoming a reality, from starting product discovery in chat, not search, to executing purchases directly from within AI interfaces. For retailers to win in this brave, new AI-shopping world, they need to:
Sync data in real-time for immediate action, from hyper-personalization to omnichannel experiences.
Structure product data so it’s easy for machines to parse and compare.
Enable smarter promotions and hyper-personalization that are readable, comparable and optimizable by algorithms, so they’re ready for agent-based transactions.
Build flexible checkout APIs for agent-to-agent transactions.
Provide inventory management at scale so stock data is always available and accurate. AI agents also understand when and how to reserve inventory or freeze the cart.
Offer AI-powered recurring orders for customers ready to automatically set replenishment without (or with minimum) human intervention.
Track agent vs. human traffic to fine-tune merchandising and pricing strategies.
Driver #4: Composable as the foundational layer
Monolithic platforms were designed for a web-first, human-buyer world, so they can’t keep up with AI-native journeys, emerging channels and shifting buyer expectations. To sell smarter, retailers must shift to a composable foundation, so they can:
Gain total CX control across all channels, audiences and interfaces.
Leverage API-first flexibility to innovate quickly and integrate deeply.
Enhance scalability to support future growth and shifting market dynamics.
Sustain brand integrity with consistent logic, design, and data everywhere.
commercetools is the only enterprise-grade composable platform purpose-built for the AI-powered future of retail that enables:
Composable commerce — like commercetools — offers:
Agent-aware commerce APIs: Built to serve not only human shoppers but also AI agents acting on their behalf, these APIs enable commerce systems to recognize, respond to and optimize for automated buyers.
Global inventory and order management: Synchronize stock and orders across every channel, region and fulfillment location in real time.
Smart promotions engine and personalization tools: Deliver tailored offers and dynamic experiences that adapt to context, behavior and preferences with flexible rules and AI-driven insights.
Composable checkout and payment orchestration: Design and deploy frictionless checkout flows that fit any market, device or channel. Seamlessly integrate multiple payment providers, support local payment methods, and adapt flows on the fly — all without disrupting the core commerce experience.
Model Context Protocol (MCP) for real-time context sharing: Seamlessly connect commerce systems with AI models by sharing up-to-the-moment business, customer and product context. MCP ensures every interaction — whether human- or agent-driven — is informed, relevant and adaptive.
In summary, a composable foundation gives you total control, API-first flexibility and the scalability to adapt to whatever comes next.
Prepare for next-gen shopping with commercetools
In an agent-driven world, selling smarter means becoming more agile, connected and intelligent.
With commercetools, retailers stay in full control of every customer experience, whether it’s delivered to a human or an AI agent. Future-proof your commerce strategy to sell to anyone, on any channel, with confidence and control.
Join our webinar and learn how to sell smarter for the next generation of commerce! See real-life examples, product demos and actionable insights into agentic AI, unified commerce and advanced commerce capabilities.
Manuela Marques Tchoe is a Content Writer at commercetools. She was a Content and Product Marketing Director at conversational commerce provider tyntec. She has written content in partnership with Facebook, Rakuten Viber and other social media platforms.