Bloomreach released a comprehensive buyer's guide for agentic commerce platforms, defining agentic commerce as systems that enable, orchestrate, and govern AI agents within commerce contexts including product discovery, transactions, marketing, and operations (Bloomreach Blog). The guide emphasizes that agentic commerce is already operational, with AI agents browsing and comparing products on behalf of consumers, and that retailers without agent-discoverable catalogs are losing sales before human visitors arrive (Bloomreach Blog).
Agentic commerce is estimated to generate $3-5 trillion annually worldwide by 2030, with the US B2C retail market representing a significant portion (Bloomreach Blog). Critically, research shows that AI shopping agents respond to different signals than human shoppers—promotional urgency and brand-heavy copy have little effect, while complete product attributes and accurate pricing matter most (Bloomreach Blog). The guide identifies five evaluation criteria: on-site conversational AI quality, connectivity with external agent ecosystems (ACP and MCP protocol support), autonomous marketing capabilities, and others, and notes that many platforms only address one side of agentic commerce rather than both external agent readiness and internal agent deployment (Bloomreach Blog).
For commerce practitioners, the framework surfaces a critical strategic decision: retailers must simultaneously optimize product data for external AI agents like ChatGPT and Claude while deploying internal agents for on-site shopping and marketing automation. The standardized infrastructure enabling this—MCP and ACP protocols—has only recently reached deployable maturity, making agentic commerce platform selection an operational priority for retailers competing in AI-driven discovery channels (Bloomreach Blog).