Anthropic released a blueprint for building commerce agents on Claude, with working code for a shopping agent plus a merchant agent, covering retail, travel, telecom, and ticketing. The shopping agent runs inside a retailer’s app or site, wired to its catalog, cart, checkout, saved preferences, and order history, while payment stays with the retailer’s own checkout or agentic payments provider. It handles multi-item requests, shows products and comparisons in the chat, and fields order status and return questions instead of pushing shoppers to a help page. The merchant agent covers sales analysis, inventory alerts, pricing advice, and campaign drafts, with a person signing off before any change goes live. Retailers running these agents report carts as much as 35% bigger, Anthropic says.
