Anthropic released a blueprint for building commerce agents on Claude, with working code for a shopping agent and a merchant agent, covering retail, travel, telecom, and ticketing. To clarify, these aren’t consumer-facing tools directly accessible through Claude (meaning, they’re not a Google Shopping alternative found within your Claude dashboard), but instead are frameworks for agents that businesses can develop and add to their own stores.
The Shopping Agent lives inside a merchant’s app or website and allows customers to search for things like, “I need a beach towel, umbrella, and toys for my upcoming trip with my two young kids.” From there the agent can search the catalog and assemble the right set of items, remember the customers’ preferences to personalize what it suggests, show product comparisons in the conversation, and lastly build the cart and hand it off to the store’s existing checkout. The shopping agent can also handle customer service in the same conversation such as providing the customer with their order status or the store’s refund policy.
The Merchant Agent helps employees responsible for running the store with day-to-day tasks and strategy. For example, a merchant can ask, “What should we discount to clear last season’s inventory?” and get suggestions from Claude based on their store data. The agent can answer questions about sales performance, track inventory, proactively flag problems like an item about to sell out before a promotion starts, recommend pricing and promotions, and create marketing campaigns.
The blueprints are available now with live demos for each vertical alongside an engineering deep-dive on how they were built.
Anthropic’s approach to entering the commerce business is a perfect example of how the company’s overall growth strategy differs from OpenAI’s. One company came in and said “we’re going to take over the entire e-commerce search, discovery, and payments business with consumer-facing tools and overnight become a competitor to Google Shopping and Amazon,” which failed spectacularly and publicly. The other quietly walks in the front door with backend tools to complement a merchant’s existing retail business.
Anthropic even explicitly outlines its strategy on the agent landing page with an FAQ:
“Is Anthropic moving into commerce? No. Claude is your intelligence layer, not a storefront or checkout. We’re not interested in owning catalogs, supply chain, or the last mile, and there’s no advertising or paid placement of Claude in any agent you build. Your relationships stays yours.”
