Introducing Agent Checkouts: allow agents to buy from any online store using a single API

Your agents should be able to buy anything, anywhere. But that’s easier said than done.

Where agent checkouts break today

Today, for an agent developer, enabling agents to checkout from merchants means building and maintaining a checkout stack yourself with many hurdles to jump through: 

• Most merchants haven’t built their sites to support agents directly, so most agent builders turn to generic browser use tools which are not fine-tuned for commerce. 
• Merchants that support agentic checkout use UCP and other protocols, and each one is a separate integration with its own spec and edge cases. Additionally, new checkout protocols keep coming out, with each one adding to the development overhead.
• Agent checkout can also be expensive, especially browser use. Each step in a checkout is a round trip that costs tokens: pick a variant, wait, pick shipping, wait, confirm. As commerce becomes a larger share of what agents do, that cost grows with it.
• Agent checkout needs to work. Everytime. Otherwise users won’t trust your agents to execute their transactions.

That is a heavy lift, then ongoing maintenance for as long as it runs.

Crossmint Agent Checkouts: One API, every store

Crossmint Agent Checkouts is that entire stack behind one headless API. Your agent sends what the buyer wants, a URL to start from (optional), and how they want to pay. Agent Checkout then completes the order. It automatically optimizes the checkout process knowing to use an embedded option (like Shop Pay), agentic commerce protocol, or browser automation based on whichever is available, reliable, and cost effective. As new protocols ship, we add them, so your coverage grows without shipping anything new. 

We keep checkout working across every store so your team can spend its time on the product your users see. 

The buyer request is plain language. The buyer profile carries shipping and contact details, so your agent does not collect them again. The payment method points at a card your user has already saved.

From there, Agent Checkouts picks the path. We start with the merchant's checkout endpoints where they exist and fall back to browser execution only when we have to. Either way, you pay $0.05 per execution. We're also working directly with merchants and PSPs to expand the implementation of checkout protocols, so more orders take the endpoint path over time.

Whichever path an order takes, Agent Checkouts handles the merchant back-and-forth. It resolves as much as it can up front from the buyer request and profile. When the merchant still needs a decision, such as a variant or a shipping option, the API returns the question to your agent. Your agent answers and the checkout continues. No browser loop or re-prompting the user for details they already gave.

That covers the order. Payment is where Agent Checkouts and our universal vault for agent cards work together. With Crossmint, your users save any card into a PCI-compliant vault, for use in purchases so that developers never handle the raw card data. Where the card is enrolled in Visa Intelligent Commerce or Mastercard Agent Pay, Agent Checkouts uses those programs. Where it is not, it still pays. Whatever card your users show up with, your agent can pay with it.

Cards saved with the merchant work too. Most users already have a card on file with the stores they shop at, and where a merchant offers Shop Pay, your agent can pay with it: the OTP code goes to the user and back into the session, and a persistent browser session handled by Crossmint keeps the shopper signed in so they don't enter a code on every order.

Shop where you’ve been and where you haven’t

Two gaps still stand between agents and everyday commerce. Many merchants require an account to purchase, so an agent that cannot sign in cannot buy there. And most merchants are not yet policing agents on their sites, but they will: they want to identify the agents shopping with them and the people behind them, decide whether to trust them, and stop fraud as agents shop at scale.

We handle authentication via the same API, and we’re introducing new products around identity and trust. Authentication will let users sign into their merchant accounts through your agent, which opens up the sites that require one. Identity and trust tooling will give merchants a way to recognize and trust your agent and its users. We're working with the leading companies in this space, with announcements to come, and all of it ships as APIs on the same platform as checkout and cards.

Start building

Your agent should be able to buy anything, anywhere, and with Agent Checkouts it can. Together with our universal vault for agent cards and wallets, Crossmint offers the most complete platform for making agents commerce-ready.

Agent Checkout is live today for developers who build agent platforms. Start building now, or chat with our team to learn more.

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