Reference

Agentic commerce glossary

Plain-English definitions of the protocols and concepts behind agentic trade, plus the supply chain vocabulary the products use: the language agents, buyers, and merchants need to share.

Agentic commerce

Software agents discovering, negotiating, and purchasing goods and services autonomously on a person or company’s behalf, instead of a human clicking through a website. It runs on open protocols such as UCP, ACP, MCP, AP2, and x402.

Agentic procurement

Agentic commerce applied to B2B sourcing: autonomous agents find suppliers, compare and negotiate quotes, and place orders within set policies across a supply chain.

Supply line

One supplier-to-you flow for a given item or category: who ships it, on what lead time, at what price, on which rails. Conduit watches supply lines rather than suppliers in the abstract, because a vendor can be reliable on one line and slipping on another.

Lead-time drift

The gradual widening of the gap between a supplier’s promised lead time and what it actually delivers. It rarely announces itself, which is why it is usually found late. Watched per line by Pipes.

Ranked alternate

A replacement supplier already scored on price, observed delivery, reputation, and rail payability before you need one, so a degraded line has a next step instead of a blank page and a phone call.

Execution readiness

Whether an agent can actually complete a purchase with this merchant right now, on a rail it holds, rather than whether the merchant merely appears in a catalog. Quantified as the Agentic Execution Score.

Agentic Execution ScoreAES

Conduit’s measure of whether an agent can actually finish a checkout end-to-end on a rail it holds, or whether it hits a human wall. Outcome-calibrated over real orders, not a static guess.

Universal Commerce ProtocolUCP

An open standard co-developed by Shopify and Google (2026) for AI agents to discover products, negotiate capabilities, and complete checkout with any participating merchant. Compare with ACP in the ACP vs UCP guide.

Agentic Commerce ProtocolACP

An open standard from OpenAI and Stripe that powers instant checkout inside AI assistants such as ChatGPT. See ACP vs UCP and ChatGPT Instant Checkout.

Model Context ProtocolMCP

Anthropic’s open standard for connecting AI agents to tools and live data. Conduit exposes commerce as MCP tools so any compatible agent can transact without custom integration.

Agent Payments ProtocolAP2

A standard for human-approved spend mandates covering limits, categories, and expiry, that an agent transacts within, so autonomous payments stay inside boundaries you control and can revoke instantly. Deep dive: agent spend limits.

HTTP 402 paymentsx402

A standard for trackable, web-native crypto payments an agent can make directly over HTTP. Conduit treats x402 as a first-class payable rail alongside COD and card handlers.

Agent-to-agent negotiationA2CN

Buyer agents negotiating bulk pricing and terms directly with merchant agents (also seen as A2A). Conduit can fan out to suppliers and compare negotiated quotes.

Demand aggregationGPO

Pooling demand across buyers, a group purchasing organization, to unlock volume pricing a solo buyer could not get. Better prices over time, never paid ranking.

Autonomous checkout

Completing a purchase end-to-end in software, with no human entering a card, solving a captcha, or clicking through a storefront.

Intent handoff

When an agent cannot complete a checkout autonomously, Conduit hands off a ready cart via a real continue_url so a human can finish in one step.

Two-sided reputation

Outcome-driven trust earned per order: suppliers earn rank by delivering; agents earn trust by paying and completing. Nothing is for sale.

Walled garden

A closed commerce platform with an approved-merchant allowlist, curated catalog, restricted rails, pay-for-rank, and per-transaction fees, controlled by one gatekeeper. The opposite of neutral ground.

Agentic economy (Web4)

The emerging phase of the internet where AI agents act, transact, and coordinate on people’s behalf rather than humans browsing pages.

Normalized catalog

A single, deduplicated product and carrier graph built from many sources (UCP, ACP, native APIs, the long tail) so agents compare offers on the merits, not on formatting.