Agentic Commerce Explained: What Meta Muse, Gemini and Grok Mean for Australian Retailers

Back in March, we wrote about WebMCP and how your website was about to get a new type of customer. That customer has now arrived, and it's brought its mates.

Agentic commerce means an AI does the buying, not just the recommending.

For the last couple of years, AI tools have been the helpful friend who says, "You should check out this brand". Agentic commerce goes a step further. The friend now goes to the shop, picks the right size, pays, and has it sent to your door.

You give the goal. The agent does the work. You approve the purchase.

Say someone asks Grok Bot: "Find me kids' footy boots, size 3, under $90, delivered by Saturday." The AI agent kicks into gear and starts its search. Here's how that works:

1. It gets its own computer: The agent runs its own browser in the cloud, like a personal shopper with their own laptop.
2. It shops: It reads product pages, checks sizes, compares prices and delivery times across stores.
3. You approve, it pays: Mostly with a wallet it already holds, so it isn't typing card numbers into your checkout form.
4. It keeps going: It can watch for a price drop and buy when it hits the target.

The key shift: the agent is now the one reading your website. The human may never see your homepage or your hero banner.

Here’s a breakdown of the most popular agents and how they differentiate from one another. 

Google is the hardest one to watch, because it's still where most Aussies start shopping. Its agentic checkout runs on the Universal Commerce Protocol, which we covered in our UCP explainer.

• The squinting way: The agent looks at your site like a person, guesses what each button does and fills in forms. It works, but it's fragile. A pop-up or moved button can break it, and it looks a lot like a bot.
• The handshake way: Your site tells the agent exactly what it can do: search, check stock, add to cart, check out. That's what WebMCP does at a page level, and what Shopify does at scale. Its Agentic Storefronts put products into ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot, and Muse can check out through Shop Pay on any Shopify store.

Agents don't carry a credit card. They carry a wallet: Stripe Link, PayPal, Google Pay or Shop Pay. The payment options at your checkout now decide which agents can actually finish a sale with you.

The banks are already set up here. In January, Mastercard ran Australia's first authenticated agentic transactions with CBA and Westpac, while NAB and ANZ used Visa's version.

Amazon has blocked Muse from buying on its site and taken Perplexity to court over its browser agent. It's building its own agent instead. Shopify has gone the other way and opened up.

So if a shopper's agent can't check out on Amazon but can check out on your store in seconds, the sale has a reason to come to you. That won't last forever, but right now it's a real edge.

The window is most likely pretty short, though. Muse reached Canada ten days after its US launch, and Muse Spark, the model behind it, is already rolling out across Meta's apps in Australia.

OpenAI tried letting people buy inside ChatGPT. Walmart found it converted roughly three times worse than clicking through to its own site, and ChatGPT now sends shoppers to the merchant's checkout instead. 

The agent does the shortlisting, but your site still closes the sale.

If you’re eager to see whether your business appears in this new way to shop, here’s how to check for yourself. 

1. Search for yourself in AI: Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity for products in your category. If you don't show up, an agent won't find you either.
2. Write product facts in text: Australian sizing, materials and dimensions. If it's only in an image, the agent can't read it.
3. Show the real price: GST and delivery included, with live stock and delivery times by postcode.
4. Make returns easy to find: Plain language, one click away.
5. Open up your checkout: Guest checkout on, plus Shop Pay, PayPal, Google Pay and Link where you can.
6. Check your bot settings: Over half of web traffic is now automated, and blanket bot blocking can lock out shopping agents too.
7. Get your forms WebMCP-ready: Start with clean, well-labelled forms. Our WebMCP guide covers the basics.

Ecommerce has always been about winning the human's attention. Now there's a step before that: winning the agent's shortlist.

It doesn't matter much which agent wins. They all want the same things from your store: clear data, a working checkout, and a way to pay. Thankfully, as they're not here yet, Australian businesses have a head start to get ready for when they do. 

Want to know how your store looks to an AI agent? Get in touch, and we'll tell you exactly where you stand.