# Agentic Commerce

Agentic Commerce is how AI agents discover, evaluate, and execute purchases on behalf of users. As a partner or developer, you use it to build shopping assistants, agent platforms, and multi-channel commerce experiences that interact with Finqu stores through a standard protocol—without building bespoke integrations for every merchant.

## What is Agentic Commerce?

In agentic commerce, an AI agent acts on a user's goals and constraints: finding products, comparing options, building a cart, and completing checkout. The user may never visit the merchant's website—the agent transacts through structured APIs while the merchant remains the **merchant of record**.

This is different from AI-assisted shopping, where a human browses and decides while AI provides recommendations or support.

## AI Commerce vs Agentic Commerce

Finqu splits these into two documentation areas because they serve different users and integration patterns:

| | **AI Commerce** | **Agentic Commerce** |
|---|---|---|
| **Who shops** | Merchant staff (human-driven) | End customers via AI agents |
| **Where it runs** | Finqu admin | External agents, assistants, platforms |
| **Primary use** | Support, automation, operations | Product discovery, cart, checkout |
| **Integration** | Success Agent, Workers, MCP Tools | UCP (REST, MCP, embedded checkout) |
| **What merchants optimize** | Workflow efficiency, brand voice | Machine-readable catalog, policies, availability |

[AI Commerce](/ai-commerce/overview) covers merchant-facing AI in the admin. **Agentic Commerce** (this section) covers customer-facing agent integrations via the [Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)](/reference/ucp).

## What is UCP?

The [Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)](https://ucp.dev) is an open standard for agentic commerce, co-developed by Google, Shopify, and a broad retail ecosystem. It defines:

- A **discovery profile** at `/.well-known/ucp` that advertises what a merchant supports
- **Capabilities** — discrete commerce operations (catalog search, cart, checkout, orders)
- **Transports** — REST, MCP, and embedded checkout bindings for calling those capabilities
- **Capability negotiation** — agents and merchants agree on a shared feature set per request
- **Structured responses** — protocol metadata, totals, messages, and error semantics in every response

UCP uses standard roles:

- **Business** — the merchant or store (on Finqu, each sales channel)
- **Platform** — your agent, assistant, or integration that discovers the store and drives shopping flows on behalf of buyers

## How UCP fits Finqu

Each Finqu sales channel can act as a UCP **business**. Your application acts as the **platform**:

1. Discover the merchant profile at `https://{shop-domain}/.well-known/ucp`
2. Authenticate using a supported agent tier
3. Negotiate capabilities via your platform profile
4. Browse the catalog, build carts, and (when available) complete checkout
5. Handle structured messages and errors in every response

```mermaid
flowchart LR
    Agent[Your agent / platform]
    Profile["/.well-known/ucp"]
    REST["/api/ucp/*"]
    MCP["/mcp"]
    Store[Finqu store channel]

    Agent -->|Discover| Profile
    Agent -->|REST calls| REST
    Agent -->|MCP tools| MCP
    Profile --> Store
    REST --> Store
    MCP --> Store
```

All UCP traffic is scoped to the merchant's storefront domain. Requests to a domain where UCP is not enabled receive `404`.

## What you can build

- **AI shopping assistants** — Chat or voice agents that search the catalog, compare products, and manage carts
- **Conversational storefronts** — Embed a conversational layer in web, app, or kiosk experiences
- **Multi-channel agents** — Deploy the same assistant across websites, messaging apps, and voice interfaces
- **Agent platforms** — Integrate Finqu stores into a commerce network using standard UCP discovery and negotiation

## Next steps

- [Activating UCP](./activating-ucp) — Enable UCP on a Finqu sales channel (merchants and admins)
- [Integration Guide](./integration-guide) — Build an agent integration step by step
- [UCP API Reference](/reference/ucp) — Authentication, REST endpoints, MCP tools, and error codes

For the canonical UCP specification, see [ucp.dev](https://ucp.dev).