What’s Missing in Agentic Commerce - Part I

Part I: The Bridge to Agentic Commerce at Scale

Over the last decade, commerce infrastructure has evolved faster than retailers themselves. Payments and logistics modernized. Front-end personalization matured. Delivery was born.

But the foundational layer agentic commerce depends on — accurate, structured, real-time product and store data — still isn’t there. As ReFiBuy’s Five Levels of Agentic Commerce make clear, the industry remains largely constrained to Levels 1 and 2 today.

According to an Accenture report, 75% of retailers admit that the pace of change in agentic AI is exceeding their readiness and training capacity. Retailers still operate on inconsistent catalogs, delayed feeds, mismatched pricing, and store-level metadata that drifts over time. It’s why the same tomato can appear at three different prices across a retailer’s API, online product page, and in-store shelf label. It’s why a major national chain can publish latitude and longitude data for its stores that doesn’t correspond to their actual locations. And it’s why, in 2025, some retailers still advertise “90-day returns on perishables” on their websites.

This is a structural bottleneck holding agentic commerce - AI that shops, compares, recommends, builds, and checks out carts autonomously - back from reaching all five stages at scale. The good news: most retailers now know they can’t ignore it.

At CartHappy, we believe agentic commerce requires clean, structured, and exposed data in accurate, real-time, API-ready formats. A new class of infrastructure companies is forming to provide this layer — and many will become the system of record for retailer product catalogs, much like Salesforce did for customer data.

As we’ve said, agentic commerce works best on structured, repeatable, and price-sensitive datasets — and no purchase is more frequent or predictable than groceries.

However, until that full infrastructure exists, browser-level access is the only way to give AI the same trustworthy, real-time information humans already rely on today, both online and in-store. This is why real-time browsing matters and why browser extensions will play a critical role in making agentic commerce viable in both the short and long term. They are, today, the most practical bridge to truly autonomous shopping.

Follow along and sign up today for beta access: https://www.carthappy.com/launch-your-city

• Part II Why Real-Time Browsing Matters: The Missing Infrastructure Behind Agentic Commerce

• Part III Will examine The Central Role Purchase History Plays in Agentic Commerce Infrastructure