- Agent (AI)
- A software system — typically built on an LLM — that perceives context, reasons over goals and takes actions, often on behalf of a human user.
- Agentic commerce
- Commerce flows in which AI agents participate as clients of discovery, purchase or after-sales — either advisory or transactional.
- Agent-pay
- Umbrella term for payment credentials and flows designed for AI agents acting on behalf of users. Examples: Stripe Agentic Commerce, Visa Intelligent Commerce, Mastercard Agent Pay.
- Agent-ready catalog
- A product catalog whose SKUs can be retrieved, parsed, reasoned about and acted on by an AI agent without scraping or inference.
- Answer surface
- An AI interface that synthesizes answers from multiple sources — e.g., ChatGPT Shopping, Perplexity Shop, Amazon Rufus, Google AI Overviews.
- A2A (Agent-to-Agent)
- An emerging Google-sponsored protocol for communication between AI agents, complementary to MCP.
- Canonical URL
- The stable, preferred URL for a resource; used by crawlers and agents to attribute retrieval.
- Catalog as API
- The design posture of treating a product catalog as an API surface — versioned, typed, documented — because agents consume it as such.
- Commerce interoperability
- The property that lets a merchant's catalog, offers and policies be understood and acted upon by any compliant agent or platform without bespoke integration.
- Feed (product feed)
- A structured export of a merchant's catalog, usually consumed by ad platforms, marketplaces and search engines. Google Merchant Center spec is the de facto.
- GLN (Global Location Number)
- A GS1 identifier for a party, location or functional entity. Used for merchant identity in supply-chain and cross-border commerce.
- GS1
- The international standards body behind GTIN, GLN, GPC and other identity/taxonomy systems used in commerce.
- GTIN (Global Trade Item Number)
- A GS1 product identifier that includes UPC, EAN-13 and ISBN. The default cross-merchant product identifier.
- JSON-LD
- A JSON-based format for linked structured data. The preferred way to attach schema.org markup to web pages.
- llms.txt
- A proposed site-level file providing guidance to LLM crawlers about content. Not commerce-specific; see the related site llmtxt.info for vertical coverage.
- Machine-readable (in commerce)
- Property of a catalog whose identifiers, attributes, policies, prices and availability can be consumed programmatically without scraping or inference.
- MCP (Model Context Protocol)
- An open protocol introduced by Anthropic (2024) for exposing tools and resources to LLM agents in a standardized way.
- Merchant Center (Google)
- Google's platform for ingesting merchant feeds. Its XML/CSV feed spec is the de facto standard for product data interchange.
- MerchantReturnPolicy
- schema.org type for structured expression of a return policy — window, cost, method, applicable countries.
- Model Context Protocol
- See MCP.
- MPN (Manufacturer Part Number)
- A manufacturer-assigned identifier, typically used in combination with Brand when GTIN is unavailable.
- Offer
- In schema.org, an instance of a product being sold — carrying price, currency, availability, shipping details.
- Operator
- An OpenAI product (2025) that drives a real browser on behalf of a user. More broadly, an emerging category: browser-use agent.
- PIM (Product Information Management)
- Software for managing and enriching product data centrally before syndication to channels.
- Policy data
- Structured expression of returns, shipping, warranty, age and geographic restrictions, subscription terms — readable by agents.
- Product
- In schema.org, the type describing a sold item with its attributes and offers.
- Rufus (Amazon)
- Amazon's in-app shopping assistant, launched 2024. An example of an embedded platform agent.
- Schema.org
- A vocabulary of types and properties for structured data on the web, maintained collaboratively by major search engines.
- ShippingRateSettings
- schema.org type for structured shipping rates, regions and delivery windows.
- Sitemap
- An XML file enumerating canonical URLs for crawlers, and a freshness signal.
- SKU (Stock Keeping Unit)
- Internal identifier for a merchant's sellable unit, typically variant-level.
- Stripe Agentic Commerce (ACP)
- Stripe's product suite (2024 Q4) for agent-initiated payments — scoped intents, spend controls, audit trails.
- Structured data
- Data described using a shared schema (e.g., schema.org) so that parsers can extract meaning without heuristics.
- Substrate
- In our usage: the invisible lower layers of the commerce stack on which agents and humans depend. Machine-readable by necessity.
- Token (payment)
- A stand-in credential representing a payment method. Agent-pay tokens are scoped, revocable and typically agent-bound.
- Tool use
- The pattern by which an LLM agent calls named functions (tools) to interact with external systems. Operationalized via function calling, MCP, etc.
- UCP
- Universal Commerce Protocol. The conceptual frame used on this site for the composite infrastructure layer making commerce agent-readable.
- Universal Commerce Protocol
- See UCP.
- Visa Intelligent Commerce (IC)
- Visa's agent-pay programme — agent-bound card credentials with delegated authority.
- Variant
- A specific purchasable form of a product (size, color, flavor). Should carry its own GTIN where applicable.
- Webhook
- A programmatic callback emitted on an event (order created, paid, shipped) — preferred over polling for lifecycle observability.
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