Sector brief · April 2026
Primary profile: Product (/p/)
Retail and e-commerce
Merchants are optimizing for humans in browsers while assistants shop by API. The winner exposes token-efficient catalogs, honest compare surfaces, and payments that do not collapse on micropurchases.[7][2]
Market context
McKinsey's writing on agentic commerce discusses purchase volume on the order of trillions of dollars toward the end of the decade, much of it influenced or executed by agents.[7] That story assumes merchants publish machine-readable catalogs that shopping agents can fetch, compare, and buy against while sidestepping a walled-garden tax on every micro-order.[4]
Payment comparisons (Crossmint, Hypertrends, etc.) highlight multiple agentic payment protocols; the theme is finding rails that work when the buyer is code.[6][8]
Structural gaps
Where incumbents sit
Stripe's Agentic Commerce Protocol targets in-app checkout. Skyfire couples wallets and KYA-style controls. Salesforce Agentforce keeps commerce inside CRM.[5][9] Independent retailers need open protocols and optional self-hosting.
Building on more.md (implementation map)
Product entities (`/p`) for every SKU
Publish `/p` SKUs with stable fields for price, variants, and fulfillment constraints.
Merged Markdown catalogs
Use `?show=all` (or equivalent) to return one document per retailer for cheaper retrieval than sitewide crawling.
HTTP 402 with machine-readable terms
Return payment requirements agents can satisfy programmatically, including x402-style stablecoin paths where comparisons show card fees dominate on small tickets.[6]
Competitive context
Names below appear in third-party sources listed under References. The contrast column sketches where an agent-first build on more.md sits relative to each player. Complement in some layers, substitute in others.
| Player | Position in market | Contrast with more.md-shaped build |
|---|---|---|
| Stripe (ACP) | Agent checkout inside large consumer apps. | Card economics vs native x402-style flows. |
| Skyfire | KYA-style agent checkout stack. | Wallet coupling vs open 402 manifests. |
| Salesforce Agentforce | Agents embedded in CRM workflows. | Platform lock-in vs MIT-licensed EEP you can self-host. |
References
- [1]more.md whitepaper
- [2]Medium — TOON vs JSON in high-scale LLM systems
- [3]Hypertrends — Agentic payments (x402 vs ACP vs AP2 vs TAP)
- [4]McKinsey — Automation curve in agentic commerce
- [5]Nevermined — AI agent platforms for automated businesses
- [6]Crossmint — Agentic payments protocols compared
- [7]McKinsey — Agentic commerce opportunity
- [8]AI Agent Store — Skyfire vs x402 comparison
- [9]Vybe — Best AI agent platforms 2026