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Beyond payments

Key conceptsPrivate preview

Learn about the concepts that enable agentic commerce.

An agent manages transactions between a seller and buyers within an AI interface. It maintains existing relationships with customers, such as their preferences, payment methods they use for subscriptions, and customer details. This information enables the agent to make purchase recommendations directly within the AI interface, which can help improve conversion rates and more high-intent purchases.

Overview

Within the AI interface, agents help customers and sellers interact to discover products and execute a transaction. Agents issue a shared payment token (SPT) to manage payment methods.

Sellers

Sellers are either individual businesses or platforms made up of multiple sellers, and typically provide e-commerce goods, subscriptions, digital content, or API functions. As a seller, you can use the agent as your sales channel to offer your products.

AI agents

Agents are applications that use LLMs which can discover and recommend products for purchase. For example, an AI agent can display products through a user interface in response to a prompt. Customers typically have an account or subscription with the AI agent.

The AI agent creates a Customer object for each customer, and stores their payment information so you can reuse it for future purchases.

Shared payment token

Agents issue an SPT with the API, which is a scoped grant of a payment method. A seller can use SPTs directly in PaymentIntents flows, and outside of Stripe through virtualization.

As a seller, SPTs are uniquely granted to your seller account, which ensures they’re used for your transactions. To provide security and control over your payment process, SPTs contain usage limits and expiration windows. Additionally, they never contain real PANs or other raw credentials.

Learn more about how to create and use shared payment tokens.

Transaction process

The following diagram shows the transaction process between AI agents and customers, and how you register and process payment methods.

  1. The customer provides their payment method to the agent through an existing subscription relationship or as a new payment method.
  2. The agent issues an SPT by making a call to Stripe. This request specifies which seller receives the SPT, the amount of the transaction, and the payment method.
  3. The agent sends the SPT and transaction amount to the seller through an API that you expose.
  4. You create a PaymentIntent using the SPT in your Stripe account, then Stripe processes the transaction.

See also