Build your checkout flow for agentic commercePrivate preview

An agent manages transactions between a seller and buyers within an AI interface. It maintains pre-existing relationships with customers, such as their preferences, payment methods through existing subscriptions, and customer details. This information enables the agent to make real-time and actionable purchase recommendations directly within the AI interface, helping to improve conversion rates and leading to high-intent purchases.

Overview

Within the AI interface, agents help buyers and sellers interact to discover products and execute a transaction. Agents issue Shared Payment Token to manage payment methods securely.

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 LLM-powered applications which, among many things, can discover and recommend products for purchase. For example, an AI agent can, through a user interface, display products in response to a user prompt. Typically, buyers have an account or subscription with the AI agent.

The AI agent creates a Customer object for each buyer, and stores their payment information, enabling a more streamlined checkout process.

Shared Payment Token

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

As a seller, Shared Payment Tokens are uniquely granted to your seller account, ensuring they’re used for your transactions. To provide security and control over your payment processes, Shared Payment Tokens contain usage limits and expiry windows. Additionally, they never contain real PANs or other raw credentials.

See Shared Payment Token for more details.

Transaction process

This diagram outlines the transaction process between AI agents and buyers, showing how you register and process payment methods.

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