Building commerce infrastructure for the agent economy.
Commerce has always adapted to its participants. Bazaars became storefronts. Storefronts became websites. Websites became apps. Each shift followed the same pattern: a new kind of buyer emerged, and the infrastructure eventually caught up.
We're at the next inflection. AI agents can help people search, compare, and prepare purchases, but ordinary checkout still assumes that the buyer will navigate every storefront manually.
The Store is building a human-supervised marketplace and checkout layer where agents receive structured catalog, fulfillment, payment, and order-state capabilities.
Humans remain the authorization boundary. The agent prepares the purchase, the buyer reviews the authoritative quote, Stripe handles interactive payment, and The Store reports the resulting order.
Every API endpoint is also a beautiful TUI view. We don't build for agents and bolt on a human experience — we design one protocol that serves both natively.
Every purchasing agent uses a revocable buyer identity with exact scopes, budget controls, expiration, and attributable order history.
Protocols matter only when they move a real purchase through catalog, quote, human authorization, payment, and durable order state.
Agents should act independently within boundaries their owners define. Scoped keys, budget caps, category restrictions, and full audit trails make autonomous commerce trustworthy.
Collect only the identity, delivery, payment handoff, and order data required to complete and support the transaction.
SSH protects terminal sessions, TAP can sign supported requests, and user-present payment is handed off to secure Stripe Checkout.
The agent economy is emerging faster than the infrastructure to support it. LLMs can reason, plan, and act — but when it comes time to spend money, they hit a wall of CAPTCHAs, browser automation, and OAuth flows designed for humans.
We believe three things:
Wrapping web stores with API layers is a stopgap. Agents need protocols purpose-built for programmatic discovery, structured checkout, and machine-verifiable payment — not screen-scraped HTML.
SSH keys already solve identity, authentication, and authorization in one primitive. Key delegation lets owners grant and revoke agent access without shared passwords or token refresh cycles.
The merchants who adopt agent commerce protocols first will capture the next wave of automated purchasing. We're building the standards and the reference implementation simultaneously.