CartAI
The AI agent that handles checkout.
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CartAI - The AI agent that handles checkout.

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Checkout is the hard part, and most solutions clear it only where the merchant has integrated. CartAI completes checkout on any live merchant surface with no merchant-side work, cooperating with bot detection instead of evading it. One developer-first API, four products: Catalog (search and live pricing across merchants), Checkouts (clear and track orders to confirmation), Payments (PCI off your stack via Visa and Mastercard agent rails), Monetization (commissions on every agent sale).

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Maker
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Hey PH 👋
I'm Manil, founder of CartAI. We have been building CartAI for more than a year now and today we're shipping the developer release.
The problem we kept running into: every AI agent demo ends right before the part that matters. Browser automation can navigate the web but can't pay. Payment APIs can move money but can't navigate. Your agent gets to the checkout button — and stops.

CartAI is the API that closes that gap. Integrate, point an agent at any web property, and it completes the transaction — checkouts, subscriptions, invoices, orders.

It's four products covering the full transaction lifecycle, with checkout as the wedge everything sits on:

→ Catalog — find the product: search across merchants, live variants + pricing, and checkout estimates before a cart even exists
→ Checkout — clear the order: complete on the live merchant surface, tracked to confirmation with normalized orders + webhooks
→ Payments — move the money: hosted, PCI-compliant sessions on Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay
→ Monetization — share the upside: affiliate commission captured automatically across 70,000+ brands, attribution preserved through to the sale

Three ways to use it:
→ Automate — your agent runs the full flow autonomously
→ Embed — drop our agent into your app workflow
→ Enable — add checkouts to surfaces that never had one. Make any surface commerce enabled.

What's actually hard here isn't the navigation. It's PCI-compliant payment handling, cooperative bot-mitigation so you clear checkout instead of getting blocked (we cooperate with /// via Web Bot Auth and signed agent identity using — we don't evade them), and workflows that always terminate in a known transactional state. That's the part we built.

CartAI clears real orders on production merchants: start to finish, from one API call. There's also an open-source server if you'd rather drop it straight into Claude, Cursor, or your own agent.

Would love your feedback, especially from anyone building agents that need to actually transact. What would you point CartAI at first?

Docs →

 What’s the simplest, lowest-risk “first integration” you’d recommend for a developer who wants to test CartAI’s end-to-end transaction flow without exposing themselves to large financial or legal risk; for example: a specific merchant type, a sandbox/test merchant, or a particular payment/checkout pattern that proves the system while keeping complexity low?

I like that checkout works without merchant integration. How do you handle unexpected checkout changes on different stores? Publishing success rates by merchant could build more confidence.

Maker

 

Thanks! That's a great question.

Handling dynamic checkout experiences is one of the core challenges we're solving. CartAI continuously adapts to changes in merchant checkout flows through our automation and validation layer, allowing us to remain resilient even as storefronts evolve.

I completely agree on merchant-level success metrics. As the platform grows, we'd love to publish coverage and success rates to give developers better visibility and confidence.

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback!

Check out in any merchant with zero merchant-side integration is the whole ballgame. If that holds up, this is big.
Maker

 

Exactly—you've identified the crux of it.

Enabling checkout without merchant-side integrations is only half the challenge. The other half is ensuring every transaction is secure, authentic, and trusted.

CartAI handles that complexity by working alongside the merchant's existing trust and security ecosystem—including solutions from our partners like , , and — so AI agents can complete purchases while respecting the same protection mechanisms merchants already rely on.

We believe that's what will make Agentic Commerce truly scalable. 🚀

Me value the simple API approach for developers. What monitoring tools are available after checkout starts? Real time alerts could help teams respond faster.

Maker

 

Thanks!
Excellent developer experience has been one of our core priorities from day one.


Once a checkout is initiated, developers can track its lifecycle through our Webhooks, receiving real-time events for important state changes and integrating those into their own monitoring or automation workflows.


We also provide a portal where teams can monitor orders, inspect checkout status, and troubleshoot issues when needed.


We believe every team has different operational needs, so rather than locking developers into a predefined alerting system, CartAI gives them the building blocks to create monitoring and notification workflows that fit their own stack.

Native email and SMS alerting are already on our roadmap and will be rolling out soon, making it even easier for teams to stay informed without building custom notification workflows.

Really appreciate the suggestion—feedback like this helps us prioritize what developers need most. 🚀

It would help a lot if the Catalog API exposed a confidence score or freshness timestamp with each price result, so we can decide when to refetch before sending the user to checkout. Right now we have to guess whether a cached price is still good enough to trust.

Maker

 

Thanks for the thoughtful suggestion!

Our approach is slightly different from a traditional Catalog API.
In addition to serving product data, CartAI's Checkout Estimates API gives developers an understanding of the expected checkout outcome— such as pricing and other checkout signals — before initiating the actual purchase.


During checkout, we also validate the latest merchant data to ensure the transaction uses the most up-to-date information available.

That said, exposing explicit freshness metadata or confidence scores is an interesting idea, and we'll definitely consider it as we continue to evolve the platform.

Thanks for the valuable feedback! Love it!

the cooperative bot-mitigation angle (Web Bot Auth + signed agent identity instead of evasion) is the part that actually made me trust this more than most agent-checkout plays, that's a much more durable strategy than a cat-and-mouse scraper. one thing I didn't see addressed: if the agent completes checkout but the price or stock changed between the catalog quote and the confirmed order (this will happen on flash-sale or low-stock items), does CartAI guarantee the originally quoted price, or does the developer/end user just eat the discrepancy when it clears at a different amount?

Maker

 

Thanks! I'm glad the cooperative trust model resonated with you—that's exactly the approach we believe will make Agentic Commerce sustainable.

On pricing and inventory, we actually treat the AI agent much like a human shopper. If a product goes out of stock or its price changes before checkout, a human decides whether to continue with the purchase. The same principle applies to CartAI.


Through our Agentic Payment Flows (e.g. and ), the AI agent is granted authorization to transact within predefined boundaries—such as a maximum spend amount or other purchasing constraints.
At checkout, CartAI validates the merchant's latest state. The purchase is completed only if the items are still available and the final amount falls within the authorized grant.

We also recommend that developers request a grant that's 5–10% higher than the expected order value. This provides a small buffer for dynamic shipping charges, taxes, or minor price fluctuations that commonly occur between product discovery and checkout, while still keeping spending within user-approved limits.

If the final amount exceeds the authorized grant or the item is no longer available, the AI agent doesn't proceed silently.

We believe this strikes the right balance between autonomy, flexibility, and user trust.

 makes sense, and the "doesn't proceed silently" part is the key detail for me - that's basically the same trust model as a card pre-auth hold, just extended to an agent. good to know the buffer is a recommendation rather than something baked in with no visibility. appreciate the detailed answer, following along as you ship the developer release.

Maker

  Thank you . We appreciate your support 🙏

Congrats on the launch, really interesting product, and definitely needed. The interesting claim here isn't the automation, it's cooperating with bot detection via signed identity. That only holds if merchants actually want agent traffic. What happens when one signs your key and says no?

Maker

 

Thanks! That's a great question.

We believe Agentic Commerce should be built on merchant choice, not circumvention.

Signed agent identity and cooperative bot mitigation aren't about guaranteeing access—they're about allowing merchants to distinguish trusted AI agents from anonymous automation and make informed policy decisions.
If a merchant chooses not to allow agent-driven checkouts, CartAI respects that decision.
Merchants should always remain in control of how AI agents interact with their storefronts.

At the same time, consumer expectations are evolving. Customers increasingly want the freedom to shop from the AI experiences they trust—not just a merchant's website or app. We believe the future of consumer-centric commerce is about giving customers that choice while ensuring every interaction remains secure, authenticated, and transparent for merchants.

To make that possible, CartAI works alongside the broader trust ecosystem, including our security partners such as Akamai, Cloudflare, and HUMAN, as well as merchant-trusted fraud prevention and risk management platforms like Forter and others.

Rather than circumventing merchant controls, our goal is to integrate with the existing security, fraud, and trust infrastructure that merchants already use to protect their customers and their business.
We believe that's what will make Agentic Commerce truly scalable: consumer choice, merchant control, and a shared foundation of trust.

What does the API hand back when a checkout dies halfway, after the payment authorizes but before the merchant confirms? Signed agent identity and the PCI rails cover the happy path, and that half looks genuinely solved here, it's the money-moved-but-no-confirmation case where every agentic checkout story I've read goes quiet.

Maker

 

Great question. This is actually where Agentic Payments differ from traditional payment flows.

With models like and , the customer grants the AI agent permission to transact up to a predefined amount under specific constraints. The customer isn't charged upfront.

CartAI uses that grant (authorization) to complete the merchant's checkout journey. The actual transaction only occurs when the merchant successfully processes the order, just as it would on the merchant's own website.

Throughout the checkout lifecycle, CartAI continuously publishes order state changes via Webhooks, allowing developers to build custom workflows for retries, notifications, reconciliation, or any post-checkout automation if an issue occurs.

Combined with our self-healing checkout orchestration, this ensures developers have both visibility into every checkout state and the flexibility to respond programmatically whenever needed.

 The grant model dissolves most of it, if nothing settles until the merchant processes, the half-dead case shrinks to the auth hold itself. One loose end though: a merchant that never confirms leaves that pending amount sitting on the customer's card until something releases it. How fast does CartAI let go of the hold in that case?

Maker

 We never hold funds on the card as an authorization. The card is converted to an agentic token via Visa and Mastercard and entered directly on the merchant website at checkout. The flow is no different than if the consumer went to a website and placed a direct order.

 If the token gets entered directly on the merchant's site like a live card number, is it scoped to that one checkout, locked to the order amount and single-use, or could it be reused for a second charge if the merchant's system holds onto it after the sale?

Hi Team,

First of all, Many many congratulations for such a great launch, 🎉

Really like the approach of working with bot detection instead of trying to sneak past it. Getting listed in Cloudflare’s verified bot directory is not something most teams can pull off.

One question though. Since you’re checking out on live merchant sites, what happens if a payment goes through but the site glitches before the confirmation shows up? Does the system know not to retry and charge the customer twice? Curious how you handle those messy edge cases, because that feels like the hardest part of making this reliable.

Rooting for you guys, the idea makes a lot of sense. Great job 👏

Maker

 

Great question !!

The agentic order is considered successful once the merchant processes and confirms it. Any failure during this period will fail the entire transaction.
We do not retry if the merchant site glitches before the confirmation and fails to display an order confirmation page.

 Hi Aman, Thanks for the clear answer! Failing safe instead of retrying blindly is definitely the right call, way better than risking a double charge.

Out of curiosity, in the rare case where the card gets charged but the glitch happens before the confirmation shows up, does the system catch that afterwards and update the order? Would love to understand how you close that loop, since handling it well would honestly be a huge trust signal for anyone building on top of you.

Btw, Loving the thoughtful engineering behind this.

Great work!

Maker

 

Really appreciate you asking this.
Our agent uses the customer's contact information when interacting with the merchant, so the merchant remains the source of truth and customers continue to receive official order confirmations through the merchant's existing communication channels.
Our agent intentionally doesn't infer the outcome without confirmation, preferring accuracy over making potentially incorrect assumptions.

Nice Lanuch! How do you handle the nasty middle state where the card gets charged but the confirmation page times out or never comes back? Curious how you guarantee idempotency and reconciliation there, and how the final state a caller receives distinguishes "order actually placed" from "charged but the merchant has no record of it.

Maker

 

Great question.
The key thing is that CartAI never charges the customer's card itself.
The payment is still processed by the merchant through their existing payment provider, just as it is today.

CartAI uses Visa Intelligent Commerce (VIC) and Mastercard Agent Pay to obtain permission to spend using agentic payment tokens (agentic PANs).

The merchant processes these tokens like a normal payment credential, while the Card Network handles the mapping to the customer's actual card.


If a confirmation page times out after payment, that's not unique to Agentic Commerce, it's the same scenario merchants already handle today. Their payment gateway, order system, and the card networks remain the source of truth for whether a payment was authorized and whether an order was created.

CartAI simply works within that existing ecosystem rather than introducing a new payment flow or reconciliation model.

 Thanks for the detailed explanation, appreciate it!

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