Anthropic launches Claude commerce blueprint for retailers

Anthropic has launched a blueprint for building commerce agents on its Claude AI models, aimed at retailers, marketplaces, eCommerce platforms and travel groups.

The release includes reference implementations for two types of agent: a shopping agent for consumer-facing use and a merchant agent for store operators. Engineering teams can deploy the software through the Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry or Google Cloud Vertex AI. It also includes a Claude Code plugin.

The move adds a more structured product offering in a category drawing growing interest from retailers and payments groups. Anthropic says customers already using Claude-based shopping agents have seen shopping carts grow by as much as 35% and shoppers become 60% more likely to complete a purchase.

Two agent types

The shopping agent is designed to sit inside a company's app or website and handle product search, comparisons, cart building and customer service queries in a single conversation. It includes integration points for catalogues, carts, checkout systems, customer preferences and order histories, while leaving payments to a retailer's existing checkout process or a third-party provider.

According to Anthropic, the shopping agent can process multi-item requests, retain customer preferences and present products and comparisons within the conversation rather than as text alone. It is also intended to answer post-purchase service questions such as order tracking, returns, exchanges and refund policies.

The merchant agent is aimed at internal users running stores and online operations. It can answer questions on sales performance, monitor inventory, suggest pricing and promotional changes, and draft marketing campaigns based on the merchant's own data.

Any proactive recommendation from the merchant agent still requires human approval before changes go live. The software also includes controls intended to keep prices and products tied to actual catalogue data and to avoid manipulative upselling.

Retail partners

Several large commerce and consumer companies are already building on Claude, including Shopify, Priceline, Intuit, Klaviyo, Wix, Square and Zomato. Anthropic is also working with Accenture, Mastercard and Visa as part of a wider partner network around the new blueprint.

For retailers and travel companies, the appeal of conversational agents lies in reducing friction across product discovery, comparison and support. That is especially relevant in categories such as travel, where a booking often involves flights, hotels, car hire and multiple trade-offs.

"A trip is one of the most complex things a person buys: flights, hotels, cars, and dozens of options to weigh against each other. Penny, our AI assistant, navigates all of that in one conversation and surfaces the best options and best value. We built the latest generation of Penny on Claude because that kind of reasoning is exactly what Claude models are good at," said Cobus Kok, Vice President of AI Experiences at Priceline.

The blueprint is also intended to reduce the time and engineering effort needed to launch an agent. Users can review self-guided demonstrations before writing code and then adapt the software to their own catalogues, policies and brand requirements.

"Our engineers had both commerce agents from Anthropic's blueprint running locally in well under an hour, with live conversations working on the first attempt. We ran the Claude Code workflow twice and got two different architectures back, each designed to what we'd asked for. For a team starting from scratch, that turns days of agent scaffolding into hours," said Ashley Nader, Staff Product Manager.

Payments and trust

The involvement of payments companies points to a broader contest over how AI agents fit into online transactions. As more shopping journeys move into conversational interfaces, merchants and payment networks are trying to ensure they retain oversight of customer interactions and checkout flows.

"AI will fundamentally reshape commerce, but trust must remain at the center of every transaction. Merchants are telling us they want more control over how AI engages their customers. Our collaboration with Anthropic on their commerce blueprint helps bring together the intelligence of Claude with the trust, security, and global reach of the Visa network, empowering merchants to deliver better customer experiences while maintaining the relationships that drive their businesses forward," said Jack Forestell, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Visa.

Mastercard struck a similar note on the role of trust in agent-led transactions. "Trust is the currency of commerce, and it is even more critical in the agentic era. With Anthropic's commerce blueprint, we're helping merchants build their own agents with Claude to drive their growth. By combining AI innovation with trusted payments and commerce infrastructure, we're helping connect consumers, merchants and AI agents securely, seamlessly and at scale," said Sherri Haymond, Executive Vice President and Global Head of Digital Commercialisation at Mastercard.

Consulting firms are also positioning themselves around the implementation opportunity as companies move from pilots to production systems.

"Commerce agents are quickly becoming a critical capability for organizations seeking to deliver the personalized, intelligent customer experiences that today's consumers expect. Our latest research revealed that 85% are now open to collaboration with an AI agent and nearly three in four would trust a personal AI agent more than their best friend to make a purchase on their behalf. This is more than a shift in how people shop. Agentic commerce is rewriting the rules of brand value - fundamentally shaping what gets purchased, when, where and by whom. Anthropic's commerce agent blueprint provides a proven starting point that can help organizations accelerate deployment and build differentiated experiences that increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and growth. Combined with Accenture's deep retail and consumer goods expertise, we can help clients move from concept to production and realize value from agentic AI faster," said Kath Gramling, Global Consumer Goods, Retail and Travel Lead at Accenture.

The repository contains complete working implementations built with Anthropic's Messages API, Agent SDK or Claude Managed Agents. The software covers retail, travel, telecom and ticketing use cases, with tools for catalogue search, inventory management, analytics, personalisation, marketing and in-conversation user interfaces.

"Our engineers had the blueprint running with no blockers; the setup worked exactly as documented. The practices it bakes in, from tool iteration limits to prompt caching, are the ones we recognized from building Zomato's own agent. Teams standing up their first agent on Claude will skip weeks of trial and error," said Akhil Bansal, Senior Engineering Manager at Zomato.