Anthropic has launched a blueprint for retailers to build AI shopping and merchant agents on Claude, as businesses prepare for the holiday shopping season and consumers increasingly use AI to discover and compare products.

The blueprint provides working reference implementations for shopping and merchant agents across retail, travel, telecoms and ticketing, with deployment available through the Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry and Google Cloud Vertex AI.

Anthropic said the shopping agent can operate within a retailer’s website or app, searching product catalogues, assembling multi-item carts, tailoring recommendations to customer preferences and displaying comparisons during conversations. It can then hand the completed cart to the retailer’s existing checkout or an agentic payments provider, while answering questions about orders, returns, exchanges and refunds.

The company said the agents include controls designed to keep recommended products and prices tied to catalogue data and prevent manipulative upselling. Payment processing remains with the retailer, while the merchant agent requires human approval before suggested changes to pricing, promotions or other store operations go live.

Angela Jiang, Anthropic’s head of product on its Claude platform, said retailers using the technology had seen “cart size up about 30–35 per cent for one partner”, while customers were “about 60 per cent more likely to complete a purchase”.

Anthropic’s merchant agent is designed to help retailers analyse sales performance, monitor inventory, identify potential stock problems and recommend pricing and promotions based on historical sales data. It can also draft marketing campaigns, with retailers retaining control over whether proposed changes are implemented.

The blueprint is available through Anthropic’s commerce-agents repository and includes a Claude Code plugin intended to help engineering teams customise the agents for their catalogues, policies and brands. Anthropic said its partners include Accenture, Mastercard and Visa, while retailers and commerce businesses including Shopify, Priceline and Wix are developing agents with Claude.

Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, said the collaboration was intended to combine Claude’s capabilities with “the trust, security, and global reach of the Visa network”, reflecting the importance of controls as AI becomes more involved in commerce.

Anthropic’s launch forms part of its wider push to expand Claude’s use among businesses, with the company positioning reusable agent-building tools as a way for organisations to deploy conversational commerce systems ahead of the peak retail period.

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