[DigitalToday reporter Chi-gyu Hwang (황치규)] Anthropic unveiled a "blueprint" to support building commerce agents based on Claude.

On Sept. 3 (local time), Anthropic said many retailers, marketplaces, e-commerce platforms and travel companies around the world are building shopping agents with Claude.

Corporate customers such as Shopify and Priceline have already introduced agents that let users search for, compare and buy products in natural language.

The blueprint includes harnesses, patterns and guardrails that help engineering teams run commerce agents within days. It also includes reference implementations for shopping and merchant agents for retail, travel, telecommunications and ticketing, as well as a Claude Code plugin.

The code works out of the box in any environment that uses Claude, including the Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry and Google Cloud Vertex AI. Anthropic is working with partners such as Accenture, Mastercard and Visa to help customers and merchants apply the blueprint in practice.

The blueprint code also includes a shopping agent and a merchant agent. The shopping agent operates inside an app or website. It provides integration points for catalogues, shopping carts, payments, customer preferences and order histories, while payment itself is handled by existing payment systems or agentic payment providers.

For example, if a customer says, "Find a tent, sleeping bag and stove for a weekend trip," the agent searches a catalogue to combine multiple products, remembers customer preferences to make tailored suggestions, and shows products and comparisons in the conversation in a form other than text, along with the shopping cart.

The merchant agent supports store operators. If asked, "What should I discount to clear last season's inventory?" it analyses store sales and inventory data to provide an answer. It recommends pricing and promotions based on sales history and drafts marketing campaign copy. Even if the agent proposes changes, approval is required before applying them, and the final decision is made by a person.