An open protocol and commerce transaction layer for AI agents. The internet's missing commerce layer — built so agents can discover, search, compare, and buy from any participating store.
The Problem
AI agents have no standard interface to discover, search, and purchase products across e-commerce sites. Every store has its own website, its own checkout flow, its own API (if it has one at all). Agents have to scrape, guess, and hack their way through.
Agora defines the standard. Think of it as "HTTP for agent commerce" — stores serve a manifest at /.well-known/agora.json declaring their capabilities, and agents interact through one unified protocol.
How It Works
Agents find stores through the public registry or by reading a store's agora.json manifest. Each store declares what it can do — product feed, search, cart, checkout.
Unified search across all participating stores. Compare products by price, availability, and attributes. No scraping, no guessing — structured data from the source.
Full commerce loop: build carts, initiate checkout, complete purchases. Consumer approval required via single-use tokens with 15-minute expiry. Agents can't charge cards autonomously.
Any store can participate by serving agora.json. Tiered capabilities — start with a product feed, add cart and checkout later. Shopify stores get zero-config onboarding with one API call.
Technical
Features
One POST call adapts any Shopify store into the protocol with no code changes. Automatic product indexing and capability mapping.
Works natively with Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and other MCP-compatible agents via the agora-mcp-server npm package.
Products compared across stores for price and availability in a single API call. Agents get the best deal, every time.
Single-use purchase tokens with 15-minute expiry. Agents propose transactions, humans approve them. No autonomous charges.
Agents discover stores without knowing their URLs. Each store gets a trust score, analytics dashboard, and webhook support for real-time inventory updates.