There is a person behind every agent
An AI agent did not decide it wanted your product. Somebody asked it to buy something, and it went and did the work. That somebody is your customer, exactly as they were before. They may have named your shop, or they may have described what they were after and their assistant found you. Either way the decision was theirs and the money is theirs. The agent is doing the legwork: comparing options, filling in the form, completing the checkout. It works much the way an assistant books a flight for the person they work for, or a comparison site sends a buyer your way. This is worth holding onto, because it makes everything else easier to place. Agentic commerce is a channel, the way mobile was a channel. It is not a new kind of customer, and it has not put you in a new kind of business.What it looks like in your store
If you are using one of the official plugins for WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Shopware, Medusa or Saleor, the order arrives in your normal order list with your normal order number. It sits between the orders that came in before and after it. Nothing about your admin changes and there is no separate screen to go and check. The difference is on the payment line, which tells you the order was paid by an AI agent in stablecoins rather than by card. The shipping details are there as usual. The customer record is there as usual. Your returns policy applies as usual. Pick and pack it the way you would anything else.Why the agent paid in stablecoins and not by card
This is the part that looks odd until you see it from the agent’s side. A card payment assumes a person. It assumes somebody holding a piece of plastic who can read a number off the front, take a message from their bank and tap approve. Remove the person and a card payment largely stops working. An agent has no card, no phone to receive the code, and nobody sitting beside it at three in the morning to confirm anything. Stablecoins are simply the payment method that still works when there is no human in the loop. A stablecoin is a digital form of an ordinary currency, usually the dollar, that holds a steady value rather than moving around the way other digital assets do. The agent spends from a balance its owner funded, without needing anyone’s permission at the moment of purchase. It suits buying across borders, too. The payment behaves the same whether your customer is in the next town or on the far side of the world, with nothing for you to arrange locally. It also reaches you in seconds rather than days, because it passes through far fewer hands than a card payment does. That quietly widens who is able to buy from you: someone whose local card you could never have accepted can now pay you directly.What actually happened to the money
Behind the order, the sequence was short. The buyer’s agent had a wallet its owner had put money into. At checkout it signed an instruction for exactly the amount you were charging, no more and nothing open-ended. That instruction went to the address you nominated when you set up your project, and the money moved there directly. Nobody held it along the way. It did not rest with us, with a processor, or in an account waiting to be released to you on a schedule. It went from your buyer to you. Once the network confirms the transfer, which usually takes seconds, it is complete.When it is safe to send the goods
When the order shows as paid, it is paid, and you can send the goods exactly as you normally would. One difference is worth understanding at this point. A completed transfer cannot be undone — there is no mechanism to reverse it, not by you, not by your buyer, and not by us. In practice that means a paid order stays paid. It also means that when you decide to refund somebody, you send the money back yourself rather than asking anyone to reverse anything. That is a subject of its own, and it is covered separately.What is genuinely different
Three things, and none of them touch how you fulfil an order. The money arrives as stablecoins rather than in your bank account. Most of what a business pays for still moves in ordinary currency, so at some point you will convert it, on whatever cadence suits your cash flow. Refunds are something you send rather than something you reverse. Your policy does not change, only the mechanics of paying somebody back. And the money lands in a wallet you control rather than in an account somebody else holds for you. That is deliberate, and it comes with the responsibility you would expect: the wallet is yours to look after.Where to go next
Cashing Out to Your Bank
Converting what you have been paid into ordinary currency and getting it
into a business bank account.
How It Works
The mechanics in a little more depth, if you want to see the whole path a
payment takes.