Hey HN! We got tired of waiting on Shopify, Stripe, and OpenAI to converge on a solution and let the world use it, so we built our own infrastructure to bridge that gap. For merchants, this is a one-click setup: connect your Shopify store and your catalog becomes programmatically accessible to AI systems via ACP. Agents can query structured product data (inventory, pricing, availability) and initiate purchases using ACP-compatible flows. Full agentic payments via Stripe are on the roadmap. A few technical details that may interest this crowd: - Shopify’s APIs were designed for human storefronts and backend services, not autonomous agents. We built an abstraction layer that presents commerce data in a deterministic, agent-friendly way. - Payments are the hardest part. The challenge isn’t charging a card — it’s safely handing off agent intent to Stripe while preserving authorization, fraud controls, and auditability. Basically, everything is structured and permissioned. No scraping, no prompt-hacking your storefront HTML. For developers, we provide clear docs and SDK-style endpoints so integrating an agent is straightforward. The goal is to make “AI can shop this store” as simple as calling an API, not building custom glue code per merchant. We’re running limited beta signups while we learn where this breaks in real usage. Right now it’s free for smaller stores as we focus on stability and feedback rather than monetization. The early interest has been strongest from merchants selling technical or niche products, where agent-driven discovery and purchasing actually makes sense. We’re live at https://actory.ai. If you run a Shopify store, are building agents, or have thought about agent-driven commerce, we’d love blunt feedback. What are we missing? What breaks if even 5–10% of commerce flows through agents in the next few years? |