The Quiet Shift From Pages to Protocols
E-commerce used to revolve around what people saw: product detail page layouts, review carousels, and retargeting pixels. In the age of autonomous shopping agents, it pivots to what models can read and call. Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) represents the most mature attempt to standardize that machine-to-catalog handshake, describing products, offers, and checkout functions in a single JSON manifest that lives at /.well-known/mcp/manifest.json.
Industry watchers have already grouped MCP with Agent-2-Agent (A2A) and similar efforts as the "USB-C moment" of AI—the missing piece that makes independent agents interoperable at web scale.
Why Sellers Will Eventually Opt-In
The transition to agent-driven commerce creates legitimate concerns for merchants, but emerging solutions address each major friction point:
Perceived Loss: No email capture, no pixel history
The Reality: Agents pass a signed, revocable shopper-profile token that merchants can pipe into their CRM for post-purchase journeys—privacy-safe but still actionable.
Perceived Loss: Fewer upsell banners
The Reality: Rankers weighting rich structured fields (warranty details, sustainability scores) are boosting conversion in early pilots. Walmart's internal trials show meaningful lift when agents can surface differentiated value beyond price.
Perceived Loss: Fear of a price race to the bottom
The Reality: MCP supports first-class "differentiator" fields (bundled services, loyalty perks) so merchants can surface complete value propositions, not just pricing.
Where the Critical Mass Comes From
1. Platform Defaults
- Shopify is already forcing a move from legacy REST to GraphQL Admin APIs by April 2025, signaling its intent to auto-generate richer, schema-based endpoints.
- Salesforce added a Vector Search layer to Data Cloud and markets it as the on-platform way to feed generative AI experiences. And while Mulesoft will support MCP there has not been any direction given for Commerce on Core. We are looking forward to finding out release plans for this important step.
2. Marketplace Mandates
Major marketplaces (Amazon, Walmart, Temu) are experimenting with agent-facing feeds that rank MCP-compliant offers higher. Insiders report Walmart will formalize this advantage in 2026. Watch for similar language in vendor program updates.
3. Consumer Pull
Surveys show 38% of U.S. consumers—and a majority of Gen Z—already use generative AI helpers in some part of the buying journey. Once agent checkouts pass 10% of GMV in a vertical, holdouts risk simply disappearing from recommendations.
The Resulting Timeline
Phase | GMV Reachable via Agents | Indicative Window |
Pioneer marketplaces & D2C | ~8% | Now – H1 '25 |
Early majority (Shopify auto-enable, mid-tier clouds) | 30-40% | H2 '25 – H1 '26 |
Late majority (Woo/Magento, regional chains) | 55-70% | '26 – '27 |
Laggards (luxury, highly curated UX) | Trailing 15% | '28+ |
The Data-Ownership Truce
Protocol working groups are baking consent into the spec itself. MCP v0.3 introduces a mandatory data_usage section; agents that won't honor retention limits can be blocked at the handshake. Regulators, meanwhile, are steering sellers toward zero-party data flows that look remarkably similar to these tokens—both DMA in Europe and CCPA amendments in California include language exempting such flows from the harshest restrictions on tracking.
What Merchants Should Do Now
1. Inventory your catalog attributes – Fill gaps in price granularity, dimensions, sustainability and warranty fields.
2. Stand up a vector index (Salesforce Data Cloud, pgvector, or Pinecone) so you can answer "best option?" queries in under 100ms.
3. Expose a thin MCP façade over existing product and checkout APIs; start with read-only, then add reserveItem and placeOrder.
4. Tokenize loyalty – Design a flow where an MCP shopper token can be upgraded to a full account with explicit consent.
5. Join the spec listservs – Anthropic's MCP and the cross-vendor A2A group publish weekly drafts; small schema changes today will save expensive rewrites later.
Bottom Line
MCP is not a nice-to-have. It's the new "mobile-first" moment—only faster. By the time next year's Black Friday dashboards refresh, at least a third of online GMV is likely to flow through agent calls. When the traffic (and therefore revenue) shifts, having clean data and the right endpoints in place will separate those who win search-less commerce from those who wonder where their shoppers went.
Sources
- Anthropic – "Introducing the Model Context Protocol."
- Anthropic docs – "MCP: USB-C for AI."
- ModelContextProtocol.io – Introduction page.
- Business Insider – "The future of AI will be governed by protocols no one has agreed on yet."
- Salesforce Blog – "Vector Databases, Built for the AI Era."
- Salesforce Help – "Vector Search in Data Cloud."
- Shopify Dev – "REST Admin API is legacy; GraphQL required April 2025."
- Deloitte Connected Consumer Survey 2024.
- Bain & Company – "Understanding the Five Types of AI Consumers" 2025.