Sell-side agentic commerce

Sell-side agentic commerce overview

Sell-side agentic commerce is a business using its own AI agent to answer shoppers' product questions, recommend what fits, and complete the purchase in the same conversation. The shopper on the other end can be a person or the shopper's own AI agent.

Sell-side agentic commerce is the half of agentic commerce a business controls, and it runs on the business's website, app, and messaging channels. For retail and ecommerce teams, sell-side agentic commerce is how a store answers for itself once shoppers start sending their own agents to compare stores for them.

What is sell-side agentic commerce?

Sell-side agentic commerce is the seller's half of an agentic purchase, one of the 2 sides of agentic commerce. On the other side is buy-side agentic commerce, where a shopper's own AI agent searches and compares across many sellers.

3 traits separate a sell-side agent from a buy-side agent:

• It works for the business, so its goal is a sale the business wants, like the right size the first time instead of a return next week.
• It carries the business's rules, including the prices, discounts, and return policies the business approved before the agent spoke to anyone.
• It knows one catalog in depth, plus what the business already knows about the customer asking, such as what they bought last season.

A buy-side agent is wide and shallow, comparing a dozen stores on the facts each one publishes. A sell-side agent is narrow and deep, so it can answer the follow-up question a product feed can't, like whether a jacket runs small through the shoulders.

What are the types of sell-side agents?

Sell-side agents come in 3 main forms today, and they differ mostly in who hosts the agent and who it talks to. All 3 speak for one business, which separates them from the general-purpose assistants shoppers bring with them.

Where the agent lives decides who keeps the conversation. A platform-hosted agent runs inside someone else's product, while a brand-owned agent keeps every shopper question, and what it reveals about demand, with the business.

What can sell-side agents do?

Sell-side agents handle the questions and steps between a shopper's first visit and a finished purchase. That starts with the question that stalls a sale, like whether a sofa will fit through a narrow doorway, and runs through the recommendation, the purchase itself, and after-sale needs like order status and returns.

The payoff shows up in conversion. At BJ's Wholesale Club, members who engaged with Bev, the shopping assistant powered by Delight.ai, converted at a higher rate and showed greater purchasing activity per visit than those who didn't, according to the BJ's Wholesale Club case study.

Like buy-side agents, sell-side agents work at 3 levels of autonomy, but the business sets them instead of the shopper:

• Answer only, where the agent answers questions and recommends a product, and the shopper adds it to the cart.
• Act with approval, where the agent builds the cart or starts a return, and the shopper confirms before anything happens.
• Act within preset rules, where the agent applies an approved bundle price or swaps a size on its own, inside limits the business set.

A business sets the level action by action. It can let the agent swap a size on its own while still requiring a person to approve every refund.

What are retailers saying about sell-side agentic commerce?

Many retailers are deciding they need their own AI shopping agent because a third-party assistant can't speak for their catalog, offers, or customers. Throughout 2026, businesses have told Delight.ai they're concerned about how shoppers' AI assistants, like ChatGPT, find and buy their products. About 6 in 10 of those businesses are now building or evaluating a sell-side agent of their own.

At Delight.ai, we build AI agents for retail brands, so we hear firsthand which problems retailers want their own agent to solve. Among the retail and ecommerce businesses evaluating a Delight.ai agent with us in 2026, 5 problems came up most often.

Businesses could raise more than one problem, so the shares add up to more than 100%. Product discovery leads by a wide margin, and it's the problem where a brand's own agent has the edge, since it can draw on fit notes and return history a shopper's agent never sees.

How does a sell-side agent decide what to offer?

A sell-side agent decides what to offer by weighing what the shopper asked for against what the business can sell and has approved. That usually means 4 inputs:

• The shopper's stated need, such as a budget, a size, or a delivery date.
• Live stock and price from the business's commerce systems, so it doesn't recommend an item that sold out an hour ago.
• The offers and rules the business approved, like a bundle price or a cap on discounts.
• The customer's history, including past orders, returns, and preferences from earlier conversations.

The customer's history is the input a buy-side agent can't see. A returning shopper asking for running shoes doesn't have to mention she exchanged a narrow pair last spring, because the agent already knows to suggest a wide fit.

In a Delight.ai agent, that wide-fit suggestion comes from a memory feature that keeps each shopper's past orders, returns, and preferences, so the next conversation picks up where the last one ended. The feature is called Agent Memory Platform (AMP).

How does a sell-side agent complete a sale?

A sell-side agent completes a sale by taking only the actions the business approved, so a shopper can complete the purchase without leaving the chat. The business decides in advance what the agent is allowed to do along the way.

With Delight.ai, those approved actions are step-by-step flows a person reviews before they go live, such as how to swap a size or apply a bundle price. Those reviewed flows are called Actionbooks. Anything outside them, like a refund past the return window, goes to a human agent with the full conversation attached.

That boundary protects both sides of the sale. The shopper gets an answer the business will stand behind, and the business knows the agent won't promise a discount it never approved.

Where does sell-side meet buy-side?

Sell-side and buy-side agentic commerce meet when a shopper's AI agent asks a business a question and the business's own agent answers it. Instead of reading a product feed, the shopper's agent gets a reply based on the business's live catalog, approved offers, and rules.

Agent-to-agent protocols like A2A let that exchange happen without a person in the middle, so one sell-side agent can answer human shoppers and the agents they send.

Sell-side agentic commerce example

A shopper tells her AI assistant to buy a specific espresso machine for under $300, delivered by Friday. Her assistant checks 6 retailers, and only one of them has its own sell-side agent. The table follows the purchase from that retailer's side.

The retailer won the order with two things a general product feed can't carry, a delivery date confirmed from its live catalog and a bundle it had already approved. It kept the customer with a third, the history that made the follow-up answer useful.

Retailers already run this kind of agent with Delight.ai. BJ's Wholesale Club's shopping assistant Bev searches, recommends, and adds products to the cart based on what members buy, and it hands members to a live agent with the conversation intact.

"Bev gives us a new way to help members across the journey, from finding the right product to getting more value out of their membership. It makes the experience feel more personal, more useful, and more connected."

Scott Vandegrift, VP of Product, BJ's Wholesale Club (2026)

Key takeaways

• Sell-side agentic commerce is a business's own AI agent answering shoppers' questions, recommending what fits, and completing the purchase, whether the shopper is a person or an AI agent.
• A sell-side agent answers with what only the business knows, like whether a shoe runs narrow or whether a bundle is available today.
• Among retailers evaluating a Delight.ai agent, 46% want help with shoppers struggling to find and choose the right product, the most common problem they raised.
• Delight.ai builds sell-side agents that act only through approved Actionbooks and remember each customer through Agent Memory Platform.

Shoppers' agents will keep getting better at comparing stores, and no business controls which one a shopper uses. What a business can control is how it answers, with its live stock, its approved offers, and what it knows about the customer asking. Explore agentic commerce with Delight.ai.