OpenAI's launch of native Shopify checkout inside ChatGPT marks a turning point in agentic commerce. What was once hypothetical is now live: users can discover, evaluate, and purchase products in a single interface. This isn’t just a feature—it's a declaration of intent. AI-native commerce is here.

For every AI company racing toward similar product experiences, a hard truth waits just beneath the surface: scaling commerce isn't a language problem. It's an infrastructure problem.

And that infrastructure already exists.

The Invisible Work Behind the Buy Button

When OpenAI added native checkout, it crossed a boundary. It stopped being just an assistant and started becoming an operator—responsible not just for recommendations, but for executing trusted, secure transactions on behalf of users.

That means integrating with real merchant systems. Not just pulling product data, but:

• Respecting inventory and availability in real time

• Handling variant logic, shipping rules, tax, and discounts

• Creating carts and completing orders inside a merchant's existing stack

• Supporting post-order events like refunds and cancellations

These aren't edge cases. They're the foundation of a reliable commerce experience.

A Critical Capability for Scalable AI Applications

Commerce is emerging as a foundational layer in many AI-native and agent-powered experiences. Platforms that can reliably enable transactions—at scale—will be best positioned to capture share, retain users, and differentiate. But the work required to integrate with real-world merchant systems can be a major blocker.

This is the problem Violet was built to solve.

After years of building deep integrations across the commerce ecosystem, Violet now provides the infrastructure needed to support this new class of applications. With a single API, Violet connects your agents or assistants to real merchant systems across Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and a range of custom ecommerce platforms.

But it doesn't stop at connectivity. Violet supports an exhaustive set of real-world commerce scenarios across platforms, including:

• Product data ingestion and normalization

• Real-time inventory and pricing per SKU, per location

• Variant mapping and availability logic

• Storefront-specific shipping methods, rates, and geofenced delivery zones

• Multi-merchant cart and checkout orchestration

• Platform-native tax calculation and discount rule application

• Payment authorization through the merchant’s existing gateway

• Line-level order creation with unique identifiers for traceability

• Post-purchase event handling (cancellations, refunds, partial refunds, re-shipments)

• Merchant-level compliance with return policies, blackout dates, and business rules

• Support for persistent cart and user state across multiple merchants in a single session

• Brand-level merchandising controls to ensure accuracy and compliance

All of this is available through a normalized, developer-friendly API surface that allows your agents to act confidently and autonomously across the entire commerce stack—without ever reinventing it.

No scraping. No rebuilding. No reverse-engineered hacks.

Just robust, production-grade commerce infrastructure—built to scale with you.

The Infrastructure Advantage

As the demand for agent-powered commerce grows, many product and engineering teams face the challenge of building scalable integrations across diverse merchant systems. While the value proposition is clear, the implementation cost is high—especially when teams are focused on core AI and interface innovation.

This capability doesn't need to be built from scratch.

Violet provides:

• Fast access to normalized merchant inventory and pricing

• Embedded cart and checkout creation across platforms

• Compliant, trust-based integrations that merchants are willing to support

• Full support for post-purchase workflows like refunds and cancellations

Most critically, it unlocks speed to market—without sacrificing reliability or merchant trust.

For companies exploring embedded commerce—whether through autonomous agents, AI shopping copilots, or intelligent product interfaces—speed to market can be the difference between leading and lagging. There’s no need to build the integration layer from the ground up.

The Race Is On

We're watching multi-billion-dollar companies race to win the embedded commerce layer of the internet. If you're in that race, every week counts. The bottleneck shouldn't be integrations. It should be creativity.

Violet’s infrastructure is ready, tested, and already powering production use cases across platforms. It allows teams to skip the slow, error-prone process of custom integrations and focus on unlocking differentiated experiences instead. The companies that move fastest will be the primary destination for agentic commerce.

 Move faster, build for scale with real merchants, and skip the years of pain. 

Agentic commerce is moving fast. We’re here to help with infrastructure that accelerates go-to-market timelines, reduces integration overhead, and allows teams to focus on what differentiates their product—not what slows it down.