Everyone builtthe checkout.Nobody built the shelf.
Caravanserai is where a store registers so AI can buy from it. People now hand their shopping to an AI assistant. The store can’t give it a real price, stock, or a time for pickup or delivery, so the order fails. We make the store answer.
AI shoppers convert best. There are almost none of them. Both are on the record.
AI-referred shoppers convert better than the rest of a retailer's traffic. The best traffic in retail right now.
And there are almost none of them. That is Etsy's AI traffic as a share of all its traffic, said on an earnings call.
Merchants who ever went live on ChatGPT Instant Checkout, against the million promised. OpenAI retired it in March.
How in-chat checkout converted next to a plain link to walmart.com. Walmart measured it, said so on the record, and pulled out.
Independent shops that publish a delivery promise a machine can act on. Not few: none, in 946 shops we could read. 48.5% say they deliver, in words on the page, which an agent cannot book against.
The best-converting shoppers a store can get, and almost none of them arrive. The gap is not demand, and it is not payment. Stores are not registered for AI to buy from them, so the buy fails.
Marks show where each figure came from. Attribution, not endorsement. Every figure is sourced in the receipts. The fifth is our own fieldwork.
Protocols and tills
We compete with none of these.We speak MCP today.
Payment already works. A store integrates once, with us. Today that means MCP and our own API. The rails marked coming soon are not built yet; a registered store gets each one as it lands.
Rails an agent can arrive on
ACPComing soon
Agentic Commerce Protocol
Open spec, Sept 2025
AP2Coming soon
Agent Payments Protocol
Donated to the FIDO Alliance
UCPComing soon
Universal Commerce Protocol
Open standard, Jan 2026
MCP
Model Context Protocol
Storefront servers on every Shopify store
TAPComing soon
Trusted Agent Protocol
10+ partners, Oct 2025
Agent PayComing soon
Agentic Tokens
Agent Pay for Machines, June 2026
x402Coming soon
HTTP 402 settlement
x402 Foundation, Linux Foundation, Apr 2026
Tills a store already runs · AI buys through Square today
Square
ToastComing soon
CloverComing soon
LightspeedComing soon
WooCommerceComing soon
One integration, not one per AI. We serve MCP today and add each rail as it lands. That is how a small store gets bought from by software it has never heard of, on the buyer’s own assistant, not one we sold them.
Marks show who publishes each protocol and which tills a store runs. Attribution, not endorsement.
Put your store where the AI can buy from it.
One integration on the till you already run. No code, no replatforming, no change to checkout. We do the work with you.
“Crawling and scraping is inadequate to get the full breadth of product data that you need to do a good job of commerce.”
Emily Pfeiffer, Principal Analyst, Forrester
In September 2025 OpenAI and Stripe shipped a protocol and a checkout and promised a million merchants. By February, thirty were live. In March it was retired. Every named reason was a store data problem. None was payment.
- 01Stock status went stale.
- 02Delivery dates were outdated or invented.
- 03Shipping costs were wrong, or missing entirely.
- 04No multi-item cart.
- 05No sales tax collected or remitted.
- 06Merchants would not hand over loyalty, payment data, or the customer after the sale.
That is not a list of things an AI cannot do. It is a list of things a store never told anyone. So it is our product spec.
A store is a promise about what is behind the counter. Nothing about that changed when the customer became software.
Photograph · Ron Lach
Illustrative transcript
Today
The agent guesses, then gives up.
This is the usual outcome. The store is real, the demand is real, and the AI can read none of it.
With Caravanserai · delivery
The store answers, and the AI buys.
Same florist, same question. The store is registered, so the assistant gets the real price, stock and delivery for the whole basket, then orders and pays once.
With Caravanserai · pickup
Ready at the counter, already paid.
A pet shop on Square. The usual basket, one charge, one order on its till. What it doesn't have is named, not guessed.
Stores register. People delegate. The AI does the buying.
01
The store registers
One integration with the till the store already runs. On Square, AI can buy from the store the moment it connects; Clover and WooCommerce are coming soon. No replatforming, no new hardware. The store keeps its own checkout, loyalty and customer.
02
Buyable by AI
We read live price, stock, fees, and pickup and delivery times from the till, and serve them over MCP, the protocol AI assistants connect with. A shopper's AI can find the items, check they are in stock, and buy the basket for pickup or delivery.
03
A person hands over the shopping
A person connects the assistant they already use — ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini — saves a card once, and sets which stores it may buy from and how much. Square keeps the card; we keep only a token. Then they say what they want, and the AI finds it, orders and pays. No store app, no checkout. Early access: stores first, then buyers from the waitlist.
04
We are never the merchant of record
The store charges the card on its own processor, under its own account, with a card the buyer approved once. We hold no card data and take no fee. We sit between the two sides — the store's till and the buyer's assistant — and never in the money.
The live offer a store stands behind.
One store, one basket, signed and good for fifteen minutes: the real prices, stock and delivery a registered store stands behind. A shopper’s AI buys against this, not a guess.
minting and signing a quote…Signed and verified in your browser against the key below. Change one cent and it breaks. That is the difference between a scraped price and one the store signed.
- Signer key
- ed25519:b7b2…0189
- Curve
- Ed25519 over the canonical body (sorted keys, no whitespace)
Reference implementation. Real signature, illustrative merchant — Hollow Stem Flowers is not a customer. Signed with a disposable demo key.
The window opened when the first attempt failed. It started closing this month, when scraping became permissioned.
15 Sep 2026
Scraping becomes permissioned
Cloudflare now makes AI companies split their crawlers into search, training and agent. From this date it blocks training and agent crawlers by default on ad-bearing pages, for free customers and every new site. Not a total shutdown — a bakery's site carries no ads. But the switch that decides which bots get in is now built, on, and set to no. Cloudflare customers blocked 416 billion AI bot requests in five months.
Mar 2026
Shopify closed its own door
Agentic Storefronts switched on by default for eligible US merchants, putting catalogs into ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Copilot, with checkout on the merchant's own site. Free. Shopify solved this for Shopify.
1 Jul 2026
Square did it for its restaurants
A ChatGPT app and a Claude plugin. US food-and-beverage sellers with an active Square Online Ordering profile were opted in automatically: orders go into Square Online Ordering, the POS and the kitchen display, paid by Order by Cash App, no commission. It is a catalog inside two assistants, and nothing for a seller off Square. Two platforms have now split this market by till, not by merchant.
Mar 2026
The first attempt failed in public
Instant Checkout retired. Atlas retired four months later. The field is clear now. It was not six months ago, and it will not be in twelve.
Now
Both numbers are true at once
Agent traffic converts best in retail and is under one percent of volume. Both will not stay true for long. And delegation runs one way: people hand off every task AI can take. That is the window.
None of it matters unless your order is there when you were told.
Photograph · Tima Miroshnichenko
We are picking the first stores now.
A few stores whose shelves change by the hour, the people building agents that have to read them, and shoppers who would rather tell an assistant than open six apps. We do the integration ourselves, on the till you already run.
I run a store.
Tell us what you sell and which till you run. We register your store so a shopper's AI can buy from it, for pickup or delivery. No code, no replatforming, no change to checkout. Square first; Clover and WooCommerce are coming soon.