Agentic commerce technology provider Firmly has announced that retailers are using its newest platform offering to “more easily sell” through developing AI channels.
In late March, the tech company introduced what it called Firmly Connect. It described Firmly Connect as a no-code onboarding platform for online retailers that integrates with merchants’ existing websites and other commerce infrastructure.
Among the Firmly feature’s early users are consumer electronics retailer Best Buy and sporting goods seller Backcountry.
Kevin Lenau, president of Backcountry’s family of brands, said in the announcement that agentic commerce will represent an important shift in digital retail.
It will open “entirely new demand channels through AI agents, and emerging vertical shopping apps,” Lenau said. “The challenge has always been how complex and resource-intensive it is to integrate any new individual channel.”
Best Buy is No. 8 in the Top 2000, and Backcountry is No. 91. The Top 2000 Database is Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of the largest North American online retailers.
Merchants use Firmly to prepare for agentic commerce
Firmly said it “enables merchants to quickly become ‘agentic commerce-ready’ within hours to sell across AI shopping agents, platforms, and publishers.”
It said Firmly Connect “creates a direct and trusted connection between the agent and merchant and eliminates months of engineering work, complex data restructuring and cross-team coordination.”
Firmly framed those months of work as restrictions for merchants who seek to participate in “the new agentic commerce economy.” It starts with retailers verifying their business credentials and selecting where they want to sell, according to Firmly. Retailers must also be prepared to publish their product catalog. Firmly said retailers maintain full control over pricing, inventory and distribution.
Additionally, Firmly said it provides retailers with a “centralized interface” to manage and monitor:
- what agents and channels they sell through
- the products they sell within each channel
- how their products appear and transact across AI platforms
Those platforms include AI shopping agents, marketplaces, publishers and other emerging commerce environments, Firmly said.
Backcountry’s Lenau said Firmly has enabled the family of brands and its parent company, CSC Generation Enterprise, to connect with these channels. In doing so, Backcountry required “zero engineering resources or reworking our infrastructure,” he said.
“I did not believe the zero engineering to launch but they proved this true,” Lenau said. “This is a major step forward in unlocking the full potential of agentic commerce at scale.”
How the Firmly platform works
Firmly said its platform “autonomously integrates with a merchant’s systems and runs automated testing to validate the integration, removing the need for engineering effort on the merchant side.”
It said it has built its platform around three “core” capabilities:
- Protocol abstraction. Firmly said it abstracts across emerging protocols, including MCP, AP2, ACP, UCP, A2A and KYA. That allows merchants to participate in multiple ecosystems without rebuilding integrations for each one, Firmly said.
- Horizontal infrastructure layer. Firmly said it operates above existing commerce platforms. That allows merchants to connect once and distribute everywhere, according to Firmly.
- Merchant-of-record model. Firmly said merchants remain the merchant of record. It said they preserve their brand, customer relationships and first-party data. They also maintain control over pricing and inventory, according to the technology provider.
Firmly has also announced a strategic partnership with payments technology company Aurus. Firmly said the partnership allows Aurus’ enterprise-level retail clients “to activate AI-driven commerce channels without additional infrastructure changes.”
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