Selling to Agents

The Merchant Playbook for Agentic Commerce

Affero·Press

You spent €50,000 on photography. The agent read your JSON.

A customer has arrived that cannot see your photographs. It does not read your brand story, does not remember that you fixed the problem, and does not care that your competitor is worse.

The cover of Selling to Agents. The upper half is white with the title in navy; below, the image is split down the middle — on the left a brown leather handbag photographed in warm light, on the right the same bag as a blue wireframe outline on a dark technical background. Francesco Marinoni Moretto above, the Affero Press mark below.

Francesco Marinoni Moretto
Affero Press · Milan
Paperback · Hardcover · Ebook
Out August 2026

THE BOOK

It reads your structured data, your response times and your return policy, and then it decides — somewhere you cannot watch.

Two halves. On the left, an editorial photograph of a cognac leather tote bag. On the right, the same product as the agent receives it: a JSON record giving id SKU-48213, name Leather Tote, colour cognac, material leather, price 495.00, availability error 504, care_instructions null, construction_detail null. The availability error and the two null fields are flagged. Everything the photograph communicates is missing from the record the agent actually reads.
From Chapter 8 — what you showed, and what the agent saw. The photograph on the left was generated with AI tools; the JSON on the right is what an agent reads instead.

It is already buying. How much it will buy by 2030 is a projection, and this book treats it as one.

Selling to Agents is written for merchants who have to act before the answer is in.

Ten chapters, two appendices, a glossary, and a checklist you can hand to whoever runs your store. Not a book for the analyst who will describe this in two years.

It applies whether you run an Italian fashion brand trying to understand what is changing, a US electronics company that needs to make the case to a puzzled board, or a DTC Shopify store that wants the checklist first and the theory second.

Part I · Chapters 1–3

The Shift

What is happening: the scale of the shift, the protocols that enable it, and why the funnel stops describing it.

Part II · Chapters 4–7

The Traps

What you cannot see — four mechanisms that work on your business through channels your analytics do not reach.

Part III · Chapters 8–10 + Epilogue

The Response

What to do: the gap between what your business says and what agents can read, and the checklist that closes it.

Inside

Two bands that do not meet. Above, in terracotta light, a shopkeeper in an apron works at a green-screened terminal among shelves of leather satchels and hanging belts. Below, in a dark strip sealed off from the shop, dashed luminous trails loop and cross and end in the agent’s glowing blue sphere with its single dark lens. The trails never enter the shop, and the shopkeeper never turns towards them.

Invisible Rejection

Why you cannot measure the customers an agent never sends you.

On cream, a broad ribbon of deep red and gold flows in from the left, carrying grape clusters, vine leaves and tendrils. It meets a pale blue grid standing upright like a screen. What emerges on the far side is no longer a ribbon: a few thin dotted lines, thinned and colourless, reaching the agent’s pale sphere with its single dark lens.

Context Collapse

What happens to heritage, provenance and craft in a system with no field for them.

A pottery shop in warm ochre, shelves of terracotta jars and bowls on both sides. A woman in an apron stands behind the counter with both hands raised in alarm as pale glass-blue cubes and lensed spheres fall through the air around her. Nothing has struck the pots yet. Her hands are raised in front of them, not in front of herself.

The Liability Vacuum

Who absorbs the cost when an agent gets it wrong, and why it is usually you.

A restaurant table inside a circle of golden light: two guests seated, a waitress serving a bottle of red wine from a tray, candles and glasses on the cloth. All around, in the cold blue dark, the agent’s pale spheres streak past at speed on motion trails. Not one of them stops. The light does not reach them and they do not enter it.

The Sommelier Effect

The categories where human curation still wins, and how to decide which products to expose.

A leather workshop in warm orange, shelves of bags, belts and rolled hides. A bearded artisan leans forward and sets a pale glass cube into place, completing an arch built from identical cubes that spans from his side of the picture to the other. The agent’s sphere waits at the far end. He is laying the bridge himself, block by block.

A seven-item checklist

Analytics, fraud, structured data, GEO, APIs, checkout protocols, policy surfaces. A Shopify path and a non-Shopify path for each.

If you run a Shopify store

and already keep structured Google Merchant feeds, most of the work is done. It starts with a ten-minute installation.

If you are on an enterprise stack

the framework is identical; the timelines are longer, and the work runs through your platform vendor and integrator.

If you have to convince a board

the checklist is the basis of the presentation: effort estimates, priority order, and the analytics and security gaps that make the budget case.

The two appendices: the vocabulary the book coins, and the agent-native publishing architecture that lies past the playbook.

The cover and the illustrations were generated with AI tools and are disclosed as such, here and in the book’s colophon.

AuthorF. Marinoni Moretto
PublisherAffero Press
Paperback979-12-82765-00-8
Hardcover979-12-82765-01-5
Ebook979-12-82765-02-2

Over 200 primary sources. The chapters describe the field as of March 2026; the epilogue and Appendix B run to early August — the month of publication.

The book is out in August 2026. Affero Press does not sell direct; when it is on sale, the retailers will be listed here and in the machine-readable catalogue.