Claude Commerce Agents

// Overview

Claude Commerce Agents is Anthropic's reference implementation of two commerce agents built on Claude. The shopping agent is what a business embeds in its app for customers: it searches and compares products, plans, fills the cart, answers order and policy questions and remembers what a customer tells it. The merchant agent is what staff use to run the back office: it explains performance, maintains listings, acts on inventory and order alerts, prices and promotes, and drafts campaigns. Each agent is defined once — prompt, skills, tool contracts and gates — and runs on the Messages API, the Claude Agent SDK and Managed Agents.

The repository ships seven pip packages (a shared commerce-common plus core, runtime and SDK layers per agent) and four runnable verticals — retail, travel, telecom and entertainment ticketing — each with a storefront and a merchant portal over the same libraries. Everything runs against fictional stores: nothing places an order, charges a card or changes a live listing. Checkout renders the cart for the host application to complete, and every merchant write is staged until a person approves it.

Safety is enforced inside the tool calls rather than in the prompt: fencing of third-party text, provenance gates so only IDs returned by a catalogue tool can enter a cart, caps, memory validation and the merchant approval gate hold on all three execution paths. A Claude Code plugin scaffolds a new agent on these packages against your own systems or reviews one you already have. Anthropic labels the project a reference implementation under Apache-2.0 that is not maintained and does not accept contributions — a starting point you own.

// What it does

• Two reference agents: a customer-facing shopping agent and a back-office merchant agent, each defined once and run on the Messages API, the Agent SDK and Managed Agents
• Four runnable verticals (retail, travel, telecom, entertainment) with a storefront and a merchant portal each
• Guardrails in code: text fencing, provenance gates on cart and listing IDs, caps, memory validation and a human-approval gate on every merchant write
• Checkout hands off to the host — the agent never sees payment details or the checkout URL
• A Claude Code plugin (commerce-builder) that scaffolds, extends, evaluates and reviews commerce agents
• Backend interfaces (StorefrontBackend, MerchantBackend) you implement over your own catalogue, cart, order, analytics and pricing systems; deployment docs cover Vertex AI, Bedrock and Microsoft Foundry

// Getting started

You need Python 3.11+ and Node 22. The README's quick start clones the repo, installs the packages and runs a vertical; the commands below are taken from it.

git clone https://github.com/anthropics/commerce-agents.git && cd commerce-agents
python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

cp .env.example .env
(cd examples && npm ci)

python scripts/run_demo.py retail

claude plugin marketplace add anthropics/commerce-agents
claude plugin install commerce-builder@claude-commerce-agents
claude
/scaffold-commerce-agent a shopping assistant for our store

Commands and code are distilled from the project's own documentation — always check the official repo for the latest.

// When to use it

• Start a retail or marketplace shopping assistant from a build whose safety rules are already enforced in code
• Give merchant staff an agent that drafts pricing, promotion and restock changes for human approval instead of applying them
• Study how Anthropic wires the same agent onto the Messages API, the Agent SDK and Managed Agents
• Review an existing commerce agent against the reference with the plugin's /review-commerce-agent command

// How Claude Commerce Agents compares

Claude Commerce Agents alongside other open-source agent frameworks & builders tools AI/TLDR tracks, ranked by GitHub stars.