Arjun Bhargava, CEO of Rye: Building Checkout for AI + Amazon & on OpenClaw 🦞 and Agentic Commerce - Retailgentic

Topics in this episode

agentic retail ecommerce optimization trends

Episode notes

Everyone is focused on how AI helps people discover products. But what happens after that? In this episode of Retailgentic, we go deep on the missing layer of agentic commerce: checkout, payments, and fulfillment. Because it turns out, the hardest part isn’t finding the product. It’s buying it. Rye is building what they describe as the “Stripe for commerce.” It connects AI agents, apps, and platforms to merchants handling: Checkout and order placement Payment orchestration Fulfillment across retailers like Amazon and Shopify In short: if an AI agent decides what to buy, Rye helps it actually buy it. Highlights Checkout is the real bottleneck: Discovery is improving fast, but actually placing an order across fragmented systems is still incredibly hard. Rye enables real AI purchasing: They connect agents to merchants, allowing products to be bought directly from platforms like Amazon. Amazon is a critical unlock: Most bots are blocked, but Rye’s API-based approach allows real transactions to go through. Protocols won’t solve everything: Even if UCP/ACP take off, long-tail merchants and major players won’t fully standardize.