For more than 25 years, I have been building software for merchants at Shopware. One tension keeps returning: shared infrastructure needs to be economical, while each business needs room to make something of its own. The most interesting ideas often begin where the standard ends. For many merchants, implementing them was too expensive.
Agents change that calculation. They can take shopping chores off customers’ hands and help merchants develop their software, knowledge and operations. What interests me is the resulting entrepreneurial freedom. Which good ideas become possible when implementation costs fall? What responsibility follows when software can act?
At Shopware, we have spent years exploring how AI, commerce and experience fit together. I was writing about agentic commerce in January 2025, when the term was still unfamiliar to much of the industry. Protocols, products and expectations have grown quickly since then. I write as a platform founder, developer and contributor to the Agentic Commerce Alliance. My conviction is that merchants should retain control of their businesses and have room to build distinctive offers.
A good part of this book grew out of code. In Shopware’s Agentic Commerce Lab and my own projects, questions become prototypes. The experiment boxes explain the question, what we built, what we learned and what remains open. The repositories are listed in the appendices. Readers who disagree will often find somewhere to start a pull request.
VEYNDO is my personal, publicly developed experimental environment: what would commerce look like with knowledge and agents at its core from the outset? It lets me explore ideas without maintaining compatibility with an installed base. Evolving an established platform such as Shopware also means supporting migrations, extensions and merchants’ daily operations. Both perspectives inform this book.
We begin with a suitcase that needs to arrive by Friday. That simple request connects product data, selection, price, consent, payment and delivery. Technical spare parts and room design broaden the picture later. The purpose remains the same: fulfil a customer’s request better.
Commerce now has four points of contact: people and agents buy in the merchant’s own shop and through external channels. Beneath all four sits the merchant’s business: products, prices, orders and promises. This map guides the book. The suitcase from the opening travels with us, all the way to the airport on Friday.
How to read this book
The chapters connect my strategic arguments with published developments, personal experiments and practical decisions. “From the Lab” identifies projects from Shopware’s Agentic Commerce Lab; “From my experimental work” identifies my personal projects. The boxes describe the question, what we built, its main lesson and the next step. They provide a way to apply the ideas to your business and explore the code in more depth.
Nordstern, Werkpunkt and Lichtfeld are fictional merchants. They help us explore outdoor advice, spare-parts procurement and room design. The two anonymous real-world cases in Chapter 16 come from my merchant network. Model calculations state their assumptions; quotations and published facts refer to the sources in the appendix. That is also where you will find protocol versions.