Trigger warning! Anthropic launched Merchant agents. šµ I think they have the potential to kill a whole bunā¦
by Marcel Hollerbach Ā· World of Commerce
Trigger warning! Anthropic launched Merchant agents. šµ I think they have the potential to kill a whole bunch of businesses. Saaspocalypse?!
Merchant agents let you watch sales, stock, and pricing across the storefront, flag the listings running low and the ones due for a markdown, and draft a restock plan or a promotion on request. It is a free Apache 2.0 repository. Retailers connect their own catalog, cart and checkout and pay for their own Claude usage.
The closest to this is Shopify Sidekick which does almost exactly the same. As Shopify is its own ecosystem it is more interesting to look at independent incumbents.
In inventory and replenishment planning you have players like Netstock, Inventory Planner (Sage), Prediko, Cogsy, Toolio, Syrup Tech, Nextail at the SMB-to-mid end; RELEX, Blue Yonder, o9, Impact Analytics and Increff at enterprise retail.
In pricing and markdown optimization there are players like Revionics/Aptos, Competera, Quicklizard, Intelligems, Prisync, Oracle Retail Science and DynamicAction.
In storefront analytics (performance-insights) thereās Triple Whale, Polar Analytics, Peel, Daasity, Glew, plus generic BI like Looker or Qlik pointed at commerce data.
In campaign drafting we come across companies like Klaviyo, Attentive, Braze, Bloomreach, Insider, Emarsys.
As always there are good reasons why each individual company exists but it also shows that a push towards āAI nativeā workflows and openness for agents is not optional anymore.
Last thought. Product catalogs seem to become a real moat and the topic is more complex than most people think. Even Anthropic is explicit about it "We're not interested in owning catalogs, supply chain, or the last mile, and there's no advertising or paid placement of Claude in any agent you build."
What a great time to be in Feed Management!