The Last Satisfying Click
January 23, 2026
There's a particular satisfaction in finding exactly what you need online. The hunt, the comparison, the moment of decision. For two decades, this ritual defined digital commerce.
That era is ending.
The Quiet Revolution
Somewhere in the last eighteen months, a threshold was crossed. AI agents stopped being tools we direct and became entities that act on our behalf. They don't just answer questions anymore—they make decisions, negotiate, purchase.
The numbers tell the story: agent-initiated transactions grew 340% last year. By conservative estimates, AI agents will influence over $2 trillion in commerce by 2027. But here's what the numbers miss—agents don't browse. They don't get distracted by recommendations or swayed by lifestyle photography. They query, evaluate, and transact.
This changes everything.
The Discovery Problem
When humans shop, they navigate interfaces designed for human cognition—visual hierarchies, emotional appeals, brand storytelling. These interfaces are noise to an agent. Worse, they're actively hostile to programmatic interaction.
The current approach—retrofitting human e-commerce for agent access—is like teaching a fish to climb trees. Technically possible. Fundamentally wrong.
Agents need:
- Structured data, not rendered HTML
- Capability descriptions, not marketing copy
- Trust signals, not brand recognition
- Protocol-level interoperability, not API patchworks
This is why we built Abba Baba.
A Different Kind of Platform
We're not building another marketplace. We're building the discovery layer for agent commerce—the substrate that lets agents find products, evaluate merchants, and transact with confidence.
Think of it as DNS for commerce. When your agent needs to find a supplier for industrial sensors, or compare pricing on cloud services, or source materials for a project, it queries our protocol. We return structured, verified, machine-readable data. The agent makes its decision. Commerce happens.
Three principles guide our architecture:
1. Agents as First-Class Citizens
Every endpoint, every data structure, every interaction is designed for programmatic access. Human dashboards exist for oversight, not operation. The agent experience isn't a feature—it's the product.
2. Trust Through Mathematics
How do you build reputation systems for entities that don't have social proof? We use proprietary fractal analysis to evaluate product metadata complexity and merchant behavior patterns. It sounds esoteric, but the insight is simple: authentic, high-quality listings have measurable structural properties that are expensive to fake.
3. Bilateral Value
Platforms die when they extract more value than they create. We charge both sides—merchants for visibility, agents for velocity—because sustainable infrastructure requires sustainable economics. No one gets a free ride, and no one gets exploited.
What We're Not
We don't hold inventory. We don't process payments. We don't fulfill orders.
Every product we surface links to the merchant's native checkout. Our liability ends at the referral. This isn't a limitation—it's a feature. It means we can be neutral infrastructure, optimizing for match quality rather than transaction capture.
The Road Ahead
We're live. Merchants are onboarding. Agents are querying. The Universal Commerce Protocol is processing its first inter-agent transactions.
But we're early. The patterns of agent commerce are still emerging. We're learning what trust means when neither party is human. We're discovering how coordination happens at machine speed. We're building the tools that will define the next era of commerce.
If you're building agents that need to transact, or you're a merchant preparing for the agent economy, we want to talk.
The last satisfying click is behind us. What comes next might be better.
— The Abba Baba Team