What is Delegated Commerce?

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Delegated commerce is a transaction model in which a buyer authorizes another system, such as an AI agent, to perform defined shopping or purchasing actions on their behalf. Delegation is limited by permissions, spending rules, approved suppliers, or other controls.

Delegation means the user authorizes software to perform some part of the shopping or purchasing process on their behalf. The scope can be narrow, such as “reorder these filters,” or conditional, such as “buy when the price falls below €100.” In B2B it can also reflect organizational authority, where an employee or agent may prepare a purchase but another role must approve it.

A delegated commerce model needs clear answers to:

• Who is delegating authority and how that identity is verified.

• Which products, amounts, merchants, time windows, or actions are allowed.

• When the agent must return to the user or approver for explicit confirmation.

• How the authorization and resulting transaction are logged for audit and dispute resolution.

The commercial opportunity is convenience and automation; the design risk is treating conversational intent as unlimited permission. Delegated commerce therefore depends on bounded mandates, permissions, and deterministic policy enforcement. The more autonomous the agent becomes, the more important it is to separate what the AI recommends from what the payment and commerce systems are actually authorized to execute.

Example: A user could authorize an agent to reorder a specific consumable when stock falls below a threshold, with a maximum price and monthly budget encoded as part of the delegation.