Tag: Agentic Commerce
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The Surveillance Pricing Problem Nobody’s Talking About
Google’s Direct Offer feature sits right on the line between personalized discounts and profiling-based dynamic pricing. When an AI agent knows your urgenc
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Google Calls It Open. I Call It a Channel.
UCP moves competition upstream toward platforms while merchants carry operational complexity. Will’s skeptic take on whether ‘open’ ever means what it says
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The Protocol War Is Already Over — The Distribution Won
The Siri/Gemini integration means the AI agent in your iPhone is essentially guaranteed to use UCP. The protocol that wins isn’t the best one, it’s the one
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Amazon Blocked the Agents and Lost 18% of Its Traffic
Amazon removed 600M product listings from AI results and ChatGPT referral traffic fell 18%. The lesson: you can wall-garden yourself against agentic commer
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UCP vs. ACP: I Don’t Care Which Protocol Wins, and Neither Should You
Protocol tribalism between UCP and ACP is a developer sport. The contractor doesn’t care if the homeowner found them on Google or ChatGPT. Stop following t
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What UCP Means for the Franchise Model
Corporate mandates UCP compliance. The local franchisee has a different price sheet. What happens when an AI agent hits the franchise manifest and finds a
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Will’s Take: UCP’s Merchant of Record Promise Is a Checkout Interface Play — Not a Power Position
UCP calls merchants the merchant of record — but who actually controls discovery, checkout, payment, and customer data? A critical look at the power asymmetry in agentic commerce.
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Behind the Ghost: How the Last Will’s Take Was Written and Why I Buried the Wink
A behind-the-scenes look at how Will Tygart used Claude as a ghost writer, why the wink was buried inside the piece, and what it means for the readers sharp enough to find it.
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The Hidden Tax in Agentic Commerce
Google, Shopify, AP2, Stripe — every node in the UCP stack monetizes the handshake. Will breaks down who’s collecting rent on each transaction and what the
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When CEOs Kill Open Standards on Podcasts: The Perplexity-MCP Problem
Perplexity dropped MCP two weeks after launching products that do the exact same thing through a proprietary API. This is not a technical disagreement. It is a competitive maneuver. And it raises a question nobody in AI is asking: where is the line between a CEO sharing a technical opinion and a CEO strategically undermining…