# Get In, Decide, Prove: A Merchant-Side Readiness Benchmark for Agentic Commerce arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17378 ยท HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17378/ ## Key facts - No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). - Placed in Financial trading and forecasting agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. - Builds on 31 of its 62 references that are in the map. - First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2026. ## Placed in - LLM agents and tool use / [Financial trading and forecasting agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/financial-trading-and-forecasting-agents/) ## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31) - [WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13854/) (2023) - [WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01206/) (2022) - [Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06070/) (2023) - [WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13919/) (2024) - [An Illusion of Progress? Assessing the Current State of Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01382/) (2025) - [Measuring what Matters: Construct Validity in Large Language Model Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04703/) (2025) - [Consent in Crisis: The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14933/) (2024) - [DeepShop: A Benchmark for Deep Research Shopping Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02839/) (2025) - [REAL: Benchmarking Autonomous Agents on Deterministic Simulations of Real Websites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11543/) (2025) - [ClawBench: Can AI Agents Complete Everyday Online Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08523/) (2026) - [ShoppingBench: A Real-World Intent-Grounded Shopping Benchmark for LLM-based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04266/) (2025) - [What Is Your AI Agent Buying? Evaluation, Biases, Model Dependence, & Emerging Implications for Agentic E-Commerce](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02630/) (2025) - [Magentic Marketplace: An Open-Source Environment for Studying Agentic Markets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25779/) (2025) - [Build the web for agents, not agents for the web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10953/) (2025) - [WebMall -- A Multi-Shop Benchmark for Evaluating Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13024/) (2025) - [Investigating the Impact of Dark Patterns on LLM-Based Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18113/) (2025) - [DECEPTICON: How Dark Patterns Manipulate Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22894/) (2025) - [ShoppingComp: Are LLMs Really Ready for Your Shopping Cart?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22978/) (2025) - [Somesite I Used To Crawl: Awareness, Agency and Efficacy in Protecting Content Creators From AI Crawlers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15091/) (2024) - [Scrapers selectively respect robots.txt directives: evidence from a large-scale empirical study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21733/) (2025) - [MCP vs RAG vs NLWeb vs HTML: A Comparison of the Effectiveness and Efficiency of Different Agent Interfaces to the Web (Technical Report)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23281/) (2025) - [Permission Manifests for Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02371/) (2025) - [Can Agent Benchmarks Support Their Scores? Evidence-Supported Bounds for Interactive-Agent Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10448/) (2026) - [FP-Agent: Fingerprinting AI Browsing Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01247/) (2026) - [RAILS: Verification-Native Clearing For Agentic Commerce](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08790/) (2026) - [Broken Gates: Re-evaluating Web Bot Defenses in the Age of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18659/) (2026) - [Designing Agent-Ready Websites for AI Web Agents: A Framework for Machine Readability, Actionability, and Decision Reliability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12056/) (2026) - [terms.txt: A Consent and Compensation Protocol for Agentic Web Access](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.11152/) (2026) - [Signing the Transaction but Not the Decision: Whisper Attacks and a Binding Defense for AP2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.11757/) (2026) - [Shopping by algorithm: How agentic AI deploys human heuristics as a surrogate consumer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28372/) (2026) ## Abstract (arXiv) AI agents now browse and buy on people's behalf, and benchmarks measure how well the agents perform. Far less is known about the other side of the transaction: whether a merchant's website lets an agent in, publishes terms precise enough to decide a purchase, and leaves evidence of what was agreed. This paper presents a merchant-side benchmark built on those three questions and reports a pilot of it. The central measurement, decision sufficiency, rates each criterion of a concrete buyer mandate (total cost, cancellation or return terms, service date, variant identity) as determinate, indeterminate, or unknown from the merchant's own published evidence. Readiness scores carry their evidence coverage and missingness bounds; access is reported separately for a declared bot, a declared headless browser, and a user-present browser; and each observed term is mapped to the RAILS admissibility class of the evidence that could support it in a dispute. Four large merchants received the full assessment: three refused the declared profiles at their offer pages, and no mandate could be confirmed as met, because each merchant left a total or a refund term undetermined. An access census of 555 sites of merchants that two payment processors publicly name as clients found the home page unreadable to both declared profiles at 105 sites (18.9%). A declared assessment of 330 merchants, scored by deterministic rules without a rater, found that evidence coverage rather than the score decides who can be ranked: 115 merchants (35%) reached the ranking threshold, rankable profiles scored a median of 89 to 90, and material terms was the one pillar well below the others, because the all-in total was decidable at 18 merchants. The pilot shows that the measurements can be taken; it does not validate them or rank merchants, and the weights and the projected clearing band await validation against outcomes.