CT AI

Let AI shopping agents browse your CartThrob store and send buyers straight to your own checkout.

Sell to shoppers who shop through AI

More shoppers are asking an AI assistant to find and buy things for them. CartThrob AI is your store’s side of that conversation. It publishes your catalog and checkout in the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard, so a compatible shopping agent can find your products, prepare an order, and send the buyer to you to pay.

How a purchase works

1. A shopping agent discovers your store and searches the products you have chosen to share.
2. It builds a cart. CartThrob calculates the amounts from your real store configuration.
3. The shopper gets a Continue checkout link.
4. They land on your site with the cart already loaded, review current prices, and pay through your existing checkout and gateway.
5. The order is saved as a normal CartThrob order, and the agent’s platform receives a signed order notification.

CartThrob stays in charge

There is no second price list and no parallel order system. Prices, inventory, product options, coupons, shipping and tax all come from CartThrob. The agent API never takes card details and never charges anyone; payment happens only in your checkout.

You decide what agents see

• Map each product channel’s description, SKU, brand, GTIN, MPN and images from your existing fields.
• Hide whole channels, categories, statuses or single entries.
• Preview exactly what an agent will receive before you publish anything.
• Start catalog-only, then turn on checkout when you are ready.
• Product options and price modifiers become purchasable variants.

No AI account required

CartThrob AI contains no chatbot and never calls an AI model. There are no AI keys to manage and no per-request costs. The assistant belongs to whoever runs the shopping platform; your store simply answers it.

Built for real stores

• Signed API responses and order notifications, with encrypted signing keys generated at install
• Platform authentication by signed request or API key, with rate limiting and an audit log
• Idempotent cart and checkout requests, so a retry never creates a duplicate
• Automatic retries for order notifications, and a reconciliation command that never charges twice
• Control panel screens for mapping, settings, reindexing and catalog health
• CLI commands for scheduled reindexing and notification delivery
• Multi-Site Manager aware: settings, keys and jobs are per site

Good to know

CartThrob AI makes your store ready for agents; it does not list your store in any AI service. A UCP-compatible platform has to connect to your store, and the included integration guide tells its developer how. Subscription purchases, shipment and refund updates to platforms, and MCP and A2A connections are not part of this release.

Requirements

ExpressionEngine 7, CartThrob 9.0.1 or later, PHP 8.1 or later, a public HTTPS site with TLS 1.3, and the ability to run scheduled EE CLI commands.