Try Conto with Anthropic Commerce Agent Templates

Anthropic released commerce agent templates for retail, travel, and ticketing. They give developers a working starting point for agents that help people shop and help merchants run their businesses, with the agent loop, tools, and guardrails already in place.

The part we're interested in is checkout: once an agent has found something worth buying, what gives it permission to spend? Our shopping, travel, and ticketing demos pair Anthropic's agents with Conto's spending controls. You can ask for a recommendation, compare options, and build an order. At checkout, Conto checks whether that purchase is allowed under the rules you set.

The $219 tent Claude recommended, now in the cart. It's within the shopper's $250 budget, but above the $100 purchase limit shown at the top.

What the templates handle

Anthropic's guide to effective commerce agents explains the design. A shopping conversation stays with one main agent, with skills for different tasks. Product cards, itineraries, and seat maps come from tools whose inputs the server validates. Listings and reviews are treated as untrusted information, with safeguards enforced in code.

The shopping agent can assemble a cart, but its backend interface has no method to charge a card, so checkout has to happen through a separate flow. Merchant changes, such as a price update, also need approval before they take effect. Anthropic describes this as a model that stages an action and a person or policy that applies it. The templates give you the agent and a place to connect the systems your business already uses to authorize and execute the purchase.

Where Conto comes in

An agent reordering office supplies is a useful example. You might be happy for it to buy printer paper from your usual supplier, provided the cost comes out of the office budget. A $2,000 furniture order deserves a review, even if it's from that same supplier. In Conto, you set the spending limits, allowed merchants, and approval requirements for that agent. Each payment request is checked against those rules before it can go ahead, with three possible outcomes:

• Allow: The purchase is within policy and can proceed without an additional Conto approval.
• Ask: The purchase needs a person's approval before it can proceed.
• Block: The purchase breaks a rule and cannot proceed.

An allowed request still needs to go through checkout or a payment provider to complete the charge. Conto's approval answers whether the purchase is permitted; it doesn't mean the payment has succeeded. When several agents share a budget, that permission also depends on what the others have already spent. Each could make a reasonable purchase and still overspend in total, which is why the business needs to track spending across requests rather than rely on a budget mentioned in each chat.

Try it in the demos

We built three storefronts on Anthropic's templates, each with Conto controls you can change as you shop:

• Shopping: Find products, compare options, and build a cart. Try asking for a camping tent or a home office setup, then check the purchase against your spending limit.
• Travel: Plan flights, stays, and experiences. Put together a trip and see how its total fits your budget and approval rules.
• Ticketing: Find an event and hold seats. Review the total, including fees, before the purchase goes through Conto's checks.

Open Controls and set a purchase limit, then build a cart and try checkout. Lower the limit below the cart total and try again to see how the decision changes. You can also change the allowed merchants and the amount above which a purchase needs your approval.

Conto stops the $219 purchase at checkout because the per-purchase limit is $100. The decision shows which check failed, and no payment is started.

The shopping demo includes Stripe Link checkout, with Conto checking spending rules before payment can proceed. The ACME catalog is fictional and checkout uses Stripe test mode, so you can try these rules without making a real purchase.

Let agents finish the job

We wrote recently about why agents that can pay are more useful. An agent that can complete a purchase can act on the result: confirm the booking, adjust after a decline, or move on to the next part of the task. For the person responsible for the budget, the question is whether they can leave the agent to do that work. They need to know it will ask about the furniture order without asking about every box of paper. That's what we're testing with these demos: letting the agent handle the shopping while the buyer sets the terms under which a purchase can go ahead.

Building a commerce agent? Get in touch to see how Conto can add spending limits, merchant controls, and purchase approvals.