What is Sitewai

Sitewai is a small specification and toolkit that makes online stores AI-friendly. It helps assistants and agents find products, choose the right variant, and initiate checkout safely, transparently, and without giving away long-lived secrets.

Why now: commerce is becoming agentic

The way people shop is shifting. Instead of tab-hopping across stores, customers increasingly ask assistants to “find me the right one” or “order this for me”. These AI agents don’t replace your storefront, they augment it by doing the tedious parts: discovery, comparison, and setup. But agents can only help if your shop is legible and safe to automate against.

The problem today

Ambiguous pages. Product names, options, and prices are readable to humans, not to agents.
Fragile scraping. Bots guess your structure and break with every theme change.
Risky checkouts. Direct charge flows demand credentials and increase liability.
No shared language. Each integration is bespoke; agents can’t reliably reuse what they learn elsewhere.

What “AI-friendly” means

An AI-friendly shop is one that exposes a minimal, machine-readable intent: “here is what I sell, here’s how to set up a customer’s order, and here are the safety rules”. It doesn’t change your brand or your checkout. It just makes the crucial steps explicit, so assistants can help customers faster.

Four pillars

Structure: clearly described products and variants, discoverable per shop domain.
Actions: a tiny set of standard actions (e.g., create a draft order) instead of full APIs.
Safety rails: idempotency, rate limits, normalized errors, and explicit retry guidance.
Governance: links to docs and legal pages; clear ownership between platform and merchant.

The Sitewai approach

Sitewai publishes a compact set of signals, small “signs on the door” your storefront can expose, that any assistant can understand:

Discovery tags: lightweight metadata in your <head> that announces what the store can do (capabilities), where to find products, how to initiate checkout, and where to read the rules.
Per-domain sitemap: a simple, predictable feed for products and their variants, no scraping.
Draft-only checkout: agents create a draft or pending order and receive an invoice link. Customers remain in control and complete payment in your normal checkout.
Safety by default: every create call requires a one-time idempotency key; rate limits and a uniform error shape guide agent behavior; no long-lived credentials are needed in the public flow.

Why it matters for everyone

For customers

Less friction: “order this for me” works end-to-end without copying links.
More control: payment happens in your familiar checkout, on your domain.
Transparency: agents can explain what they’re doing and why.

For merchants

More qualified intent: agents arrive with the correct variant and shipping info.
Lower risk: draft-only flows, safe retries, and abuse guards.
Future-proofing: one small spec serves current and future assistants.

For agents & platforms

One mental model across stores, no bespoke integrations per theme.
Clear guardrails: headers to send, limits to respect, and when to retry.
Ethical defaults: privacy links, consent hints, and explicit scope.

How it fits your current stack

Sitewai sits next to your storefront. It doesn’t replace your CMS or payment provider. On Shopify we create draft orders; on WooCommerce we create pending orders. Inventory is not reserved by default, and invoice links follow your store’s own rules and expirations.

What lives inside the spec (conceptually)

Shop profile: name, platform, and where the product sitemap lives per domain.
Capabilities & actions: a short list of verbs agents can call (e.g., list products, create draft).
Requirements: what fields are needed (e.g., email, variant), plus UI hints for agents.
Safety: idempotency keys, rate limits, normalized error envelopes, retry guidance.
Governance: links to technical docs (platform) and privacy/terms (merchant).

Privacy & responsibility

Sitewai separates responsibilities: the platform provides technical documentation and safety rails; the merchant remains the controller for purchase data. Agents are encouraged to ask for customer consent where required, and to link to the merchant’s privacy and terms. No payment credentials are exposed in draft-only flows.

Adoption path (no heavy lift)

Add discovery. Place the lightweight tags in your theme’s <head>.
Expose products. Enable the per-domain product sitemap.
Enable draft checkout. Support the single create action with safety rails on.

That’s enough to let assistants guide customers to the right product and hand them a secure invoice link to complete purchase.

Design principles

Small beats complete. A few good defaults work across most stores.
Public by default, private when needed. Draft-only flows are tokenless; tokens are optional for add-ons.
Resilience over cleverness. Idempotency and backoff are first-class, not afterthoughts.
Merchant-centred. Keep the brand, keep the checkout, keep the relationship.

FAQ

Does this let agents charge customers directly? No. The default mode is draft-only: customers pay in your existing checkout.

Will this break my theme? No. It’s additive small metadata plus a couple of stable endpoints.

Do I need OAuth? Not for public draft flows. Private features can add bearer tokens later.

What about rate limits and retries? Agents are told exactly how to behave; safe defaults are enforced server-side.

Where to go next

Read the technical docs (for implementers).
Expose the sitemap and draft checkout with safety rails on.
Share your store’s privacy and terms so agents can link them.

Sitewai is intentionally small. It’s enough structure for agents to help, without turning your store into an API product. As agentic commerce grows, small standards like this keep the web open, safe, and easy to buy from.