A commerce platform enables its merchants
Separate a shared platform interface from each merchant's catalog, payment configuration and operational obligations.
Evidence, not endorsement
A research and planning tool, not a vendor certification. Sources describe specific products, not every service offered by a company. Unknown means not established by the sources reviewed, not unsupported. grug402 sandbox tests do not test these vendors. Operational owners are suggested team contacts, not legal liability assignments.
Editorial review: 2026-10-08. Evidence older than 90 days needs rechecking; source check dates are not release dates.
Illustrative participants, not integrations
The sequence below is a hypothetical role walkthrough. Named examples do not imply a working connection.
Discovery
Publish accurate product data and eligibility. Shopify's Catalog API is a documented example; BigCommerce's Stripe connection is an announced example, not an equivalent access contract.
Suggested operational owner: Platform product and catalog engineering.
Authorization
Define agent identity, merchant consent and buyer approval separately. AP2 mandates and API authentication serve different purposes.
Suggested operational owner: Identity and security.
Payment
Choose the checkout interface and provider for each merchant. Validate accepted methods, currencies, recipients and restrictions; no universal cross-platform interoperability is implied.
Suggested operational owner: Platform payments and merchant onboarding.
Delivery
Keep order events, inventory, webhook retries and receipts consistent with the merchant's system of record.
Suggested operational owner: Platform integrations and merchant operations.
Failure & recovery
Assign escalation contacts for uncertain settlements, lost callbacks and paid-but-missing orders. Prove recovery in a sandbox before rollout.
Suggested operational owner: Platform reliability and support.
Relevant sandbox tests — not vendor results
These are controlled grug402 scenarios. A passing sandbox request does not certify a company, integration, checkout or refund process.
- P1: A payment that completes — Establish a baseline before diagnosing failure cases. Suggested owner: Payments engineering.
- P1: Interpret the amount correctly — A decimals mismatch can change the economic amount dramatically. Suggested owner: Payments engineering and treasury.
- P1: Retry without a duplicate charge — Lost responses should not cause the same purchase intent to be paid again. Suggested owner: Application engineering.
- P1: Handle paid-but-not-delivered — Settlement can succeed while the application fails to deliver. Suggested owner: Payments and customer operations.
- P2: Resolve an uncertain settlement — A server error does not establish whether money moved. Reconcile before retrying. Suggested owner: Payments operations and facilitator operator.
Coverage limits
grug402 does not certify UCP, ACP or AP2 implementations and does not exercise merchant onboarding, order systems or refunds.