Agentic purchases made through Stripe’s Link wallet grew 38x in September, with payment volume up 20x, and retail took the largest slice of both: 36 percent of transactions and 32 percent of volume. Travel followed at 28 percent of volume. The typical agent, Stripe says, spends about $100 per order.

That’s the shape of a demand channel, not a demo.

Stripe disclosed the numbers on September 29, framing Link as a wallet designed specifically for personal agents. Roughly 70 agents were connected when the analysis ran. By the time product manager Dan Hill spoke to The Decoder, that count had moved to around 200, including Meta’s Muse, Grok Bot, Instinct, and others built on OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google stacks. Muse alone reached 2.18 million daily active users by October 5, a figure Stripe president John Collison shared on the Cheeky Pint podcast with Mark Zuckerberg and Meta’s Alexandr Wang. “It only as of September basically started going vertical,” Collison said. Wang called Muse “one of the first products where people are fully delegating purchases to the agents.”

For a small retail merchant, the mechanics matter more than the metaphysics. Link issues the agent a separate 16-digit card number rather than exposing the shopper’s real one. Muse launched across more than 1 million businesses using Link; Stripe’s hosted checkout covers over 7.8 million. Shopify flipped agent checkout on by default for eligible merchants. If you sell on these rails, agents can already transact with you.

They just might not, because 59 percent of AI-assisted purchases still end on Amazon, which spent September blocking Muse at checkout. The platform war is live, and small merchants with clean product data and agent-ready listings are the swing inventory. For context on how this connects to Meta’s shopping stack, see our earlier reporting on Meta’s agentic ads manager going live and on Meta’s small-business agent built on 200 million relationships.

Checkout.com’s 2026 report puts agentic transactions at 3 percent of surveyed merchant volume, with 89 percent preparing and 42 percent testing. PYMNTS Intelligence found 93 percent of merchants think the agent provider should eat the loss on a wrong purchase, 80 percent expect providers to verify an agent’s authority, and only 28 percent are willing to offer agents their full catalog on the same terms as human buyers. Fed Governor Christopher Waller, speaking at Sibos in Miami, named the bottleneck: “The biggest barrier to scaling agentic commerce, particularly the agent-delegated model, is building sufficient trust among buyers and sellers.”

Stripe shipped 288 products at April’s Sessions event betting that trust gets built through plumbing. September’s curve suggests the bet is clearing.

Sources