Table of Contents
Why Agentic Commerce Will Supercharge Black Friday and Cyber Monday
Arjun Bhargava
Co-founder and CEO @ Rye
Sep 4, 2025
BFCM doesn't have to be chaotic for shoppers. Agentic checkout can quickly and reliably secure the deals that AI tools find, thanks to Rye.
While shopper-on-shopper violence over doorbusters is thankfully a phenomenon of the past, the pressures around Black Friday and Cyber Monday have merely shifted online. BFCM, as it’s known in the industry, strains e-commerce systems with enormous traffic, bots trying to swoop up limited deals, and high cart abandonment rates.
But in the next two years, agentic commerce will fundamentally change this picture. AI-driven agents will go beyond recommending deals and start executing them. They’ll navigate merchant sites; resolve real-time prices, shipping, and tax; and complete purchases instantly.
With Rye’s Universal Commerce API, this vision can become a reality, making these high-stress shopping days quite a bit easier for both consumers and retailers.
While shopper-on-shopper violence over doorbusters is thankfully a phenomenon of the past, the pressures around Black Friday and Cyber Monday have merely shifted online. BFCM, as it’s known in the industry, strains e-commerce systems with enormous traffic, bots trying to swoop up limited deals, and high cart abandonment rates.
But in the next two years, agentic commerce will fundamentally change this picture. AI-driven agents will go beyond recommending deals and start executing them. They’ll navigate merchant sites; resolve real-time prices, shipping, and tax; and complete purchases instantly.
With Rye’s Universal Commerce API, this vision can become a reality, making these high-stress shopping days quite a bit easier for both consumers and retailers.
While shopper-on-shopper violence over doorbusters is thankfully a phenomenon of the past, the pressures around Black Friday and Cyber Monday have merely shifted online. BFCM, as it’s known in the industry, strains e-commerce systems with enormous traffic, bots trying to swoop up limited deals, and high cart abandonment rates.
But in the next two years, agentic commerce will fundamentally change this picture. AI-driven agents will go beyond recommending deals and start executing them. They’ll navigate merchant sites; resolve real-time prices, shipping, and tax; and complete purchases instantly.
With Rye’s Universal Commerce API, this vision can become a reality, making these high-stress shopping days quite a bit easier for both consumers and retailers.
The Bottleneck Problem: Checkout as the Weak Link
Even with optimized e-commerce stacks, checkout remains fragile during high-traffic events. Commerce slows as order management systems process rapid inventory adjustments, sites deploy additional fraud checks, and thousands of customers pile into the same resource-intensive tax and shipping calculation flows. That latency continues to plague commerce that claims to be AI-based, and on high-impact shopping days, it’s a real problem. For shoppers, seconds matter: a limited-time discount or scarce product can vanish before the purchase completes.
To do better than an anxious shopper, agents need deterministic, low-latency resolution of the true landed cost (item price, shipping, and tax). Without this, AI-powered shopping collapses under the weight of its own promise, falling back on minutes-long human-in-the-loop backups or failing entirely. And there’s no worse time for that to happen than the holiday shopping rush, when retail comes under the tough lens of the national media. Bad shopping experiences can be a brand reputation nightmare for a retailer or, these days, an LLM.
Why 2026 Will be the Turning Point
By fall of 2026, retailers and consumers alike will expect agents to play a role in the biggest shopping weekend. Two trends converge here:
Consumers are already leaning on AI for deals. Shoppers now think AI is better than they are at finding discounts, with the average consumer saving $83 last year thanks to AI tools. Gen Z in particular is comfortable letting AI complete purchases.
Retailers need reliability at scale. Cart abandonment hovers around 55%, largely because checkout remains slow or clunky. On high-volume days like Black Friday, that translates to billions in lost revenue. Agentic commerce offers a way to offload these edge cases: agents can push transactions through instantly, at scale, without overwhelming human shoppers or call centers.
By fall of 2026, retailers and consumers alike will expect agents to play a role in the biggest shopping weekend. Two trends converge here:
Consumers are already leaning on AI for deals. Shoppers now think AI is better than they are at finding discounts, with the average consumer saving $83 last year thanks to AI tools. Gen Z in particular is comfortable letting AI complete purchases.
Retailers need reliability at scale. Cart abandonment hovers around 55%, largely because checkout remains slow or clunky. On high-volume days like Black Friday, that translates to billions in lost revenue. Agentic commerce offers a way to offload these edge cases: agents can push transactions through instantly, at scale, without overwhelming human shoppers or call centers.
By fall of 2026, retailers and consumers alike will expect agents to play a role in the biggest shopping weekend. Two trends converge here:
Consumers are already leaning on AI for deals. Shoppers now think AI is better than they are at finding discounts, with the average consumer saving $83 last year thanks to AI tools. Gen Z in particular is comfortable letting AI complete purchases.
Retailers need reliability at scale. Cart abandonment hovers around 55%, largely because checkout remains slow or clunky. On high-volume days like Black Friday, that translates to billions in lost revenue. Agentic commerce offers a way to offload these edge cases: agents can push transactions through instantly, at scale, without overwhelming human shoppers or call centers.
How Rye Closes the Gap
Rye’s Universal Checkout API is built for calm execution. It abstracts away the toughest parts of checkout like latency, fraud sensitivity, and shipping/tax retrieval. It turns everything into a simple contract: product URL, buyer identity, tokenized payment method in; confirmed merchant order out. The merchant provides the confirmation email and order support.
Because Rye resolves full landed costs within seconds, agents don’t stall or abandon. Its architecture of workflow caching, resilient DOM automation, and fraud-mitigation techniques ensures reliability under real-world variance. And this stays true even when sites change layouts or deploy aggressive bot defenses.
Rye’s Universal Checkout API is built for calm execution. It abstracts away the toughest parts of checkout like latency, fraud sensitivity, and shipping/tax retrieval. It turns everything into a simple contract: product URL, buyer identity, tokenized payment method in; confirmed merchant order out. The merchant provides the confirmation email and order support.
Because Rye resolves full landed costs within seconds, agents don’t stall or abandon. Its architecture of workflow caching, resilient DOM automation, and fraud-mitigation techniques ensures reliability under real-world variance. And this stays true even when sites change layouts or deploy aggressive bot defenses.
Rye’s Universal Checkout API is built for calm execution. It abstracts away the toughest parts of checkout like latency, fraud sensitivity, and shipping/tax retrieval. It turns everything into a simple contract: product URL, buyer identity, tokenized payment method in; confirmed merchant order out. The merchant provides the confirmation email and order support.
Because Rye resolves full landed costs within seconds, agents don’t stall or abandon. Its architecture of workflow caching, resilient DOM automation, and fraud-mitigation techniques ensures reliability under real-world variance. And this stays true even when sites change layouts or deploy aggressive bot defenses.
The Future Black Friday Experience
Picture Black Friday 2026, powered by Rye:
A shopper asks their AI assistant to “grab the best 65-inch TV under $800, delivered by next week.”
The assistant queries multiple merchants, retrieves true totals including shipping and tax, and lets the buyer instantly confirm an order.
The shopper gets a confirmation in seconds. No lines, no reloading carts, no checkout bottlenecks.
For retailers, this means reduced cart abandonment, smoother handling of peak traffic, and direct sales preserved within their own merchant-of-record flow. For discovery services and AI platforms, it means adding real value around the largest commerce moment of the year. Black Friday and Cyber Monday may well be the proving ground for agentic commerce. And the retailers, platforms, and shoppers who adopt it early will define the next era of peak-season shopping.
Picture Black Friday 2026, powered by Rye:
A shopper asks their AI assistant to “grab the best 65-inch TV under $800, delivered by next week.”
The assistant queries multiple merchants, retrieves true totals including shipping and tax, and lets the buyer instantly confirm an order.
The shopper gets a confirmation in seconds. No lines, no reloading carts, no checkout bottlenecks.
For retailers, this means reduced cart abandonment, smoother handling of peak traffic, and direct sales preserved within their own merchant-of-record flow. For discovery services and AI platforms, it means adding real value around the largest commerce moment of the year. Black Friday and Cyber Monday may well be the proving ground for agentic commerce. And the retailers, platforms, and shoppers who adopt it early will define the next era of peak-season shopping.
Picture Black Friday 2026, powered by Rye:
A shopper asks their AI assistant to “grab the best 65-inch TV under $800, delivered by next week.”
The assistant queries multiple merchants, retrieves true totals including shipping and tax, and lets the buyer instantly confirm an order.
The shopper gets a confirmation in seconds. No lines, no reloading carts, no checkout bottlenecks.
For retailers, this means reduced cart abandonment, smoother handling of peak traffic, and direct sales preserved within their own merchant-of-record flow. For discovery services and AI platforms, it means adding real value around the largest commerce moment of the year. Black Friday and Cyber Monday may well be the proving ground for agentic commerce. And the retailers, platforms, and shoppers who adopt it early will define the next era of peak-season shopping.
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