Key Takeaways
- Best Buy and Backcountry adopt Firmly Connect, enabling no-code agentic commerce implementation in just 45 minutes
- A new middleware layer emerges that solves protocol fragmentation through "protocol abstraction" across MCP, UCP, ACP and more
- Strategic partnership with payment platform Aurus enables AI commerce channel activation without changing existing payment infrastructure
Best Buy Adopts Firmly's Agentic Commerce Platform
Firmly said its agentic commerce platform integrates with retailers' systems and runs automated testing to validate the shopping experience.
www.digitalcommerce360.comOn March 24, 2026, agentic commerce technology provider Firmly announced Firmly Connect, a no-code onboarding platform. Among its early adopters are consumer electronics giant Best Buy and outdoor sporting goods retailer Backcountry.
Firmly Connect autonomously integrates with merchants' existing websites and commerce infrastructure, running automated tests to validate connections. Traditionally, agentic commerce channel integration required 3 to 12 months, teams of 12 to 18 people, and costs of $250,000 to $500,000 per channel. Firmly Connect reduces this to approximately 45 minutes of merchant time, cutting integration costs by an estimated 95%.
Kevin Lenau, president of the Backcountry family of brands, stated in the press release:
I did not believe the zero engineering to launch but they proved this true. This is a major step forward in unlocking the full potential of agentic commerce at scale.
An Abstraction Layer for the Protocol Fragmentation Era
The most compelling aspect of Firmly Connect is its ability to abstract across the rapidly proliferating agentic commerce protocols.
As of 2026, protocols connecting AI agents to commerce systems are in a state of fragmentation. Google leads UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol), OpenAI and Stripe co-developed ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol), Anthropic offers MCP (Model Context Protocol), and additional standards like A2A, AP2, and KYA also exist. For retailers, deciding which protocols to support and building individual integrations for each is both confusing and costly.
Firmly addresses this challenge through three core capabilities.
Protocol Abstraction: Firmly abstracts across emerging protocols including MCP, AP2, ACP, UCP, A2A, and KYA, eliminating the need for merchants to rebuild integrations for each ecosystem.
Horizontal Infrastructure Layer: Operating above existing commerce platforms, Firmly enables merchants to connect once and distribute everywhere across AI channels.
Merchant-of-Record Model: Merchants retain their status as the merchant of record, preserving their brand, customer relationships, first-party data, and control over pricing and inventory.
Alignment with Best Buy's Agentic Strategy
For Best Buy, adopting Firmly Connect is a natural extension of its broader AI strategy. During the Q4 earnings call in March 2026, CEO Corie Barry declared that bestbuy.com would evolve into a site that is "browsable and discoverable by AI agents." Alongside deploying its product catalog on ChatGPT and supporting Google's UCP, leveraging integration middleware like Firmly enables efficient simultaneous access to multiple AI channels.
Best Buy ranks No. 8 in Digital Commerce 360's Top 2000 database of the largest North American online retailers, while fellow adopter Backcountry ranks No. 91. The fact that major retailers have chosen Firmly Connect is a significant signal that agentic commerce is transitioning from experimentation to implementation.
Aurus Partnership Signals Payment Integration Direction
Simultaneously, Firmly announced a strategic partnership with Aurus, an enterprise payment platform serving major retailers and grocers across more than 25 countries. This makes Aurus the first omni-commerce gateway with native agentic commerce capabilities.
Aurus CEO Rahul Mutha outlined three key values of the partnership: maintaining existing digital commerce use cases and payment matrices intact, deploying agentic commerce in weeks rather than months, and enabling retailers to gain agentic commerce experience without reprioritizing other internal projects.
The partnership underscores that seamless payment infrastructure integration is essential for widespread agentic commerce adoption.
Implications for E-commerce Businesses
The launch of Firmly Connect signals that barriers to agentic commerce adoption are falling rapidly.
Protocol Choice Paralysis Resolved: For the question of whether to support UCP, ACP, or MCP, abstraction layers like Firmly provide the answer of "support all of them." There is no longer a need to wait for protocol standards to settle.
Engineering Cost Barriers Lowered: As Backcountry's case demonstrates, zero-engineering-resource deployment makes agentic commerce a realistic option even for mid-sized e-commerce businesses.
Brand Control Remains Key: Firmly's merchant-of-record model ensures that brands and customer relationships remain with the merchant even in AI channel sales. This is a critical safeguard against the risk of losing customer touchpoints to AI platforms.
Firmly was selected for Mastercard's Start Path Emerging Fintech program in 2025, earning recognition from a payments industry leader. As the agentic commerce market is projected to reach $3 to $5 trillion within the next five years, the role of middleware like Firmly Connect will only grow in importance.
Summary
Best Buy and Backcountry's adoption of Firmly Connect signals that agentic commerce has moved from proof-of-concept to production deployment. Firmly's "abstraction layer" approach to protocol fragmentation mirrors the structural role that Payment Service Providers once played in consolidating payment method proliferation. The key developments to watch are how far Firmly Connect adoption extends and whether the Aurus partnership can drive meaningful transaction volume through agentic commerce channels.
