CommerceTXT
An open standard for AI shopping context (like llms.txt)
Details
- External ID
- 46289481
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- CommerceTXT
- Website domain
- commercetxt.org
- Launched
- Dec. 16, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 20
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.6507633587786259
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Hi HN, author here.I built CommerceTXT because I got tired of the fragility of extracting pricing and inventory data from HTML. AI agents currently waste ~8k tokens just to parse a product page, only to hallucinate the price or miss the fact that it's "Out of Stock".CommerceTXT is a strict, read-only text protocol (CC0 Public Domain) designed to give agents deterministic ground truth. Think of it as `robots.txt` + `llms.txt` but structured specifically for transactions.Key technical decisions v1.0:1. *Fractal Architecture:* Root -> Category -> Product files. Agents only fetch what they need (saves bandwidth/tokens).2. *Strictly Read-Only:* v1.0 intentionally excludes transactions/actions to avoid security nightmares. It's purely context.3. *Token Efficiency:* A typical product definition is ~380 tokens vs ~8,500 for the HTML equivalent.4. *Anti-Hallucination:* Includes directives like @INVENTORY with timestamps and @REVIEWS with verification sources.The spec is live and open. I'd love your feedback on the directive structure and especially on the "Trust & Verification" concepts we're exploring.Spec: https://github.com/commercetxt/commercetxt Website: https://commercetxt.org
Enrichment
- Theme
- financial intelligence and trading tools
- Vertical
- Retail & commerce
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- AI feature
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- open standard for ai shopping context
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes This is a static specification document and structured file standard (similar to robots.txt or llms.txt) alongside basic web presentation.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Shopify API (enterprise partners only), Amazon catalog API, JSON-LD structured data, BeautifulSoup (bs4) HTML parsing, CSV inventory dumps
Concerns raised: Maintenance burden: AI-generated mappings break when developers change CSS classes, Low adoption risk: platforms like Shopify/Wix won't voluntarily adopt without incentive, Design smell: LLM-specific protocols violate principle of general-purpose APIs, Platform gatekeeping problem is business/political, not solvable by new technical standard, Assumes adoption by merchants on rigid platforms that don't allow file editing
Feature requests: Add @SEMANTIC_LOGIC and @BRAND_VOICE behavioral directives to specification, Integration pathway with Shopify/Wix to render CommerceTXT as native view layer, Permissionless endpoint (no API key requirement) for discoverability, Support for high-value transaction verification workflows with fallback to HTML
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 96 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #40 of 97 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 43 days after the earliest competitor.
- 30k IKEA items in flat text · hn · 2026-01-07 · 55 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Ktx · hn · 2026-05-28 · 93 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- e-commerce-copy-quality-inspection-agent · github · 2026-09-14 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- SalesEntry · ph · 2026-09-12 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Ecom_Desc_Bot_2026 · ph · 2026-09-28 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Finterm.ai Bloomberg terminal for Claude Code · hn · 2026-07-13 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- shopify-integration · github · 2026-09-23 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Dealta · hn · 2026-01-02 · 56 upvotes · similarity 0.39
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.