CommerceTXT
An open standard for AI shopping context (like llms.txt)
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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
HN · launched Dec 16, 2025 · 20 upvotes (top 35%) · 0 views
Niche: ai intelligence and analysis tools · 141 launches, 17 in the last 7 days ▲ +13% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Retail & commerce
- Data infrastructure
- Developer
- AI-native
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 141 launches in ai intelligence and analysis tools →
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 : 231 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #81 of 232 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 46 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Ecom_Desc_Bot_2026 · ph · 2026-09-28 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Dealta · hn · 2026-01-02 · 56 upvotes · similarity 0.41
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