Merchant Manifest Generator prototype grant

Summary

The Merchant Manifest Generator produces a machine-readable manifest that describes a merchant to agentic clients. The manifest covers merchant identity, canonical URL, catalog endpoints, product data formats, checkout paths, payment routes, shipping regions, return policy URL, support contact, agent access policy, and a last updated timestamp. The generator can ingest existing storefront data, validate it against a published schema, and emit a signed manifest ready for hosting at a well-known location.

Why It Matters

Today, agents cannot reliably discover what a merchant supports, where to checkout, or what policies apply. Every agent integration becomes a bespoke scraping or interview exercise. A shared manifest format reduces this to a single fetch and parse, and gives merchants a clean place to declare their agent access policy. Without merchant-side tooling, agentic commerce stalls at the demo stage.

Manifest Fields

Strategic Layer Mapping

This grant advances Layer 3: Merchant Readiness in the Foundation's seven-layer agentic-commerce development program. The manifest is a primary input for Layer 2 (protocol routing) and Layer 5 (mission compliance reporting).

Strategic Gap Mapping

Closes Gap 3: Merchant-Side Tooling. Without low-effort manifest tooling, agentic commerce stays a research demo. A generator that ingests existing storefront data is the lever that gets merchants over the hump.

Suggested Deliverables

• Open-source generator with at least a CLI interface, with a documented programmatic API.
• Published manifest schema and validation tooling.
• Importers for at least one major commerce platform (for example Shopify or WooCommerce).
• Signed manifest envelope with a documented key handling pattern.
• Reference fixtures for happy path, partial data, and invalid data cases.
• Public documentation describing how to host the manifest at a well-known location.
• An optional viewer that renders a manifest in human-readable form.

MVP Expectations

• Generates a schema-valid manifest from a minimum input set.
• Round-trip serialization and validation.
• One importer for an existing commerce platform.
• Signed envelope option, with documented key handling.
• Passing test suite and a CLI invocation example.
• Published under an OSI-approved license with a permissive default.

Out of Scope for Initial Grant

• Hosted SaaS manifest endpoints.
• Custodial storage of merchant private keys.
• Storefront builders or commerce platforms themselves.
• Tax, customs, or jurisdiction-specific shipping logic.
• Closed platform integrations that cannot be open-sourced.

Security and Privacy Expectations

• Manifest signing keys are documented; no private keys are committed.
• Inputs are validated against the schema before signing.
• The agent access policy field is structured and parseable, not free-form prose.
• Last updated timestamps are integrity-protected.
• A documented threat model that names what the manifest does and does not attest to.
• A responsible disclosure contact in the README.

Suggested Applicant Profile

This grant suits a team with experience in e-commerce integrations, structured data tooling, or open-source SDK delivery. Familiarity with Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, or headless commerce stacks is helpful. The Foundation also welcomes contributors with prior schema or feed format work (for example Schema.org, Open Graph product, or product feed standards).

Review Criteria

• Public-good output and permissive licensing.
• Schema completeness against the listed fields.
• Coverage and quality of the importer.
• Determinism of generation and signing.
• Quality of documentation and developer ergonomics.
• Maintenance plan and team track record.

How to Apply