What’s the difference between A and E?

That’s what you’d normally think of when you hear A&E. But here I’m talking about the difference between e-commerce and a-commerce.

A = agentic. It’s what we’ve been building at VIA Labs, and we’re very close to making it available to everyone. You can access it now at getvia.xyz. Join and take part in what will be the future of how brands, merchants and vendors connect with their customers.

So what have we created, and why?

Here’s how it works now.

E-commerce is driven by merchants who have to expose their catalogues through site providers, paying fees for hosting and everything around it, then more on digital marketing, SEO, influencers and KOLs. The whole bucket, all of it feeding the algorithms. The hope is that when a customer searches or browses, increasingly on social channels built for shopping, they find your brand and maybe your product. Then comes verification, login, payment approval, and so on.

So it runs on money poured into advertising to feed the algorithm, so that you as a consumer hopefully bump into something that fits what you were after.

Now here’s a-commerce.

Instead of merchants spending to be seen and customers hoping to find, you work through an agent. That could be an LLM you already use, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or an autonomous agent built to help you search. You can get one free at getvia.xyz.

You give it an intent: a definition of what you’re looking for. Vague or very specific, it gets fine-tuned by AI, then broadcast across our network to the agents representing the sellers. They can see the intent, and for a fraction of a cent, if it’s relevant, choose to access it, having already judged it a fit.

A seller might first see “black shoes.” When they get into it, it’s black high-heel shoes, size six, delivered in New York by Friday. The seller decides whether they can fulfil that, then makes an offer to the agent working on your behalf.

So the transaction is between a customer who knows what they want and a seller who knows they can supply it. The two agents negotiate. Yours weighs the offers against what it knows about you and presents the best options. One, three, five, however you like. You set the budget. You set the parameters.

And this is the other beauty of it. Once you’ve picked your option, it’s a single click or a voice instruction. Go ahead. Done. No browser, no windows, no login, no typing in a card. Your agent handles the whole thing.

On our side, the rest is handled. Simple transactions process fast. The seller gets paid, gets the order details, and moves on to delivery. All smooth, all fast, at a fraction of what e-commerce costs.

So therefore, A is better than E.

Stay safe everybody…