--- type: WebPage name: A sale in the hand. id: "https://selfe.ai/solutions/direct-sales" url: "https://selfe.ai/solutions/direct-sales" publisher: "did:web:selfe.ai" description: "How a live merchant feed puts you into Google Shopping and everywhere else that compares, so you are in the reckoning at the moment of choosing." --- # A sale in the hand. > How a live merchant feed puts you into Google Shopping and everywhere else that compares, so you are in the reckoning at the moment of choosing. A live merchant feed puts you into Google Shopping and every place that compares, while the sale, price and customer stay in your own system. Selfe keeps it live and lets an agent complete the purchase on terms you set. ## The biggest shop window sends people to you. Google's shopping surfaces put buyers with clear intent in front of businesses that can fulfil it. The sale can still arrive on your site, at your price, with the customer attached. Rooms work the same way. That depends on a merchant feed. Most businesses lack one or have not touched it since setup. It is what Google and other AI agents use to compare and complete. The sequence belongs to nobody. Catalogue, basket, checkout, order. Google is the largest surface, not the owner, so getting it right once makes you buyable everywhere. ## What your Selfe keeps right. Selling direct against the marketplaces means being in the comparison with everything filled in. **The feed, kept live.** Every product, rate and change out of the system you already run, as it stands this morning. **The fields nobody fills in.** Availability, condition, identifiers, and the attributes that decide whether you come up for a size 12. **Your rates beside theirs.** Your own price in front of an agent next to whoever else sells it. Being in the comparison is the win. **Ready for a checkout that completes.** What it costs, what is left and what the terms are, all three true at once. **The customer lands with you.** Their details and what they wanted go into your own system, which is what makes a second visit askable. **Tractors & Cream** A Somerset farm café and glamping stay, connecting through ResNexus, the same adapter already proven end to end, live, on a real partner sandbox. **Cranstons Cumbrian Food Hall** A Cumbrian food hall and deli, connecting through its own WooCommerce shop, via Visit Keswick. ## The margin you keep is the cheapest margin there is. A direct sale is worth more than the same sale through somebody else, especially when margins are thin. A live, complete record means the comparison surface can hand you the transaction rather than keep the customer. You are listed there, but you receive the visit, basket and card details. What remains is a customer, not a reference number. That is the value that pays again. ## Worth reading next The latest on how AI agents actually work, written as it happens. **The request behind your booking button is what matters.** A booking button helps a person start a journey. An agent needs to establish the terms of a specific request, know what it may do and carry the relevant context into the next step. **Someone asks for a dog-friendly stay in October. What happens next?** A dog-friendly stay in October sounds like a simple filter until an AI agent tries to act on it. What happens next depends on details a first-pass search never asks for. **How much does an agent need to know before it can buy?** Not everything. An AI agent working through a booking request doesn't need a business's full history, it needs the small number of facts that resolve the specific thing the person asked for. A page with forty things to say and none of them the right one loses to a page with three. ## How does this compare with a marketplace or booking channel? A marketplace is a destination that brings the customer, controls the journey and usually keeps the relationship. Selfe makes your own business available wherever the customer's agent is asking; the sale lands in your system and the customer remains yours. They can work alongside each other, but the economics and ownership are different. **Is this saying we should leave the channels?** No. Channels earn their place when they introduce demand you would not otherwise reach. Selfe adds another direct route and makes it easier to complete sales without handing over the customer. The sensible question is which sales genuinely needed a channel and which could have completed with you. **Why charge a percentage at all?** Because part of the value only exists when a sale completes. A transaction charge puts that part of our return on the same side of the arithmetic as yours. It applies to an attributable sale completed through Selfe, not simply to every order appearing in a system you connected. **Is that instead of card fees, or on top?** On top. Your payment provider still processes the money into your account and charges its normal fee. Selfe never becomes the merchant or holds your proceeds. Its transaction charge is for creating and completing the attributable sale, not for moving the card payment. **Can an AI agent really complete a sale or booking?** Yes, where your connected systems and rules allow it. Selfe checks live availability and terms, takes authorised payment through your existing provider, and writes the order or booking into the system your team already uses. Anything outside your rules stops before it commits. ## Act on this - [Check whether an agent can buy from you](https://selfe.ai/agentic-commerce/buyability-check) — the free readiness scan. - [Discover venues](https://selfe.ai/api/registry/discover) — `POST`, semantic browse across the registry. - [Match a bookable answer](https://selfe.ai/api/registry/match) — `POST` with dates and party size. - [Verify Selfe's identity](https://selfe.ai/.well-known/did.json) — `did:web:selfe.ai`. - [Agent card](https://selfe.ai/.well-known/agent-card.json) — how to connect over A2A or MCP.