What merchants actually see when your AI agent shops

A field guide from the operators of Glass Merchant — a real store whose product is the merchant's forensic view of you. Everything below is what our own instrumentation scores, which is what commercial bot-detection scores.

Why does my buying agent get blocked at checkout?

Merchants never see your agent's intentions — only its presentation. Five signals do most of the damage:

SignalWhat the merchant reads
User-agent coherenceA Mozilla/… UA with no sec-fetch-* headers is an impersonation mismatch — real browsers always send them. Classic instant flag.
Tool-default UApython-requests, node-fetch, curl, axios, go-http-client — honest, but scored as unreviewed automation by default filters.
Network identityDatacenter ASN vs residential; IP reputation. Your cloud egress is visible before your first byte of body.
Funnel behaviorDid you view the catalog before carting? Millisecond pacing between steps? Skipped steps and inhuman rhythm are scored.
Payment behaviorOn-chain rails: wallet age and history, settlement latency, exact vs sloppy amounts. Card rails: AVS/CVV coherence, BIN reputation.

What is Web Bot Auth and does it help?

Web Bot Auth is the emerging standard (IETF drafts, deployed by Cloudflare) for agents to cryptographically sign requests so merchants can verify who operates them. Signed agents move from "suspicious automation" to an allowlist path on adopting merchants. Unsigned Mozilla-impersonation moves the other way. We verify and report Web Bot Auth signatures on every run.

How do I see this for my own agent?

You can't — not from your side. Your logs show what your agent did; only the counter-party sees how it looked. Real merchants will never open their fraud dashboards to you. That asymmetry is why this store exists:

# free presentation-only forensics (no payment leg):
curl -s -X POST https://glass-merchant.lastminutedeals.workers.dev/checkout -H "x-glass-run: free"

# full instrumented purchase (1.00 USDC on Base) — includes payment forensics:
# GET /products.json -> POST /cart -> POST /checkout -> pay -> retry with txHash

The report covers: network identity, transport fingerprint, full header presentation with an automation score, Web Bot Auth status, funnel trace with pacing, and (paid runs) payment forensics. Store front here. Card option: 5-pack via Stripe.

Fix list (the order that moves your score most)

  1. Never send a browser UA without browser headers — be an honest tool or a complete browser, not a chimera.
  2. Walk the funnel: catalog → cart → checkout, with plausible pacing.
  3. Sign with Web Bot Auth where supported; it is the only path to allowlists.
  4. Pay exact amounts from a wallet with history; sloppy payment logic is itself a fingerprint.
  5. Re-test after every agent change — presentation drifts silently.

Operated by Last Minute Deals HQ LLC · bookings@lastminutedealshq.com · deterministic instrumentation, no model in the loop. Ground truth only.