Editorial and advertising policy

Who publishes this

Agentic Commerce Review is written and edited by Dirk Buursma and published by Commerce Partners, a one-person independent advisory registered in Ireland. There is no editorial board and no newsroom. When you read something here, one named person is accountable for it.

Outside contributions are published under the contributor's own byline with their employer named. They are labelled as a Partner View and they are never presented as the publication's own reporting.

Where the money comes from

Commerce Partners earns its income from three things: advisory work for brands and retailers, a paid go-to-market programme for technology vendors, and sponsorship of this publication and its research.

The second of those is the one that matters to you as a reader. Commerce Partners is paid by some of the vendors it writes about, and the partner pages on this site describe partners who pay for that programme. That is a commercial relationship, not journalism, and it is why those pages sit outside the publication.

The rules that separate the two

Four rules, and they are absolute rather than aspirational.

1. Vendor Watch is never sponsored. No exceptions, no packages, no "supported by". It is the franchise procurement readers rely on, and the moment it is for sale it is worthless to them and therefore to me.
2. No vendor under consideration in a live client selection can buy any placement anywhere in the publication, for the duration of that selection. If a sponsor enters a shortlist, the placement stops.
3. Sponsorship never touches assessment. A sponsor cannot see, influence, delay or respond to an assessment before publication, and money changing hands is not a fact that enters the evaluation.
4. Everything commercial is labelled on the page itself, in the same place every time — not in a footer, not in a hover, not further down.

What a sponsor can and cannot buy

A sponsor can buy

• A named placement in the Brief or on article pages
• Sponsorship of the Agentic Readiness Index, with attribution
• A Partner View byline, clearly labelled, subject to it being worth a reader's time
• Association with a roundtable or briefing

A sponsor cannot buy

• Any influence over what is covered, or when
• A mention inside editorial copy
• Sight of a piece before publication, including one that names them
• Removal or softening of criticism
• Subscriber contact details, ever — the list is never rented, shared or sold
• Any placement while under consideration in a live selection

How vendors get assessed

Assessments are based on demonstrated capability: what the software does in a client environment, what the reference calls say, what the implementation record shows. Not on the briefing, the analyst placement or the funding round.

Every vendor written about gets the same treatment, including the ones Commerce Partners has a commercial relationship with — and a partner relationship is disclosed at the point it is relevant, in the piece itself.

Where a claim cannot be verified, the piece says so rather than repeating it. That includes the AI capability claims that currently make up most vendor marketing in this category.

Use of AI in producing this publication

AI tools are used here for research, drafting assistance, and checking. They are not used to generate finished articles that go out unread under a human byline.

Every figure, date and quotation in a published piece has been checked against a primary source by a person, and the source is linked so you can check it too. Where a commonly repeated industry statistic turns out to have no traceable origin, it is left out — and occasionally that absence is the story.

A publication about AI that was itself quietly written by AI would deserve exactly none of your attention.

Corrections

Errors get corrected on the page, with a dated note saying what changed. Substantive corrections are also carried in the next Brief. Nothing is silently edited after publication, and nothing is quietly deleted.

If something here is wrong, tell me and it will be fixed — including when the person telling me is the vendor who comes out badly.

Your data

Subscribing asks for your email, optionally your first name, and which of the reader segments you belong to. The segment answer exists so the publication can report its audience composition honestly to sponsors in aggregate, and so the right items reach the right readers.

The list is never rented, shared or sold, and individual subscriber data never goes to a sponsor in any form. Survey responses are reported in aggregate only. Unsubscribing takes one click and removes you entirely.