Salesforce just spent millions proving VIA right
(we are not for the 1%)
This month Salesforce made Agentforce Commerce generally available. A sales agent for every brand. A buying agent for procurement. Catalogs synced into ChatGPT. Transactions completed in conversation, with the merchant keeping the sale on their own store.
If you have followed what we are building at VIA, that description will sound familiar. It is our architecture. Agents that sell, agents that buy, discovery open to any AI assistant, the seller always the merchant of record.
So the biggest CRM company in the world has now confirmed the thesis: commerce is moving from websites to agents. Their own numbers say AI assistants drove 119% more retail traffic year on year, and they are telling every brand that winners will have a shopper agent live for the 2026 shopping season.
Here is what they are not putting in the headline. The price of admission.
Commerce Cloud takes 1 to 3% of your gross merchandise value as the licence. Implementation runs $200,000 to $500,000 through a specialist agency, on a six to twelve month project. The recommended support plan adds 30% to your licence fee. And the new agent layer is metered at roughly $0.10 per action, where one shopping conversation is many actions. A realistic first year lands in the high six figures. <these are best estimates based on publicly disclosed charges and fees>
That is why the launch customers are PacSun and Iceland Foods. This product was built for the top few thousand retailers on earth. The other five million stores, the independents, the Shopify sellers, the small brands with real products and real customers, are not invited.
<credit Tony Moon, Sideburns #1, 1977>
VIA is for them.
On VIA a seller registers and has a working sales agent the same day. No agency. No project plan. No licence. Your catalog becomes discoverable by any AI agent over an open protocol, not just the ones your vendor signed a deal with. Settlement is instant, in stablecoins, on-chain. You pay only when something sells.
And VIA agents do something Agentforce agents do not: they negotiate. They quote, they counter, they compete for buyer demand. Salesforce agents answer inbound traffic at list price. Ours go and win business.
Salesforce has done us a favour. They have told every brand on earth that agentic commerce is mandatory, then priced it for the 1%.
Cheaper, faster, better. VIA is live at app.getvia.xyz.
