Fixed-price commerce publishes a price. Negotiated Commerce allows terms to be formed between buyer and seller.

For two hundred years, commerce has run on published terms: one price, one set of conditions, offered identically to everyone. It is one of the great inventions of the industrial age. It is clear, it is fast, and it scales to millions of customers without a single conversation. It is the backbone of modern trade, and it is not going anywhere.

But publishing a price is a one-way act. The seller speaks; the buyer takes it or leaves it. The other way of trading, terms formed between buyer and seller, where price, delivery, bundles, inclusions and timing are shaped to fit two parties rather than printed for all of them, never disappeared. It simply became a luxury. Forming terms takes a conversation, conversations take people, and people do not scale. So it retreated to where it could pay its way: property, wholesale, procurement, the largest purchases of a life.

That constraint has just lifted. Every buyer and every seller can now be represented by an agent that negotiates: tirelessly, instantly, within rules its principal controls. For the first time since the market square, every economic relationship can afford to form its own terms, not instead of the published price, but alongside it.

We believe the published price does one job well, and only one.

The published price serves the customer who is ready: clear, fast, no conversation needed. It should stand, and in Negotiated Commerce it does. But every seller knows who published terms cannot serve: the customer at the edge, the one who wants it, values it honestly, and walks, leaving a sale nobody ever sees. And the seller's only traditional way to reach that customer, the public discount, reaches everyone else too, handing the same saving to the many who were happy at full price and showing every competitor the new number to beat.

Negotiation is the precise instrument that completes published terms. The ready customer pays the ticket, untouched. The customer at the edge makes an offer, the seller's limits decide in private, and a sale that never used to exist, exists. Each agreement finds its own level; the published terms stand for everyone else. And every offer, won or lost, teaches the seller what customers truly value, the one thing a silent shelf never could.

We believe the agentic economy will be a negotiated economy.

Not just what the television costs. What the sofa costs with delivery included and the old one taken away. What the hotel room is worth on a quiet Tuesday, breakfast thrown in. What the airline seat clears at an hour before the doors close. What a business pays for a hundred laptops delivered this month with three years of support. What the power company pays for the solar off your roof at two in the afternoon. Wherever a buyer and a seller meet and terms must be shaped, published terms become what they always were: an opening position.

And never just the price. Terms have always been more than a number. The delivery. The warranty. The loyalty points. The accessory added in. The timing. A real negotiation trades all of it, so the seller can protect the price by giving value, and the buyer can win value the tag never offered.

Be clear about what this is not.

It is not dynamic pricing, where the seller alone moves the number. It is not personalisation, where the seller predicts what you might tolerate. It is not discounting, where published terms are lowered for everyone at once. It is not an auction, where buyers compete against each other. Negotiated Commerce is two authorised economic actors forming mutually acceptable terms, each within limits they alone control. It is not a new way to set a price. It is a new way to form terms.

We believe terms formed between machines need a protocol, which is better than the status quo: we provide the structure to negotiate on more than just price.

Two people can form terms because everything is carried by trust: who they are, whether they mean it, whether the price and terms will be honoured at the till. Two machines carry none of that. An AI that "just talks price" can miss a deal that both sides would have been happy with. It can't explore price and terms, it can't promise a deal that a checkout recognises, it can't get a deal done that is trusted by both sides. Protocols make commitments. Negotiation keeps the character of a conversation; protocol is what makes the conversation executable, so that an agreement becomes something the checkout, the booking system, the settlement rail is bound to honour. At machine speed and machine scale, trust has to be built in, or it is not there at all.

We believe the first question is always: who negotiates?

An agent cannot open a negotiation without knowing who will negotiate. The market needs an honest index, one that gives exactly two answers, yes or not yet, and never claims yes unless it is true. Where the answer is not yet, willing buyers should be able to say so, with consent, so the queue of intent becomes the reason the answer changes.

We believe the standard must be open, and we hold these three things apart:

1. Negotiated Commerce is a defined category; it belongs to no company.
2. The Negotiation Extension is the open protocol: published, versioned, implementable by anyone.
3. Bidit is the enabler: the reference implementation, the operator of the first index, the infrastructure that makes the protocol run in the real world.

The protocol is open so everyone can trust it. Bidit exists so it actually works.

We start in retail, deliberately.

Retail is where agents arrived first, where the rails are being laid in public by the largest companies on earth, and where machine-readable public pricing bites first. Our engine negotiates real products at real retailers today, price and terms together. Retail proves the primitives. It does not define the size of the idea.

The published price will keep doing what it does best: serving the ready customer at scale. Alongside it, at last, every deal's terms can be formed, not just taken. Negotiated Commerce is back, and this time it scales.

The protocol is open. Bidit enables it.

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