In March, a new AI-focused marketplace went live, hosting over 60 services designed for non-human users. Everything from full-text searches across every SEC filing—priced per query—to CAPTCHA solvers and physical letter mailers is accessible through a single HTTP call. Behind it sits the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), built by Stripe and Tempo. In its first week, 894 agents ran more than 31,000 transactions, paying anywhere from $0.003 up to $35 per request, using cards, stablecoins or Lightning all within that same API call. Traditional e-commerce builds around storefronts, checkout pages and subscriptions. Headless merchants ditch all that. They expose machine-readable schemas that include pricing and endpoints; there’s no login, no shopping cart, no account. An AI agent evaluates documentation, checks price and uptime, pays immediately, and consumes the output—all in one back-and-forth. The payment itself proves identity and intent, a concept Simon Taylor calls the “intention economy.” This model collapses barriers to micro-transactions. Charging three-tenths of a cent per API call never made sense when humans had to complete billing flows. Agents don’t mind. They’ll fire off thousands of $0.003 image-generation calls or $0.01 web scrapes in a day, never signing up or canceling a subscription. That makes lean, pay-per-request services competitive against legacy API-key plus tiered-subscription setups—agents simply skip over anything that adds friction. The rails are ready—Visa’s CLI for card payments, MPP and X402 for mixed settlement—but the real play is on the merchant side. The next wave won’t invent new payment protocols; it’ll spin up headless businesses with clean APIs, reliable output and predictable per-call pricing. These “merchants” exist purely as endpoints, reaching AI-driven buyers that never would have clicked “create account.”