# Liam J.E Gerada

Liam J.E Gerada writes about ecommerce payments and how online stores can serve software agents that shop for people. His posts cover payment costs, subscription billing and checkout systems, and describe Krepling Pay as work on payments infrastructure for ecommerce.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/liam-j-e-gerada/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-j-e-gerada-28043a122
- LinkedIn followers: 1,681
- Topics: artificial-intelligence, ecommerce, agentic-commerce
- Based on 10 dated posts, latest 2026-08-05

## Summary

Most useful for merchant-level payment diagnostics and arguments about how commerce systems should adapt for shopping agents.

- Best for: A payments infrastructure brand or conference panel on agentic checkout and payment legibility.
- Not for: Consumer lifestyle or mass-market fintech short-form video campaigns aimed at broad audiences.
- Check first: Confirm claims are verified, product ties do not affect work, and request audience demographics and engagement.

### Takeaways

- A $110 million merchant reportedly paid an effective rate above 4.3% versus quoted 2.9%.
- Agents abandon checkouts that assume a human is present, including human-shaped payment forms.
- Subscription billing declines can be mistaken for customer cancellations when payment and storefront data sit separately.

## Main ideas

- **The quoted processing rate is not the rate merchants pay**: Gerada argues that the headline rate on a pricing page is marketing, not a merchant’s true cost. Cross-border assessments, FX spread, gateway fees, chargeback fees and downgraded interchange all add up, yet most operators cannot quote their effective rate even when they know customer acquisition cost to the dollar. The post works through published fee schedules for Stripe, PayPal, Shopify and Adyen, then gives a one-line diagnostic: divide total fees by total processed volume.
- **Agents abandon checkouts that assume a human is present**: Checkout flows are built around getting a person to approve a transaction in the moment, through 3DS, CVV prompts and confirmation screens. Autonomous agents stall at the same friction points—interstitial pop-ups, forced account creation and payment forms that presume a human operator—but, unlike people, they do not hesitate. They route to a merchant whose infrastructure they can transact with, turning payment plumbing from a cost centre into a demand-capture asset, Gerada says.
- **Agent purchasing moves consent from the transaction to the relationship**: Existing controls answer whether a person approved a specific purchase. When an agent buys, no one is present at checkout; the question is whether a person authorised that agent to make purchases like this one. Incumbents are issuing tokens that flag transactions as agent-initiated and adding agentic checkout within their own ecosystems, Gerada says. But these retain the old shape: a party between agent and merchant, taking a fee and deciding which agents get through.
- **Neutral settlement is argued from conflict and volume**: Gerada expects the incumbent middle-party model to fail for two reasons. First, conflict: a company that owns both the agent and checkout has an incentive to point the agent at its own inventory and take margin on both sides. That pushes merchants and agent developers toward a settlement layer with no stake in what gets bought. Second, volume: a per-transaction toll that is rounding error at human purchase frequency becomes a real tax when agents transact constantly—and real taxes get engineered around.
- **Subscription revenue leaks in the seams between tools**: One-time sales give a clean pass or fail at checkout; subscriptions run for months and lose useful signal when the storefront and processor record different things. Involuntary churn—expired cards, declines and fraud flags rather than customer intent—drives a large share of cancellations, but merchants may mistake it for customer intent. Payment-method mix also affects retention and is invisible when subscription cohorts live in one tool and payment data in another.

## Work to read

- [Why agents abandon checkouts — and what that changes about payment infrastructure](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/liam-j-e-gerada-28043a122_most-checkout-flows-were-built-on-an-assumption-activity-7486049203169812481-OD6d)
- [The headline processing rate is marketing: a worked example of true payment costs](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/liam-j-e-gerada-28043a122_most-operators-can-quote-their-cac-to-the-activity-7490787092558491648-q0yw)
- [Consent has to move from the transaction to the relationship](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/liam-j-e-gerada-28043a122_every-online-checkout-assumes-a-person-is-activity-7475923716061986816-CwnL)
- [Subscriptions hide their leaks in the seams between tools](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/liam-j-e-gerada-28043a122_one-time-sales-give-you-a-clean-passfail-activity-7450517764630265857-L1ZQ)

## Brand relationships

- **Krepling Pay** (owned_business)

## Partnerships

Gerada’s posts contain no sponsorship, affiliate or paid-partnership offer, and no media kit, rate card or partnership terms page. The commercial activity shown is their own company: posts use “we” and “our team” to describe building Krepling Pay and direct readers to its pricing page. That is a product they are behind, not a sponsorship format a brand can book. The posts do not say sponsorships are never accepted; they simply publish no terms. A brand considering them for a panel or paid placement should ask about deliverables, disclosure, exclusivity, lead time and rates, and confirm terms before committing spend.

## Alternatives

- Jeremy Burke: Choose Burke when the panel centres on subscription revenue retention rather than agent-initiated checkout: preventing involuntary churn, spotting at-risk accounts before renewal and treating failed payments as a payment-performance problem rather than a customer-liquidity problem. Burke’s posts give the payments infrastructure company a practical angle on retention and decline diagnosis for a merchant or CFO audience.
- Sharon Gai: Choose Gai when the audience is retailers who need the agentic commerce landscape explained: which protocols are emerging, how AI agents discover and buy products, and what brands should do to become agent-ready. Gai’s posts name Google’s AP2, Mastercard’s Agent Pay, Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol and PayPal’s agentic commerce platform, and connect agentic shopping to answer-engine discovery. That makes Gai a better fit for a retailer-facing panel on protocol readiness and discovery than for one built around merchant payment-cost diagnostics.
- Tom Shivers: Choose Shivers when the panel needs implementation detail on agentic checkout standards. Shivers compares OpenAI and Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Protocol with Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, explains delegated payments and cart building inside ChatGPT, and lists concrete retailer actions such as structured product feeds, ACP checkout endpoints and feed-readiness checks. That makes Shivers a stronger choice for a working session on preparing merchant data and checkout infrastructure for agent-led purchasing.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/