Connections & Connected Stores

Overview

Connections are the outside systems your organization has linked to Buyer24. The page has three sections: Channels, Solicitation sources and Integrations. Today that covers four kinds:

• Email mailboxes — the Gmail, Outlook / Microsoft 365, or mail-server accounts your RFQ email is sent from and read into. Each person connects their own; see Connecting Your Email.
• WhatsApp — Buyer24's number or your own WhatsApp Business number, to reach suppliers who miss email; see Connecting WhatsApp. Telegram and WeChat are listed as Coming soon.
• Solicitation sources — the agency bid portals, government tender feeds and bid-data subscriptions Buyer24 reads public bids from; see Finding Public Bids.
• A commerce store your organization buys from. Once it's connected, your Procurement Manager agent can search the store's catalog, build a cart, and hand you a checkout link — and anything the store can't supply goes out to your suppliers as an RFQ.

The store has to support Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, the standard that lets an AI agent shop a store on a buyer's behalf. If you're not sure whether a store you buy from supports it, ask the store.

No money moves inside Buyer24. An agent can fill a cart and start a checkout, but the checkout ends in a link that a person opens and pays on the store's own page. Buyer24 never sees or handles payment details.

Where to find it

Open Connections in the Assistant sidebar, just below Plugins. If your organization only uses Buyer24 to answer quote requests (no Assistant app), both pages are under Settings instead.

The page is a grid of cards, one per kind of connection. Each card shows its status at the top right — Connected, Not connected, Needs sign-in, Error, or Coming soon for connections that aren't available yet — and, for a store, how many tools it provides and which plugin uses it.

Only Organization Admins can connect, edit, or disconnect WhatsApp, solicitation sources and stores. Everyone else sees their status.

Plan: connected stores come with the Pro and Organization plans. See Pricing.

Connecting a store

A store connection on its own only stores the credentials — agents would know the store exists, but not how to shop it. So setup starts from the plugin that brings everything together: the connection, the store's tools, and the purchasing skill that teaches your agents how to use them.

When you click Connect on the store card, Buyer24 offers Go to set up to walk you through the Google Universal Commerce Protocol Stores plugin. You can also start from the Plugins page — the plugin card has a Set up button. (If you'd rather store the credential without the plugin, Connect only is there too.)

Setup runs in four steps:

1. Permissions — a plain-language list of what Buyer24 and your agents will be able to do at the store: read its catalog and product details, create and update carts under your organization's account, start checkouts that produce a link for a person to complete, and read the status of orders placed through those checkouts. Nothing is saved until you click Accept and continue, and your acceptance is recorded with the connection.
2. Connect — enter the store's details:

- Store URL — the store's website address. Buyer24 checks that the store supports the protocol and finds its agent endpoint for you.

- Agent API key — if the store issued you one for agent access

- Buyer user id and Buyer organization id — optional; your account at the store, if it gave you one

1. Tools — Buyer24 verifies the connection and loads the store's tools. You'll see how many are available.
2. Agents — choose which agents carry the plugin. The Procurement Manager is the agent that shops the store.

If any step fails, the flow stops and tells you which one. Cancelling leaves nothing behind.

Rules worth knowing

• One store per organization. To switch stores, disconnect the current one first.
• Test re-checks the store and refreshes its tool list — use it if the store has added features.
• Disconnecting removes the store's tools from your agents on their next run. The plugin stays assigned, but it can't be used until a store is connected again. On an agent's page, an unconnected plugin reads Connect it under Connections first.
• If the store asks you to sign in again, the card shows Needs sign-in. An admin needs to reconnect it — Buyer24 won't retry quietly.

Using the store from your own Claude

The same connection works from Claude through the Buyer24 connector — you don't add the store to Claude separately. If your Claude connector was set up before the store permissions existed, disconnect and reconnect it once to approve them. See Connecting Buyer24 to Claude.

What the Procurement Manager does with a store

Ask for something to be bought — for example, paste a requisition into a chat — and the Procurement Manager checks every line against your connected store before anything goes out as an RFQ. You don't have to name the store in your request.

For each line it:

• Finds the product — by the store's SKU first, then by part number, then by your description
• Puts every match in one cart at the quantity you asked for. If the store won't sell that quantity (a pack size, a minimum, stock), it adjusts to what the store accepts and notes the difference on the line
• Leaves the unsure lines to you — a line it can't match confidently is marked confirm, and a line with several equally good products shows Pick a product for you to choose
• Keeps the rest on the order — lines the store can't supply stay on the order as needs RFQ, with the store's reason. Nothing goes to suppliers until you click Request quotes, so nothing you asked for is dropped
• Starts the checkout, filling shipping details from your organization's profile address and your name, and gives you the checkout link

Automatic purchasing

When the store's tools allow it, Buyer24 handles a plain purchase list itself, without running the agent through every step, which is faster and cheaper. The store card on Connections shows Automatic purchasing: on, or off with the reason, in which case purchases go through the assistant. Either way you finish on the same Order workspace.

Store tasks are regular agent runs — see Pricing. Changing the order afterwards in the Order workspace doesn't run the agent and costs nothing.

The Order workspace

When a task is building an order, Buyer24 opens the Order workspace beside your chat — Your order, matched line by line. If you close it, View cart on the task card brings it back. On the Tasks page, opening a task that has an order shows the same view.

The lines

Each line shows the product it was matched to (with Requested as … when your wording differed), brand and SKU, the quantity in the cart (with the quantity you requested, if different), the unit price, the line total, and a Match column:

Switch between By source — lines grouped under the connected store, Needs your pick, Needs RFQ and suppliers (linking to the RFQ they open as), and Still sourcing — and By line, which keeps your original order.

The summary

The Order summary on the side shows items, shipping, tax, and total exactly as the store calculated them, how many lines are in the store versus going to suppliers, and the agent's notes and next steps.

Changing the order

While the agent is working, the order is read-only. Once it's finished, you can change it yourself:

• Quantity — use the stepper on any line
• Product — click change on a store line to swap it for another product the store offers
• Line menu — Remove line, Move to request for quotes, Also request quotes (keep it in the cart and get supplier quotes to compare), or on a line that's on the RFQ side, Move back to the store cart

Every change goes straight to the store cart, and the prices and totals update from the store's own answer. If the store refuses a change — a minimum order, a pack size — the line says so, and you can fix it with the stepper or move it to the RFQ side.

For the lines going to suppliers:

• Request quotes drafts a chat message listing those lines, ready for you to send
• Find suppliers drafts a message asking the agent to find new suppliers for that RFQ, when your supplier list has no match

Neither runs anything until you send the message.

Checking out

When the order is ready, click Continue to checkout. It opens the store's own checkout page, where you — or whoever handles payment — sign in if needed and pay. Nothing is charged in Buyer24.

• If the order changes after a checkout link was made, the link is refreshed so it always matches the current cart
• The link shows when it expires. Once it has expired, click Get a new checkout link
• If no link was made yet, click Get checkout link. It uses your organization's profile address — add one under Organization if it's missing

After you've paid

Buyer24 doesn't hear from the store automatically when you pay. Click Already paid on the store? Check the order status — the order then shows as Ordered with its number and when it was placed, plus View the order on the store when the store provides a page for it. Use Check order status to refresh.

Once an order is placed, the cart can no longer be changed.

Related

• Connecting Buyer24 to Claude — using your connected store from your own Claude
• Understanding Tasks — how tasks run, wait for you, and finish
• Your AI Assistant — asking for work in chat
• Connecting Your Email — the mailboxes shown on the Connections page
• Pricing — what an agent run costs