"Stand up a traditional software business and you need a website, a checkout flow, user accounts, customer service, subscription management, a billing system, and a sales team or marketing budget to acquire customers. A headless merchant needs a good API and a thin layer of middleware. That is the business. This matters because of who the buyer is. An agent arrives with a task, a budget, and constraints. It evaluates the endpoint’s documentation, pricing, and reliability. If the service meets the criteria, it pays and moves on."