Virto Commerce Is First to Go Live with an onX Adapter – Here’s What That Means

Two months ago, we announced that Virto Commerce had joined the Commerce Operations Foundation as a Founding Member. Today, we’re taking the next step: we’re the first commerce platform vendor in the COF ecosystem to ship a live Order Network eXchange (onX) adapter. 

You can review it on GitHub now. 

Order Network eXchange is the Commerce Operations Foundations open specification for how orders, inventory, and fulfillment events move between systems — commerce platforms, order management systems, warehouses, 3PLs, and increasingly, AI-driven buying interfaces. 

The problem it solves is familiar to anyone who has run a complex B2B operation: every new selling channel or fulfillment partner typically means another brittle, custom integration to build and maintain. 

The solution — instead of every vendor building custom, point-to-point connections with every other vendor, everyone speaks the same operational language. 

onX brings that shared operational language to life. Clean boundaries, defined contracts, no vendor lock-in.

The Virto onX adapter exposes core Virto Commerce operations — product search, pricing queries, cart creation, order placement — as standardized, AI-callable tools through the MCP (Model Context Protocol) layer. This means external systems and AI agents can interact with Virto Commerce through a consistent interface, without needing to understand Virto-specific APIs. 

The architecture has four layers: AI agents at the top, the MCP protocol layer, the MCP server, and the commerce platform adapter at the bottom. Virto’s adapter sits in that fourth layer, translating MCP tool calls into Virto API requests and returning structured responses back up the chain. 

We’ve also contributed improvements to COF’s reference MCP server implementation (see PRs #28 and #32 on the COF GitHub), which reflects how we think about open-source work: show up, contribute, and help make the foundation stronger for everyone. 

The response from the COF community has been encouraging. As Ben Marks, Managing Director of COF, put it: 

As more vendors adopt onX, a new set of commerce workflows becomes possible. Virto customers will be able to connect to any onX-compatible OMS without custom integration work. Frontends will be able to query OMS, 3PL, and WMS systems for live inventory and delivery promise data through a single, standardized interface. 

Beyond that, AI agents (e.g., sales copilots, procurement automation, customer service assistants) will be able to invoke commerce operations directly through MCP tools. Think of a sales rep asking a conversational assistant to place an order for a customer, or a procurement agent automatically checking stock levels and generating purchase orders when inventory dips below a threshold. These aren’t distant hypotheticals; they’re the scenarios the test prompts in our repository already demonstrate. 

The COF ecosystem is still early, and the full value will grow as more vendors come on board. But that’s exactly why being first matters. As Sasha Siniouguine, CEO of Virto Commerce, comments:

We’re excited to see more vendors adopt onX and to keep contributing as this standard evolves.