What your AI sees in an Amazon order

Your bank shows one $84.31 charge from Amazon. Era shows you the six things in the box. Link a retailer account alongside your banks — Amazon, Walmart and Target among them — and every order arrives as a transaction you can open item by item: product name and line total on each item, plus quantity, unit price, the retailer's own category and a product photo where the retailer sends them. The same items reach Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or any other agent you have already connected through the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Why a card charge can't tell you this

A card charge is one number and a merchant name. That is all your bank ever received — the retailer told the card network what to collect, not what was in the box. So the groceries, the birthday present and the printer ink arrive as a single line, and the only way back to the detail is to open the retailer's site and read the order yourself.

A retailer link closes that from the other side. Rather than asking your bank for detail it never had, Era reads the order from the retailer, where the detail has been all along.

What a line item carries

Two fields are on every line, without exception:

• Product name — the description the retailer sent.
• Line total — what that line came to.

These arrive wherever the retailer supplies them:

• Quantity — three of something, or one.
• Unit price — what one of them cost.
• Category — the retailer's own category for that product, carried through exactly as the retailer wrote it.
• SKU or UPC — the retailer's product identifiers, useful when a product name is ambiguous.
• Product photo — the image the retailer publishes for that product.

Nothing here is inferred. A field the retailer did not send is simply absent rather than guessed at.

Tax, shipping and discounts are lines of their own

An order is not only products. Tax, shipping, delivery fees and discounts each arrive as a separate line, typed as what they are, so the order adds up in front of you instead of hiding a gap between the items and the total.

A discount arrives as a credit, never as a negative number. Five dollars off is five dollars of credit on its own line, which is what makes an order readable at a glance rather than a sum you have to reconstruct.

Where you see it in Era

A retailer order sits in your transaction list like any other transaction. Open the row and it expands to show the lines inside it — a photo, the product name with the retailer's own category beneath it, the quantity and the line total. A tax or shipping line carries what kind of line it is in that same place, because no product stands behind it. Your agents read the same lines and get the unit price and product code alongside them. There is no separate receipts area to learn and nothing to import by hand.

What your agent gets

The items travel through the tools your agent already uses. An agent that is already connected to Era needs no new tool and no second sign-in — the next time it lists or searches your transactions, the items are there. (For a developer reading this: the line items come back on transactions__list_transactions and transactions__search_transactions.)

That makes a set of questions answerable that were not before:

• "What did I actually buy at Amazon last month?"
• "How many of each thing was in that order?"
• "Has the unit price on my usual coffee changed?"
• "Show me every order that had a delivery fee on it."

Each of those is answered by reading the lines inside an order, not by reading the order total.

Everything stays exactly as the retailer sent it

Line items are read-only, everywhere. You can see them and ask about them; so can your agent. Nothing edits, renames, splits or recategorizes them — not you, not your agent, not an automation rule. Era does not categorize an item either: the category on a line is the retailer's own, worded exactly as the retailer wrote it.

That boundary is worth stating plainly, because "my AI can see every product I bought" is a fair thing to be uneasy about. What an agent gets is a read of the order the retailer already has. It cannot change a line, and there is no tool that would let it.

The purchase itself is still an ordinary transaction, so you or your agent can tag it, categorize it and write rules against it exactly as you would for any other. Those act on the transaction; the lines inside it stay as they arrived.

What a retailer link is not

A few things it deliberately does not do, because knowing the edges is what makes the rest trustworthy:

• It holds no money. A retailer link shows no balance and adds nothing to your net worth. It is a record of what you ordered, not an account with money in it.
• The items come from the retailer, not from your bank. Only a retailer connection produces line items. A card charge stays a card charge, with the merchant name and amount your bank sent.
• Past orders come with the link. What arrives is the retailer's own scan of your account, so orders you already placed are there alongside the new ones. How far back that scan reaches is the retailer's call — Era reads what it delivers and has no way to ask for a deeper window.

Linking a retailer

Add a connection in Era and choose your retailer. The sign-in happens outside Era, so Era never sees those credentials — what comes back is a connection, not a password. Retailer accounts connect in the US, and you can unlink at any time.

If you have not connected anything yet, start with what Era Context is and how it works, then connect your AI agent and add a retailer alongside your banks.

Once it is linked, the next question worth asking is the one your bank could never answer: not what the charge was, but what was in the box.