Guides: for buyers

Buy with an MCP agent

Connect any MCP client (Claude, or your own runtime) to https://mcp.switchboard.simulmedia.com with your OAuth credentials. The tools mirror the REST API one to one, so anything an agent does is visible in the same order book your humans see.

A working session

User: "Get 200 GRPs of prime reach on Acme in the first two weeks of October,
       under $450 a unit, preemptible is fine."

agent → search_catalog { "seller": "acme", "package_type": "daypart" }
agent → get_avails { "package_id": "acme-prime", "weeks": ["2026-W40","2026-W41"] }
# sellout_level 0.62, scatter :30 at 405.00, ng_preemptible tier P2
agent → create_order { "deal_type": "preemptible", "line_items": [...] }
agent → get_order { "order_id": "ord_9f3a12c4b7e1" }   # polls through seller_review
# placed → completed. Receipt attached. Human never touched a spreadsheet.

Guardrails that stay on

Approval thresholds are org policy: you decide which principals may confirm_order or accept counters, and above what spend.
Agents cannot skip gates: seller_review pauses for the seller's human regardless of who submitted.
Give your agent the reconciliation rules: dedup on seq, snapshot as truth, sweep non-terminal orders after outages.

A well-prompted agent can run the entire buyer quickstart from the docs alone. That is not a demo trick; it is the acceptance test we hold these pages to.