What guardrails are truly essential for safe autonomous refunds up to $200 in AI support agents?

Agentic Commerce
1

I’m working on an AI customer support agent for Shopify stores that needs to handle autonomous refunds (up to ~$200 or order value).

To make merchants comfortable removing manual approvals, we’re thinking about the following safety layer:

  • Hard throttle per action (cannot exceed order value or $200)

  • Error streak detection + automatic pause + escalation to human

  • Cryptographic/action receipts for full auditability

For those who have already shipped refund-capable autonomous agents (or are close):

What guardrails have proven mandatory in production?

Are there any other critical mechanisms I’m missing?

Would love real examples, war stories, or links to patterns that actually worked. Thanks!