What is agentic commerce? How AI agents shop and check out

What agentic commerce means

Agentic commerce is buying and selling in which software agents do steps a person used to do by hand. Google's announcement of its own protocol describes it as commerce where AI completes tasks on people’s behalf. In the protocols on this page, the agent works for the shopper: a person asks an AI assistant for something, the assistant searches products from many stores, narrows them down and places the order once the person confirms.

The word agentic comes from agent: a program that takes actions toward a goal instead of only answering questions. An assistant that lists links is acting as a search tool. An assistant that can build a cart, pass a payment credential to the store and confirm the order is acting as an agent.

Three things have to work for this to happen. The agent needs product data it can read, the store needs a way to accept an order that did not come through its own checkout page, and the payment has to reach the store without the agent holding the buyer's card number. The protocols below are shared agreements on how to do those three things. Google's case for UCP is that instead of requiring unique connections for every individual agent, UCP enables all agents to interact easily.

• Discovery: the agent reads product listings, prices, stock and shipping options from many stores.
• Comparison: it weighs the options against what the shopper asked for.
• Agentic checkout: after the shopper confirms, it sends the order and a payment credential to the store.
• After the sale: order updates, returns and support, which some protocols also cover.

How agentic checkout works, step by step

This is the flow OpenAI and Stripe described when they launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT on September 29, 2025.

1. The shopper asks

   A person describes what they want, and the assistant shows the products it finds most relevant. OpenAI says its product results are organic and unsponsored, ranked purely on relevance to the user.

2. The shopper confirms

   If the product supports Instant Checkout, OpenAI says users can tap “Buy,” confirm their order, shipping, and payment details, and complete the purchase without ever leaving the chat.

3. The order goes to the store

   OpenAI says that when someone places an order, ChatGPT sends the necessary details to the merchant’s backend using Agentic Commerce Protocol. The store then decides whether to accept the order.

4. Payment moves as a token

   In the Stripe version of this step, the store receives a token instead of the card number. Stripe describes its Shared Payment Token as a new payment primitive that lets applications like ChatGPT initiate a payment without exposing the buyer’s payment credentials, and says the tokens are scoped to a specific merchant and cart total.

5. The store finishes the sale

   Stripe says the merchant can accept or decline the order, charge the payment method, calculate and remit sales tax, and handle fulfillment and returns, as it normally would. OpenAI's documentation adds: OpenAI is not the merchant of record in the Agentic Commerce Protocol.

Agentic commerce protocols compared

Several open protocols cover parts of agentic commerce. Some cover the whole purchase and some only the payment. The table lists three of them, as each one's own announcement describes it.

Google says UCP is compatible with existing industry protocols like Agent2Agent (A2A), Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and Model Context Protocol (MCP), and AP2 supports payment types from credit and debit cards to stablecoins and real-time bank transfers.

Building to a protocol does not put a store's products in every AI assistant. The ACP site says each AI platform will manage their own process for how businesses can participate. Stores on a platform that supports AI channels can reach them through the platform instead, as the seller section below explains.

The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)

OpenAI describes ACP as an open standard for AI commerce that lets AI agents, people, and businesses work together to complete purchases. Stripe calls it an open standard codeveloped with OpenAI, and the specification is open source and community-designed under the Apache 2.0 license.

At launch, OpenAI said U.S. ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Free users can now buy directly from U.S. Etsy sellers right in chat. On cost, it wrote: Merchants pay a small fee on completed purchases, but the service is free for users. The announcement did not state the fee amount. OpenAI's developer documentation says Instant Checkout in ChatGPT is currently available to approved partners.

ACP does not require Stripe. Stripe says businesses not processing with Stripe can still adopt it with their existing payment providers. OpenAI's developer documentation also covers the catalog side: ACP enables ChatGPT to ingest structured catalog data, understand merchant inventory, and surface relevant products in context. The getting-started guide puts the feed first: Start your ACP integration by sharing a structured product feed with OpenAI.

How the purchase finishes can depend on the store's platform. For Shopify merchants, Shopify says ChatGPT users find products through Shopify Catalog and then complete purchases via an in-app browser.

The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)

Google announced the Universal Commerce Protocol on Jan 11, 2026 and describes it as a new open standard for agentic commerce that works across the entire shopping journey. Google says it was co-developed with companies including Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart.

UCP reaches further than checkout. Its specification site lists core capabilities including Catalog Search and Lookup, Cart Building, Identity Linking, Checkout, and Order Management, and notes that UCP is expanding beyond retail: Lodging draft specification now available. For payments, the site says UCP is built for secure payment (AP2) via payment mandates and verifiable credentials.

The first use Google named was a new checkout feature on eligible Google product listings in AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app. On who owns the sale, the announcement says: Retailers remain the seller of record.

What agentic shopping means for a small seller

For a seller, agentic shopping is another place where buyers find and buy products, alongside search engines and marketplaces. An agent can only recommend what it can read, so most of the work is product data and checkout eligibility.

Sellers whose store platform supports AI channels can reach them without building a protocol connection. Shopify, for example, says its Agentic Storefronts give merchants access to ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, AI Mode in Google Search, and the Gemini app, and that products become discoverable in ChatGPT by default via Agentic Storefronts, with no separate integrations, no apps, and no transaction fees beyond standard processing rates. Shopify also says merchants remain the merchant of record, retaining ownership of customer relationships and data. Direct onboarding with OpenAI is narrower: product feed onboarding in ChatGPT is currently available to approved partners.

When several stores sell the same product, OpenAI says ChatGPT considers factors like availability, price, quality, whether a merchant is the primary seller, and whether Instant Checkout is enabled. Shopify says AI surfaces favor structured data, with clean attributes and real-time accuracy.

• Keep titles, descriptions, prices and stock accurate. Price and availability are among the factors above, so a wrong price or an out-of-stock item can cost the sale.
• Fill in specific attributes such as size, material, color, variants and shipping times. These are the details an agent matches against a shopper's request.
• Publish clear shipping, return and refund policies. The store handles returns and support after an agentic sale, as it does for any order.
• Check which AI channels your platform has turned on for your store, and where you manage them.
• Keep your own store and customer list. AI channels add reach, and each AI platform sets its own rules for which products appear and how.

Is agentic checkout safe? The open questions

Agentic checkout raises new questions because an agent, and not only the person, takes part in starting the payment. Google's AP2 announcement names three of them:

• Authorization: Proving that a user gave an agent the specific authority to make a particular purchase.
• Authenticity: Enabling a merchant to be sure that an agent's request accurately reflects the user's true intent.
• Accountability: Determining accountability if a fraudulent or incorrect transaction occurs.

The protocols answer these in different ways. AP2's answer is Mandates, which Google describes as tamper-proof, cryptographically-signed digital contracts that serve as verifiable proof of a user's instructions. In ChatGPT's Instant Checkout, the shopper confirms each order and Stripe's payment token is scoped to a specific merchant and cart total. The store keeps handling payment, delivery and returns as it does for any order.

As a shopper, read the order summary before you confirm. As a seller, treat agent orders like any other order and keep your policies easy to find.

Agentic commerce vs agents that run a store

The protocols on this page are about agents that act for the shopper and how those agents reach a store. The same idea can be applied to the other side of the sale: agents that act for the seller and do the daily work of running the store.

The two sides can meet at checkout. A shopper's agent places an order through a protocol, and the seller's own tools or agents then handle the order, the customer and the delivery.

Nation applies the idea to the seller's side. Nation says one description of what you make builds the store, then agents handle orders, customers and delivery and run ads, content and social posts, with you approving the work. Nation is pre-launch, with a waitlist on withnation.ai. It is neither a shopping assistant nor an agentic commerce protocol, and this page does not compare it with them.

Where Nation fits

Questions about agentic commerce