Agentic commerce, for store owners.

A shopper asks an assistant such as ChatGPT or Google's Gemini for a product. Instead of returning ten links, the assistant reads product data from stores, compares it, and presents a few options. Depending on the platform and the store, the purchase can then happen on the store's own checkout or inside the assistant.

For a store, the change is that the first “visitor” is increasingly software reading your product data, not a person browsing your pages.

The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is co-developed by Google with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, with others including Amazon, Microsoft and Stripe listed on its site. It covers the whole purchase: catalogue search, cart, account linking through OAuth, checkout and order management, with payments through AP2 payment mandates. The merchant remains the merchant of record and keeps the customer relationship.

The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) is maintained by OpenAI and Stripe under the Apache 2.0 licence. It defines a checkout API and a delegated-payment API, and its latest stable version is dated 17 April 2026, with the specification still marked beta. OpenAI's merchant documentation starts with a structured product feed so ChatGPT can index a store's products accurately.

This is moving month by month. OpenAI launched in-chat checkout in ChatGPT in September 2025, and both protocols have published several versions since. Which assistants can complete a purchase, in which countries and for which stores, varies and changes often — check your platform's current documentation rather than a roundup article, including this one.

None of this requires a rebuild. Most of it is product-data hygiene that also helps ordinary search.

Selling through an assistant means less control over how your product is presented, and a customer who may never see your site. Fraud checks, tax, accounting and fulfilment still have to work for orders that arrive this way, so any integration should go through the same systems as your web checkout rather than around them.

For most stores the sensible position today is ready but not reshaped: product data an agent can trust, on a platform that will speak the protocols, without betting the site on a channel that is still settling.