What is agentic commerce?

There is no standard definition, and no standards body owns the term. The publishers we quote below are platforms, payment companies and one analyst firm, and their wordings overlap more than they differ.

Google, in a post of 11 January 2026 by Vidhya Srinivasan, its VP and GM of Ads and Commerce, describes "agentic commerce" as "where AI completes tasks on people's behalf". The same post says: "Today, we're launching the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), a new open standard for agentic commerce that works across the entire shopping journey".

Stripe has two wordings. Its developer documentation says: "Agentic commerce lets AI agents transact for the people they serve. Buyers can browse products, get recommendations, and complete purchases without leaving the conversation." A Stripe guide puts it as "enabling AI-driven agents to undertake shopping tasks for customers, including finding products, tailoring recommendations, and completing transactions automatically."

Shopify also has two, both in one article by Lauren Scherr dated 25 September 2026. The first: "Agentic commerce is a new model of ecommerce where AI agents shop on behalf of consumers, taking actions like researching products, comparing options, and completing purchases autonomously." The second widens it to the whole journey, "from product discovery through checkout and post-purchase support."

Visa's Intelligent Commerce page says agentic commerce "refers to commerce experiences where AI agents help consumers or businesses discover products, make decisions and complete parts of the purchasing journey", and adds that this "can range from comparing products and initiating checkout to completing transactions with user permission." A Visa Perspectives article is shorter: AI agents "can browse, compare options, apply your preferences and then pay, all within rules you set."

Forrester, the analyst firm, gives what we would call a description rather than a formal definition. Its post of 16 October 2025 says "the agents are conducting or enabling commerce at some stage of the customer lifecycle." It also warns, "We can't guarantee what vendors mean when they use terms", and says that when vendors use labels such as "AI shopping assistant," "conversational commerce" or "agentic commerce", "it might be what we're talking about here."

Mastercard does not define the term in the announcement we read. It names its programme instead: "Mastercard Agent Pay", with "Mastercard Agentic Tokens".

Choose a verb below to see which wordings use it. The tags are our reading.

Read together, the definitions agree on two things: software acts for a person, and it gets at least as far as finding and choosing products. They differ on how far it goes. Stripe's and Shopify's first wordings include completing the purchase; Visa's first says "complete parts of the purchasing journey"; only Shopify's second runs on into support after the order.

None of the sources above says who coined "agentic commerce", and neither does Wikipedia's article on it. We looked and came back with nobody, which is fitting for a term about delegation. If you see a confident origin story, check where it comes from.

A purchase made by an agent passes the same five steps as one made by a person. What changes is what the store has to provide at each one, because an agent reads text and data where a person reads a page.

First the agent has to discover what you sell. It can get that from a product feed you send to the company behind the agent: OpenAI's developer docs say product feeds "give ChatGPT the catalog data it needs to index your products". It can read the structured data on your product pages, the machine-readable description of a product, its price and its stock that sits in the page's code. Or it can read files your store publishes at fixed addresses, such as a UCP profile at /.well-known/ucp. How an AI agent reads a web page and how agents discover what a store offers cover this step.

To compare, the agent weighs price, stock, delivery cost and returns against what the shopper asked for. It can only weigh what it can read. A delivery charge that appears only after a script runs, or a returns policy that is a picture of text, is invisible to it. Our checks for shipping terms and return policies read this step.

At checkout the agent builds a basket and places the order. It can do that through your normal checkout pages, the way a person would, or through a checkout interface built for software. Two such interfaces are published: UCP, developed by Google with Shopify, and ACP, whose maintainers file lists OpenAI, Stripe and Meta. Both can be carried over MCP, the Model Context Protocol, which connects AI applications to tools. Checkout is also where a store can stop an agent, with a required account or a CAPTCHA, for example. Why agents stall at checkout goes through what an agent can run into there.

To pay, the agent should not need the shopper's card number. Instead it can pass a token scoped to one seller and one amount, such as Stripe's Shared Payment Tokens, which Stripe describes as giving "sellers scoped access to customers' payment methods for agent-initiated purchases" and labels a preview. AP2, the Agent Payments Protocol, takes another route, with signed authorisations it calls mandates. How an agent pays without seeing your card compares the approaches.

After the order, the protocols keep the store as the seller. UCP's checkout specification says "The business remains the Merchant of Record (MoR)", and ACP's site says businesses "maintain their customer relationships as the merchant of record". The merchant of record is the party that sells to the buyer and is responsible for the sale. So tracking, returns and support stay with you, and an agent needs to find them too.

If you want the four protocols on one page, UCP vs ACP vs MCP vs AP2 sets out which layer each one covers.

Here is what five assistants say about buying, as we read their pages on 3 November 2026. The status labels are the vendors' own words, because "rolling out" and "beta" mean different things and we are not going to round either of them up.

For ChatGPT, OpenAI's developer docs say onboarding product feeds "is currently available to approved partners". For plugins that sell, "the recommended and generally available approach is to use external checkout, where users complete purchases on the developer's own domain." Checkout inside ChatGPT's own payment sheet is labelled "private beta" and "is limited to select marketplaces today and is not available to all users." The same docs still describe Instant Checkout, which "requires a merchant to implement three flows", and say "OpenAI is not the merchant of record in the Agentic Commerce Protocol." Whether Instant Checkout is still offered is not published on the pages we could read; openai.com itself refused our requests, so we quote only OpenAI's developer site.

Perplexity's help centre says "Instant Buy lets U.S. users search for and buy products from a wide range of merchants directly on Perplexity", that it "is currently available to all users in the United States", and that it is "Not applicable for users with Enterprise Pro or Enterprise Max plans." It works only "with merchants who are compatible with our agentic checkout experience". Its launch post of 25 November 2025 says checkout is "with PayPal" and that "retailers stay at the center of the transaction as the merchant of record."

Google's help page for buying in AI Mode says the feature "is only available for signed in 18+ users in the US, in English" and "is beginning to roll out with eligible merchants with some restrictions in the types of products it will work with", and that "Your purchase is made directly with the merchant." For merchants, Google says checkout through UCP "will be available in phases", through an early access programme, for products eligible in the United States, Canada and Australia. On 15 October 2026 Google said Universal Cart "is rolling out in the U.S. across Google Search and in the Gemini app", with checkout "powered by the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)".

On 8 January 2026 Microsoft wrote that "Copilot Checkout is beginning to roll out in the U.S. on Copilot.com, with partner activation across PayPal, Shopify, and Stripe", and told merchants "you stay the merchant of record."

Amazon calls Buy for Me a "New beta feature" for "a subset of U.S. customers" that lets them buy from other brands' websites inside the Amazon Shopping app. Amazon provides "the customer's encrypted name, address, and payment details to complete the checkout process on the brand's website", and "brands have the choice if they want to participate".

Every vendor here that says who keeps the sale points to the merchant. None of these programmes is open everywhere: most are limited to the United States, to approved partners or to a share of users.

We do not have market data of our own, and we are not going to invent any. These are each publisher's own figures, quoted as they give them.

• Adobe says that in the 2025 US holiday season, "traffic to retail sites from generative AI tools (shoppers clicking on a link to a retail site) increased by 693.4% compared to the year prior", and that on Cyber Monday "AI traffic to U.S. retail sites increased by 670%." Adobe's data covers "over 1 trillion visits to U.S. retail sites". This is traffic from AI tools, not purchases made by agents.
• Cloudflare wrote on 30 September 2026 that "daily requests from AI agents on our network grew by more than 1,700%" over the past year, and that heavily crawled categories "like Retail" have "seen human traffic decline as much as 40% in less than one year."
• Shopify says that in the second quarter of 2026, "AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores grew 197% (roughly three times) year over year", and that "75% of AI-attributed orders" were in categories "ranked outside the top 100 by sales volume". The same article says "McKinsey estimates that, globally, AI agents could mediate $3 trillion to $5 trillion of consumer commerce by 2030." That is McKinsey's estimate as Shopify quotes it; McKinsey's own page did not load for us.
• Microsoft says, from its own data, that "When shopping intent is present, journeys with Copilot are 194% more likely to result in a purchase."

Each number measures something different, from clicks to requests to orders, so they do not add up to one picture.

For your store, it comes down to whether an agent can read what you sell and get through checkout. Here are five questions you can check:

• Does your robots.txt let the agents you want reach your product pages? See bots, crawlers and agents and our robots.txt check.
• Do your product pages carry product structured data with price and stock, and are they readable without JavaScript?
• Are your shipping and return terms written as text, not only shown in a script?
• Can someone check out as a guest, with no CAPTCHA before the payment step?
• Does your platform publish a UCP profile or an ACP endpoint for you? Our agent checkout check looks for both.

If you are on a hosted platform, much of this is set by the platform, so the useful question for your provider is which of these it already does for you.

What is agentic commerce in simple terms?

Shopping done by an AI agent for a person. The agent finds products, compares them and can check out and pay with the person's permission. Google calls it "where AI completes tasks on people's behalf".

Is agentic commerce the same as conversational commerce?

Not always. Forrester lists both among the labels vendors use and says "conversational chat" is "a mode of interaction, like a chat, but which may or may not be agentic". In our reading, the difference is whether the software acts, by adding to a basket or paying, or only answers questions.

Who keeps the sale when an agent buys?

In the protocols and programmes quoted here, the merchant. UCP says "The business remains the Merchant of Record (MoR)". Perplexity and Microsoft say the same in their own words, and OpenAI's docs say "OpenAI is not the merchant of record in the Agentic Commerce Protocol."

Do I need UCP or ACP to sell through agents?

Not necessarily. Some assistants send the buyer to your own checkout, and OpenAI's plugin docs recommend that. A protocol matters when an agent completes the purchase itself. UCP vs ACP vs MCP vs AP2 helps you work out which one your platform or payment provider supports.

Where can I check whether my store is ready?

What is agent readiness, and how is it measured? explains the term and how tools score it, and alternatives to isitagentready compares the tools themselves, Storewalk among them, which is ours. The glossary defines every term used here, from UCP to merchant of record. To see where an agent would stop on your own store, scan it below.

The sources below were last checked on the date shown.