Commerce Enters the Agent Era

Commerce has evolved in waves: from brick-and-mortar to ecommerce, from static catalogs to personalized recommendations, and from desktop to mobile. Each shift required customers to learn new behaviors—searching, trusting online payments, clicking “buy now.” AI is driving the next wave, and this week Stripe announced it is powering a flagship example: Instant Checkout in ChatGPT.

US-based ChatGPT users can now purchase from US Etsy sellers directly in chat, with support for over a million Shopify merchants—including Glossier, Vuori, Spanx, and SKIMS—coming soon. The feature is built on the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), an open standard codeveloped by Stripe and OpenAI. ACP defines how buyers, AI agents, and businesses can complete programmatic commerce flows, giving businesses a blueprint for making checkouts agent-ready so customers can buy where they discover products.

The ACP specification is available today for businesses and AI agents to implement. Businesses interested in participating in Instant Checkout in ChatGPT or other AI agents can contact Stripe.

What Real-World Testing Revealed

After a year of exploring and pressure-testing agentic commerce with partners, Stripe distilled three core requirements:

  • Trust is essential. Because AI agents can initiate transactions on a buyer’s behalf, businesses need mechanisms to confirm purchases, accept payment credentials securely, respond to new fraud patterns, and refine risk models to tell good bots from bad ones.
  • Fragmentation is painful. Businesses want access to new agentic sales channels without building custom integrations for each agent. Standardized infrastructure is needed for the AI economy to scale.
  • Flexibility is required. Agents will enable new commerce models beyond one-time, single-merchant purchases—such as background “buy for me” tasks, multi-merchant carts, and usage-based pricing. Businesses want to support these flows without rebuilding their stack.

ACP: An Open Standard Built for Businesses

Stripe drew on more than 15 years of experience helping online businesses balance conversion, fraud prevention, and customer relationships, and designed ACP to be optimized for businesses, trusted by consumers, and capable for agents. Key principles include:

  • Businesses stay in control. ACP keeps merchants as the merchant of record, with control over product selection, presentation, transaction processing, and order fulfillment.
  • Works with existing systems. ACP connects to any commerce backend and payments infrastructure. Rather than building custom inventory or payment connections per agent, businesses build once and distribute to any ACP-compatible agent.
  • Supports complex flows. ACP handles physical and digital goods, subscriptions, and asynchronous purchases. The goal is to support custom checkout capabilities—like in-store pickup or dynamic pricing—through agents.

ACP is open source under the Apache 2.0 license and community-designed. Businesses can implement it to transact with any AI agent using any compatible payment provider.

Anatomy of an ACP Transaction

Here’s how the pieces fit together for a purchase:

  • Buyer: Discovers a product via an AI surface, selects an item, uses a saved payment credential or adds a new one, and grants the agent permission to initiate checkout.
  • AI agent: Shows products, displays checkout, collects payment details, and—once the buyer confirms—requests the business to initiate checkout on the buyer’s behalf.
  • Business: Receives the checkout request and secure payment credentials from the agent. Using payment and fraud signals, the business can accept or decline the transaction while remaining merchant of record.
  • Payment provider: The agent works with the business’s payment provider to relay credentials through a secure token for the business to charge. Token usage is programmatically controlled, permissioned, and logged.

Getting Started with Agentic Commerce

Businesses can read the ACP specification to configure checkout for agentic commerce. Those preparing for Instant Checkout in ChatGPT or other agents can reach out to Stripe’s team. Existing Stripe users will be able to enable agentic payments in their current integration—in some cases by updating as little as one line of code. Businesses on other payment providers can still use Stripe for agentic payments; more details are in the documentation.

Stripe and OpenAI tested ACP against real-world complexity, and the protocol is designed to be business-friendly, agent-agnostic, and flexible across industries and business models. The project is open for contributions; learn more at agenticcommerce.dev.