What is Agentic Commerce? How AI Shopping Agents Buy for You
The complete guide to understanding agentic checkout: how AI agents autonomously complete purchases, transforming ecommerce from manual checkout to machine customers buying on your behalf.
Quick Definition
Agentic commerce is ecommerce where AI agents autonomously complete purchases on behalf of users. Instead of humans browsing and clicking checkout, users delegate shopping tasks to AI assistants like ChatGPT or Claude, which discover products, evaluate options, and execute transactions programmatically through merchant APIs.
What's New Right Now
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ChatGPT Shopping: Integrated with select merchants including Etsy. Walmart partnership announced October 2025.
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Perplexity Payments: Checkout via PayPal and Venmo now available in Perplexity AI assistant. (PayPal)
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ChatGPT Instant Checkout: OpenAI launched Instant Checkout, allowing users to buy directly from merchants like Etsy in chat, powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol. (OpenAI)
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Google Agent-to-Agent Protocol (A2A): Google launched A2A to enable AI agents to communicate and coordinate actions across platforms, with 50+ partners including PayPal, Salesforce, and ServiceNow. (Google)
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Agent Payment Protocol (AP2): Google announced AP2, an open protocol for secure agent-led payments using verifiable digital credentials, with 60+ partners including Mastercard, PayPal, and American Express. (AP2)
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Visa Trusted Agent Protocol: Initiative for identifying and authenticating legitimate shopping agents.
What is Agentic Commerce?
Agentic commerce represents a fundamental shift in how online transactions occur. Rather than users manually navigating websites, comparing products, filling out forms, and completing checkout, they delegate the entire purchasing process to an AI agent. The user provides intent ("Reorder my coffee beans," "Buy a birthday gift for my mom under $50"), and the agent autonomously handles discovery, evaluation, and transaction completion.
This isn't an incremental improvement to existing checkout flows. It's a new transaction paradigm. The "shopper" is software, not a human. The merchant's job shifts from optimizing button placement and form fields to exposing structured APIs that agents can reliably query, interpret, and use to transact.
For merchants, this means enabling programmatic access to product catalogs, inventory status, pricing, and checkout. For users, shopping becomes a delegation task rather than a manual chore. For agents, completing purchases requires authentication, consent management, delegated payments, and robust error recovery, with minimal human intervention after initial approval.
Agentic commerce vs. adjacent concepts
Conversational commerce
You chat with a bot for recommendations, then you complete checkout. In agentic commerce, the agent, under your consent, can place the order autonomously.
Chatbots
Answer questions and guide shoppers. Agentic agents have delegated authority to complete the transaction end-to-end (with approvals as needed).
Recommendation engines
Predict and suggest products. Agents research, select, and purchase, not just suggest.
What agentic commerce is not
Not just recommendations: Agents complete purchases, not merely suggest items.
Not autofill: Agents make decisions, handle errors, and adapt to constraints, beyond form filling.
Not RPA: Agents use structured, documented APIs (with idempotency and webhooks), not brittle screen scraping.
Not a single protocol: It's a category/architecture. Multiple approaches (e.g., ACP, MCP, A2A, AP2) can work together.
Note: High-value, age-restricted, or first-time purchases can require explicit human approval based on policy.
How Agentic Commerce Works
Agentic commerce follows a multi-step flow from user intent to fulfillment. Each step involves specific inputs, actions, potential failures, and success signals.
Use Cases & Examples
Agentic commerce delivers measurable value across diverse shopping scenarios. Here are the most common patterns and their real-world impact.
Agentic Commerce Examples in Production
ChatGPT Shopping & OpenAI Instant Checkout
ChatGPT can complete purchases (Etsy live), with Shopify integration announced; Walmart has said it's exploring a partnership.
Perplexity Buy with Pro
Perplexity's 'Buy with Pro' lets users purchase via PayPal and Venmo from AI search results. (PayPal)
Vertical AI Shopping Agents
Industry-specific agents for electronics, fashion, and groceries handling repeat purchases and price monitoring.
B2B Procurement Agents
Enterprises are adopting procurement agents that automate sourcing, supplier comparisons, and draft POs via API-driven workflows (e.g., SAP's Sourcing Agent).
Subscription Replenishment
Your coffee consumption is predictable. The agent knows you brew 2 cups daily and your current bag has maybe 5 days left. Rather than letting you run out or forcing you to remember to reorder, it checks your preferred merchant, finds your usual beans are in stock, notices there's a 15% discount on the 2lb bag, and places the order automatically.
This isn't speculative, it's based on actual purchase history, confirmed SKU, and delivery timing that ensures arrival before you run out. Merchants often see improved retention and customer lifetime value because the friction of remembering to reorder simply disappears. The agent handles variant confirmation by cross-referencing previous purchases, eliminating the "wrong product" problem that plagued earlier automation attempts.
Price-Watch Automation
You've been eyeing a standing desk for months. It's $399 but you'd buy it at $320. Instead of manually checking prices or setting up unreliable alerts, you tell your agent: "Buy this if it drops below $320." The agent monitors continuously, and when a flash sale hits at $315, it validates stock availability, confirms shipping costs won't push the total over budget, and completes checkout in seconds.
The speed matters because good deals vanish quickly. Users report significantly faster purchase execution and the elimination of "saw the deal but it sold out while I was checking out" scenarios. The agent re-validates price and stock at checkout and aborts if the total exceeds the threshold, preventing the classic flash-sale trick where advertised prices revert during checkout. This is opportunistic commerce, buying only when conditions align perfectly with your constraints.
Enterprise Procurement Automation
A manufacturing facility's inventory system detects that aluminum stock will hit reorder thresholds in 72 hours. The procurement agent queries approved supplier APIs, compares bulk pricing across three vendors, verifies lead times, checks for recent quality issues in the ERP system, and places a 500-unit order with the optimal supplier, within pre-approved vendor lists and budget thresholds.
Companies using these systems report automating routine procurement with high order accuracy. The key difference from consumer use cases is approval workflows and constraint enforcement: the agent never exceeds budget caps, always uses approved vendors, and escalates anomalies (like sudden 40% price spikes) for human review. This is high-stakes automation where mistakes are expensive, which is why audit trails, rollback capabilities, and clear decision logs are non-negotiable.
Benefits and Trade-offs
Agentic commerce delivers measurable improvements in conversion rates, support costs, and customer lifetime value, and can deliver improvements within a quarter depending on baseline, catalog complexity, and payment/SCA mix. Early adopters report meaningful conversion improvements, driven by the elimination of checkout friction and decision paralysis.
However, this shift introduces new challenges around trust, explainability, and compliance that merchants must address deliberately. Users need transparency into agent decisions, clear consent mechanisms, and confidence that automation won't result in unwanted purchases or compliance violations. The trade-offs are real but manageable with proper infrastructure.
What You Gain
Higher conversion rates by eliminating checkout friction. Agents don't exhibit human drop-off; failures are mainly technical (auth, stock, SCA). Retries and idempotency reduce abandonment-like failures. The path from intent to completed order typically takes seconds to a minute.
Reduced support costs as agents autonomously handle product questions, inventory checks, order tracking, and basic returns. Can reduce Tier-1 volume; expect a temporary spike during rollout and more complex exceptions routed to humans.
Improved customer lifetime value through subscription automation and proactive reordering. Customers who would have churned due to inconvenience stay because agents handle the tedious parts.
True 24/7 revenue generation without requiring night staff or international support teams. Agents operate across all time zones simultaneously, capturing purchase intent whenever it emerges.
What You Must Manage
Trust barriers prevent adoption if users fear unauthorized purchases or opaque decision-making. Transparent consent flows, spending limits, and clear approval thresholds address this, but building trust takes time and iteration.
Explainability requirements mean you need comprehensive audit trails. Users asking "why did you buy this?" expect clear answers showing what options were considered, how decisions were weighted, and why this choice won.
Product data quality becomes critical because sparse metadata breaks agent decision-making. Missing specifications, vague descriptions, or incorrect inventory status lead to poor choices and higher return rates until data improves.
Compliance complexity increases with automated purchasing. Log consent receipts and decision rationale per order; gate age-restricted SKUs; enforce region/country rules at API time. Age verification, regional restrictions, prescription requirements, and export controls all need programmatic enforcement with proper error handling and escalation paths.
How to Measure Success
Track these metrics to validate agent performance and identify optimization opportunities:
Agent conversion rate
Auth approval rate
Median time-to-order
Refund/return rate vs human baseline
Chargeback rate
% orders requiring human approval
Agent success rate (no manual fallback)
CSAT for agent-placed orders
Implementation Patterns
Four core capabilities enable agentic commerce. These patterns are protocol-agnostic and work with ACP for merchant APIs, A2A for agent coordination, MCP for tool access, and AP2 for payments, alongside existing standards (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect) and network-level verification emerging (e.g., Trusted Agent Protocol). Choose the integration approach that fits your stack.
Standards You Will Touch
Identity & Consent
OAuth 2.0 with granular scopes. Users grant explicit permissions for specific capabilities: view products, place orders under $100, access history. DPoP or mTLS token binding where supported. Every transaction includes consent receipts, mandate IDs, and audit trails.
Watch out: Vague scope descriptions lead to blind approvals
Product Catalog APIs
Expose structured APIs with search, filtering, variants, and live inventory. Agents convert natural language queries ("organic coffee under $20 with free shipping") into API parameters and get machine-readable responses.
Quality metadata is non-negotiable: complete descriptions, specifications, images, and accurate stock status enable intelligent agent decisions.
Watch out: Sparse metadata breaks decision-making
Checkout Automation
Stateless cart APIs with idempotency keys. Agents create carts, apply discounts, calculate shipping, and complete checkout. Minimize round-trips; make every write idempotent; support async confirmation via webhooks. Stock reservation/hold windows and concurrency controls prevent oversells. SCA exemptions where allowed; fall back to challenge when required.
Watch out: Missing idempotency causes double-charging
Payment Delegation
Processors like Stripe support delegated charging via Payment Intents and Setup Intents (off_session) with stored payment methods. Use Connect only in platform/marketplace setups. PCI-DSS maintained: agents never touch raw card data.
Watch out: Never pass raw card data through agents
Real-Time Updates
Webhooks notify agents of status changes: shipped, delivered, delayed. Verify signatures, retry with exponential backoff, ensure idempotency in webhook handlers to avoid double-processing. Agents monitor autonomously and alert users only when needed. Include tracking numbers and ETAs.
Watch out: Webhook failures break agent awareness
Reference Architecture
Critical patterns: Retries with exponential backoff, rate limiting (per-agent), circuit breakers on API failures, idempotency keys on all write operations. See idempotency and webhook docs.
Edge Cases to Handle
Protocols Powering Agentic Commerce
Agentic commerce isn't a single API; it's a stack. In practice you'll combine merchant commerce surfaces (ACP), agent–tool interfaces (MCP), agent interoperability (A2A), and secure payments (AP2):
ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol)
A merchant-facing API schema so agents can search products, price offers, build carts, and place orders with idempotency and webhook callbacks. ACP defines resources and events that map cleanly to autonomous checkout.
MCP (Model Context Protocol)
Connect agents to merchant tools/data (catalog, inventory, shipping) via a standardized, secure interface.
A2A (Agent-to-Agent)
Interoperability between agents: discovery, messaging, and coordination for multi-party purchase flows.
AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol)
Standardized agent payments with signed mandates, risk roles, and multi-rail support (cards, A2A/open-banking, stablecoins).
Protocol Comparison: ACP vs MCP vs A2A vs AP2
| Protocol | Purpose | Transport | Auth | Maturity | Maintained By |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACP | Merchant commerce APIs (catalog, cart, checkout) | REST/JSON | OAuth 2.0 | Emerging | OpenAI + Stripe |
| MCP | Agent↔tool/data access | JSON-RPC 2.0 (stdio/WebSocket/HTTP) | Host-provided | Early production | Anthropic |
| A2A | Agent interoperability/coordination | HTTP/gRPC (varies) | mTLS and/or OAuth service creds | Pilot | Google + partners |
| AP2 | Payment mandates & multi-rail | REST/JSON | Signed mandates (e.g., JWS) | Draft/early pilots | Google Cloud + PSPs |
Merchant Readiness Checklist
Is your store ready for agentic commerce? Use this checklist to assess your current capabilities.
| Requirement | Status | Priority |
|---|---|---|
| Structured product catalog with SKU + global IDs (GTIN/UPC/EAN/ISBN/MPN) and pricing | Required | Critical |
| Real-time inventory status API (or cache TTL ≤ 5 min) | Required | Critical |
| OAuth 2.0 auth with granular scopes (or mTLS service creds for S2S) | Required | Critical |
| Idempotent checkout and order write endpoints | Required | Critical |
| PCI-DSS compliant processor (e.g., Stripe, PayPal) with off_session + mandates | Required | Critical |
| ACP-compliant product & checkout endpoints (via AgenticCart) | Required | Critical |
| Webhook events for order lifecycle with signature verification + retries | Required | High |
| Detailed product metadata (variants, dimensions, materials, images) | Recommended | High |
| Per-agent rate limiting + fraud/risk checks | Recommended | High |
| Audit logs & consent/mandate IDs for agent transactions | Required | High |
The Agent Landscape
Multiple agent types serve different use cases. Knowing who builds and controls the agent determines how you integrate and where data/consent lives.
General AI Assistants
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. Multi-purpose assistants that can include shopping as a capability via partner integrations.
Best for: Broad adoption, cross-category purchases, users who prefer one agent for "everything"
Merchant-Defined Agents
Store/brand-owned agents with deep catalog understanding and policies tuned to a single merchant.
Best for: Brand loyalty programs, specialized catalogs, high-touch CX
Vertical Shopping Agents
Purpose-built for product research and comparison (e.g., AI shopping/search apps). Often aggregate across merchants; monetization may include affiliate links.
Best for: Complex product research, first-time purchases, price-conscious shoppers
Enterprise Procurement Agents
Company-specific agents integrated with ERP/PO systems and approval workflows; enforce budget/vendor policies.
Best for: High-volume B2B, regulated industries, complex compliance rules
Personal Shopping Agents
User-trained agents that learn preferences, sizes, budgets, and reorder rhythms. Operate with explicit permission and scoped access.
Best for: Recurring purchases, subscription management, gifting
Ethics, Trust & Compliance
Agentic commerce introduces new trust and compliance considerations. Addressing these proactively builds user confidence and reduces regulatory risk.
Ecosystem Security
To distinguish legitimate shopping agents from bots, card networks and PSPs are piloting verification frameworks (e.g., Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol). Mention this in your risk and fraud controls.
Read moreFrequently Asked Questions
Quick answers to the most common questions about agentic commerce.
How is agentic commerce different from chatbots or human checkout?
How is agentic commerce different from chatbots or human checkout?
Agents complete the purchase end-to-end; humans still browse/decide for complex buys. This supplements, not replaces, human checkout.
How do I get started as a merchant?
How do I get started as a merchant?
Focus on product data quality, real-time stock/pricing, and agent-ready APIs. If you're on WooCommerce, try AgenticCart; AgenticCart enables ACP-compliant product feeds and checkout endpoints that can be submitted to OpenAI's Instant Checkout Programme.
How are trust, fraud, and approvals handled?
How are trust, fraud, and approvals handled?
Scoped OAuth permissions, spending/category limits, SCA/3-D Secure where applicable, consent receipts, rate limiting, anomaly detection. Set approval thresholds (e.g., >$500 or age-restricted items require confirmation). Clear dispute paths.
What about returns and refunds?
What about returns and refunds?
Same policies as human purchases. Agents can initiate RMAs via API, attach consent/audit refs, and track refunds end-to-end.
Which protocols and payments are supported?
Which protocols and payments are supported?
Agents can work with multiple API styles. AgenticCart enables ACP-compliant endpoints for OpenAI's Instant Checkout Programme. Payments via compliant processors (e.g., Stripe/PayPal). AP2 can cover card rails and A2A/open-banking under one mandate; MCP connects tools; A2A handles agent interoperability.
Will this work for my industry (and is it only subscriptions)?
Will this work for my industry (and is it only subscriptions)?
Strong fit for repeat or low-ambiguity purchases (beauty, electronics, fashion, F&B, B2B). Not just subscriptions but also price-watch, replenishment, gifting, bundles.
What if an agent makes a mistake?
What if an agent makes a mistake?
Audit trails show what was considered and why. Users can dispute via normal channels; agents improve quickly with feedback loops.
Do customers really trust agents with purchases?
Do customers really trust agents with purchases?
Trust grows with transparency, scoped consent, clear limits, and easy reversibility. Start with low-risk use cases to build confidence.
Glossary
Essential terminology for understanding agentic commerce.
- Agent
- AI software that acts for a user: discovers products, evaluates options, and completes purchases end-to-end.
- AgenticCart
- WooCommerce plugin that enables ACP-compliant product feeds and checkout endpoints for OpenAI's Instant Checkout Programme.
- Delegated Purchase
- An agent completes a transaction using a user-authorized mandate with tokenized payment credentials held by a PCI-compliant PSP.
- Autonomous Checkout
- Checkout executed by an agent without human clicks beyond initial consent/limits; may invoke SCA/3-D Secure when required.
- Machine Customer
- An AI "buyer" acting as the customer of record (software, not a human).
- Price Watch
- Agent monitors price (and constraints like stock/shipping/total) and purchases when conditions are met.
- Approval Flow
- Human-in-the-loop confirmation for high-value/risk orders based on configurable thresholds.
- Idempotency
- Endpoint behavior ensuring retries don't duplicate orders/charges, typically via an idempotency key.
- Consent Receipt (Proof of Consent)
- Durable record tying a purchase to the user's authorization (e.g., OAuth grant ID/mandate, timestamp, scope).
- Scopes (OAuth 2.0)
- Granular permissions granted to the agent (e.g., "view:products", "order:≤$100").
- Webhook
- Signed, retryable callbacks (e.g., shipped/delivered/failed) that keep agents in sync.
- Product Metadata
- Structured attributes (title, specs, variants, media, price, stock) used for automated decisioning.
- Sessionless Requests
- Each API call carries auth/context (no fragile browser sessions); resources like carts remain server-side state.
- Dispute / Chargeback Evidence
- Package (consent, logs, delivery) used to contest chargebacks; not a guarantee of "protection."
- Replenishment Agent
- Agent that predicts consumption and reorders to avoid stockouts.
- ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol)
- Merchant API surface (catalog/search, pricing, inventory, cart, checkout, webhooks). AgenticCart enables ACP for WooCommerce.
- MCP (Model Context Protocol)
- Standard interface connecting agents to tools/data.
- A2A (Agent-to-Agent)
- Interoperability/coordination between agents for multi-party flows.
- AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol)
- Signed mandates and multi-rail payments (cards + A2A/open-banking).
- Mandate
- The user's standing authorization specifying spend/merchant/category limits the agent must honor.
- SCA / 3-D Secure
- Strong Customer Authentication mechanisms that may be triggered during payment.
- Tokenization
- Replacing PANs with tokens so agents/merchants never handle raw card numbers.
- PSP (Payment Service Provider)
- Compliant processor (e.g., Stripe, PayPal) that stores payment credentials and processes charges.
- Cart Abandonment
- When a human starts checkout but doesn't complete. Agents reduce this dramatically because there's no multi-step form to abandon.
Technical Resources
Authoritative specifications, documentation, and industry developments for implementing agentic commerce.
Identity & Consent
Authentication protocols and consent frameworks
Payments & Checkout
Payment security standards and integration docs
Commerce Platforms
E-commerce platform APIs and webhooks
Regulatory
Data protection and compliance regulations
Ecosystem Developments
Emerging protocols and industry initiatives
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