The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), explained
What actually makes "buy inside ChatGPT" work - an honest, jargon-free explanation of ACP and what it means for merchants.
You've probably seen the phrase "buy directly inside ChatGPT" and wondered what actually makes that work. The short answer is a new class of open standards for agentic checkout - the best-known being the Agentic Commerce Protocol, ACP. Here's a plain, honest explanation.
What ACP is
The Agentic Commerce Protocol is an open specification for letting an AI agent complete a purchase from a merchant on a shopper's behalf. It defines two things merchants care about: a product feed format so an agent can discover and understand what you sell, and a checkout flow so the agent can place an order and hand off payment securely - without the merchant losing control of the transaction.
The problem it solves
Before a shared standard, every agent-to-store integration was bespoke. If a shopper wanted to buy through an assistant, someone had to build a custom bridge between that assistant and that store's checkout. That doesn't scale. A protocol makes the interaction predictable: any compliant agent can present any compliant merchant's products and complete a purchase the same way - the way HTTP made any browser able to load any website.
How it works, roughly
- Discovery. The merchant exposes a structured product feed (identity, price, availability, identifiers, images). The agent ingests it and can recommend the products accurately.
- Checkout. When the shopper decides to buy, the agent initiates a checkout session against the merchant, collects payment through a supported processor, and the order lands in the merchant's system like any other.
- Control stays with the merchant. Pricing, inventory, tax and fulfilment remain the merchant's - the agent is a new sales surface, not a new owner of the relationship.
What ACP is not
It is not a marketplace that takes your customer, and it is not a replacement for your store. It's a way for agents to sell your products on your terms. It also isn't finished or universal yet - this is an emerging area with more than one standard in motion, and the details are still settling.
What merchants should do now
You don't need to bet on a single protocol to be ready for all of them, because they share a foundation: clean, complete, machine-readable product data. If your feed is accurate and your identifiers are present, you're most of the way to being agent-ready whichever standard wins. You can grade your feed against the ACP-style requirements with our free ACP Feed Checker.
For the bigger picture of where this fits, read what is agentic commerce.
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