If agentic commerce is the shift to agents buying on a shopper's behalf, the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) is one of the first concrete pieces of plumbing making the "buying" part real.
What ACP is
ACP is an open standard introduced by OpenAI and Stripe that lets an AI agent complete a secure, delegated checkout inside a chat surface like ChatGPT. In plain terms: a shopper can discover your product in the conversation and buy it there. Without being bounced to your site to start a fresh checkout.
It standardises the hand-off between the agent and the merchant. How product details, the cart, and payment are passed and authorised, so the agent can transact on the shopper's behalf within guardrails the shopper sets. Stripe handles the payment rails; the protocol defines the shared language.
Why it matters for merchants
Checkout has always been where intent turns into revenue, and where friction kills it. ACP collapses the gap between "the AI recommended you" and "the shopper paid you" into one uninterrupted moment. The brands wired into it can capture a purchase at the point of recommendation; the ones that aren't watch the agent transact with a competitor who is.
Being recommended by an AI is worth a lot less if the shopper then has to leave the chat, find your site, and re-start checkout. ACP is about closing that gap.
It's not the only protocol
ACP is the most visible, but the standards layer is still forming, and it's worth knowing the neighbours:
| Protocol | From | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol) | OpenAI & Stripe | Lets an agent complete a delegated checkout inside a chat surface |
| AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol) | A standard for agent-initiated payments | |
| MCP (Model Context Protocol) | Anthropic | Connects agents to tools and data; broader than commerce, but part of the same "let agents act" movement |
Specifics will keep shifting as these mature, so treat the names as a moving target. The durable takeaway is the direction: the industry is standardising how agents transact, not just how they answer.
What it asks of you
You can't bolt ACP onto a thin catalog. Participating means your product data is complete and structured (clean attributes, specs, availability, price), your offers and policies are machine-readable, and your store meets the checkout-readiness bar the agent needs to transact confidently. That's the same groundwork that improves AI visibility generally, and it's the subject of the next article.