What is Agentic Commerce?

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Why Agentic Commerce?

The motivation behind agentic commerce is clear:

• Seamless user experience: People already use conversational AI to get advice on what to buy. Agentic Commerce closes the loop, making it possible to go from intent → recommendation → purchase without leaving the chat.
• Capture high-intent demand: Instead of redirecting a user to an external site, merchants can meet buyers directly where the purchase intent happens.
• Standardization across platforms: Without standards, every merchant would have to build custom integrations for each AI. Protocols like ACP, AP2, and A2A create open standards that work across multiple agents and platforms.
• Maintaining merchant control and trust: Merchants remain the "merchant of record." They keep control over pricing, payment, fulfillment, and support, while the protocol simply provides a secure bridge.
• Security and authorization: Protocols like ACP, AP2, and A2A ensure AI agents act only with explicit, scoped user permission through mandates and secure payment flows.

This approach reimagines commerce: AI agents don't just assist they participate directly in the transaction lifecycle, safely and transparently.

What is the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)?

The Agentic Commerce Protocol is the open standard that makes agent driven transactions possible. Co-developed with Stripe, it lays out how merchants, AI agents, and payment providers exchange structured information to execute commerce in a trusted way.

Key Properties

• Open and interoperable: ACP is designed to work across multiple AI agents, merchants, and payment providers.
• Layered architecture: It includes specifications for product feeds, agentic checkout flows, and delegated payments.
• REST + JSON APIs: Merchants expose simple endpoints that allow agents to check inventory, initiate checkout, and finalize payment.
• Scoped, ephemeral tokens: Payments are authorized with temporary tokens that restrict amount, merchant, and timeframe. This prevents agents from going beyond user intent.
• Easy integration: For Stripe users, enabling ACP-powered payments may be as simple as a small code change. For others, Stripe can act as the intermediary payment layer.
• Minimal data exchange: Only the information required to fulfill the order is passed through the protocol.
• Flexibility: ACP is built to support not just one-off purchases, but subscriptions, asynchronous "buy later" flows, in‑store pickup, and dynamic pricing.
• Community-driven: The protocol is open source, licensed for broad use, and designed for community participation.

What is Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)?

Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) is an open standard designed to enable secure, mandate-driven payments for agent-led commerce. Launched in 2025 with support from over 60 industry partners, AP2 provides a structured approach to handling payments when AI agents transact on behalf of users.

Key Properties of AP2

• Mandate-driven architecture: AP2 uses explicit mandates (intent mandates and cart mandates) that require user authorization before agents can proceed with payments.
• Secure payment flows: The protocol ensures that payment instructions are securely transmitted and verified before execution.
• Interoperable across platforms: AP2 is designed to work across multiple Google agent ecosystems and can integrate with various payment providers.
• Merchant control: Merchants maintain full control over pricing, risk assessment, and payment processing while agents handle the orchestration.
• Open source and community-driven: AP2 is open source, encouraging broad adoption and community contributions.
• Scalable infrastructure: Built to handle high-volume transactions across diverse merchant types and payment scenarios.

What is Agent-to-Agent (A2A)?

The Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol is Google's framework for enabling secure communication and transaction flows between AI agents. A2A provides the underlying infrastructure that allows agents to discover products, build shopping carts, authenticate payments, and complete transactions on behalf of users.

Key Properties of A2A

• Agent orchestration: A2A enables agents to coordinate complex multi-step commerce flows, from product discovery through payment completion.
• Mandate flow management: The protocol manages the flow of mandates (user authorizations) that grant agents permission to act on behalf of users.
• Secure agent communication: A2A ensures that agent-to-agent interactions are authenticated and secure.
• Merchant endpoint integration: Merchants expose A2A-compatible endpoints that agents can interact with to check inventory, initiate checkout, and process payments.
• Multi-platform support: A2A works across Google's agent infrastructure, enabling commerce capabilities in various AI experiences.
• Standards-based: Built on open standards to ensure interoperability and broad adoption.

How ACP, AP2, and A2A Work Together

While ACP focuses on product data + checkout handoff for OpenAI's ecosystem, AP2 and A2A handle intent mandates, cart mandates, and secure payments for Google's agent infrastructure. NZ merchants may need both:

• An ACP product feed for OpenAI's ChatGPT and other ACP-compatible agents
• An AP2 mandate/payment endpoint for Google's agent ecosystems
• A2A-compatible agent endpoints for seamless agent-to-agent commerce flows

Together, these protocols enable comprehensive agentic commerce across multiple platforms, ensuring merchants can reach customers wherever they interact with AI agents.

Walkthrough: The Agentic Commerce Flow

1. Product Discovery

1. A user asks an AI, for example, "Find me a wireless headset under $200."
2. The AI agent queries merchants' product feeds made available via ACP (for OpenAI) or through A2A-compatible endpoints (for Google).
3. Products are ranked by relevance, not preferential treatment for merchants that support instant checkout.
4. The user sees eligible items with a "Buy" option.

2. Checkout and Mandates

1. The user clicks "Buy."
2. The agent gathers shipping and payment details.
3. For ACP: The agent sends a checkout request to the merchant's ACP endpoint.
4. For AP2/A2A: The agent requests an intent mandate or cart mandate from the user, authorizing the agent to proceed with the purchase.
5. The merchant validates inventory, shipping, tax, and risk.
6. The merchant returns a checkout session to the agent, possibly with options for the user to choose from.

3. Payment Processing

1. For ACP: The agent creates a delegated payment request, generating a token scoped to the transaction. This token flows through the payment provider (often Stripe) for verification.
2. For AP2: The agent uses the authorized mandate to initiate payment through the AP2 payment endpoint, with secure verification of the mandate.
3. A verified payment authorization is returned to the agent and passed to the merchant to finalize payment.
4. The merchant captures funds and returns order confirmation.
5. The user sees a completed purchase confirmation in the agent interface.

4. Fulfillment & Lifecycle

Merchants then fulfill the order as they normally would shipping, returns, refunds, and customer service all remain within their control. ACP, AP2, and A2A don't replace existing commerce systems; they connect them to AI agents, enabling seamless commerce across multiple platforms.

PXM and Agentic Commerce

Product Experience Management (PXM) plays a crucial role in enabling effective agentic commerce. As AI agents become more sophisticated in understanding and presenting products to users, the quality of product data, imagery, and contextual information becomes paramount. What is PXM? PXM solutions help merchants maintain rich, accurate product information that AI agents can leverage to provide better recommendations and seamless purchasing experiences. This synergy between PXM and agentic commerce creates a more intelligent, context-aware shopping environment where both human and AI interactions benefit from comprehensive product intelligence.

Partnership Perspective: Multi-Platform Agentic Commerce

OpenAI and Stripe have partnered to launch ACP and are rolling it out through Instant Checkout in ChatGPT. Stripe has emphasized that ACP is built to be business‑friendly: merchants integrate once, keep full control over their brand, pricing, and risk models, and immediately become compatible with multiple AI agents.

Meanwhile, Google has launched AP2 with support from over 60 industry partners, creating a complementary ecosystem for agent-driven payments. Google's AP2 and A2A protocols provide secure, mandate-driven payment infrastructure that works across Google's agent platforms.

Key benefits across both ecosystems:

• Ease of adoption: Merchants can enable agentic commerce with relatively minimal effort, particularly for those already using Stripe (for ACP) or compatible payment providers (for AP2).
• Flexibility matters: These protocols support not only simple digital purchases but also complex transactions like subscriptions, physical goods, in‑store pickups, and asynchronous "buy later" purchases.
• Scalability is essential: A single integration can work across multiple participating AI agents, reducing fragmentation and complexity.
• Trust and fraud protection are central: Merchants need to reliably distinguish authorized agent transactions from bad bots, and both ACP and AP2/A2A designs reflect this priority.
• Real deployments are underway: ACP is already powering ChatGPT's Instant Checkout, while AP2 launched in 2025 with broad industry support, positioning both as actively deployed systems shaping real-world commerce.

This multi-protocol landscape positions agentic commerce not as a theoretical concept, but as an actively evolving ecosystem with real-world deployments across multiple platforms.

What Agentic Commerce Protocols Enable

For Users

• Frictionless purchases directly in chat and AI interactions.
• Clear consent at every step through mandates and authorization flows.
• A single interface for discovery and buying across multiple AI platforms.
• Secure, trusted transactions handled by AI agents on their behalf.

For Merchants

• Access to new channels where customers are already making buying decisions.
• Full control over transactions, pricing, fulfillment, and customer relationships.
• Low integration overhead, particularly for Stripe users (ACP) or compatible payment providers (AP2).
• The ability to reach multiple AI agents and platforms with integrated feeds and endpoints.
• Support for both OpenAI (ACP) and Google (AP2/A2A) ecosystems from a single infrastructure.

For AI Agents

• Native commerce capabilities without needing to act as a merchant.
• Compatibility across platforms through shared standards (ACP, AP2, A2A).
• A focus on orchestration while leaving fulfillment and risk to merchants.
• Secure mandate-driven payment flows that protect user interests.

Challenges & Future Directions

There are still challenges ahead:

• Security and trust: Ensuring only authorized purchases go through, with robust mandate and authorization systems.
• Liability: Clarifying responsibility in the event of fraud or mistakes across different protocol implementations.
• Adoption: Merchants and platforms need to embrace ACP, AP2, and A2A for agentic commerce to scale globally.
• Multi-protocol integration: Merchants may need to support both ACP and AP2/A2A to reach customers across all AI platforms, requiring careful infrastructure planning.
• Complexity: Handling multi‑merchant carts, subscriptions, or international compliance adds difficulty across different protocol implementations.
• User confidence: Building trust so users are comfortable letting agents complete purchases, with clear mandate flows and transparent authorization processes.

Wrap-up

Agentic Commerce envisions AI agents that don't just advise but also transact on behalf of users. Multiple open protocols make this possible: OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), co‑developed with Stripe, defines standards for product feeds, checkout, and delegated payments. Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) ecosystem provide secure, mandate-driven payment infrastructure for agent-led commerce across Google's platforms.

Users get a seamless, trusted buying experience across multiple AI platforms; merchants gain powerful new channels without losing control; and AI agents expand their usefulness by connecting intent to action. With ACP already powering ChatGPT's Instant Checkout and AP2 launching in 2025 with broad industry support, these protocols represent the foundational frameworks for a future where commerce is increasingly agent‑driven across both OpenAI and Google ecosystems.