What is Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)?

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Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) is an open commerce standard codeveloped by OpenAI and Stripe for programmatic commerce between AI agents and businesses. It was introduced to support agent-led checkout and has since expanded to support richer product discovery, giving merchants a structured way to participate in AI-native shopping without handing control of fulfillment or the customer relationship to the agent.

ACP defines a common interaction layer between an AI experience and merchant systems. The agent can present products and collect the user’s intent, while the merchant remains responsible for accepting the order, processing it through its existing payment setup, and handling fulfillment, returns, and support. This model is designed to let merchants add an agentic channel without replacing their commerce backend.

For a merchant, ACP readiness centers on:

• Providing high-quality product and promotion data for agent-led discovery.

• Supporting structured checkout requests and returning authoritative totals, availability, and terms.

• Keeping the merchant as the source of truth for order acceptance, fulfillment, and customer service.

• Using secure, permissioned payment credentials or delegated payment flows rather than exposing raw payment details.

ACP matters because it turns AI shopping from a collection of bespoke integrations into a more standardized channel. Merchants still need strong catalog data, checkout APIs, and operational integrations; the protocol reduces interface fragmentation, but it does not remove the need for reliable commerce architecture behind the endpoint.

Example: An AI shopping surface can receive product data from a merchant, present a purchasable item, and send a structured checkout request; the merchant then validates the order and fulfills it through its normal systems.