Platform & products

Agentic commerce

Definition

Commerce transactions initiated, researched, or completed with an AI agent acting on the shopper's behalf, rather than a human clicking through a storefront unassisted.

Defined in The Agentic Commerce Glossary.

The full guide: What Is Agentic Commerce? The Plain-English Definition and How It Works.

How else it gets framed

The same term carries different emphasis depending on the surface it’s used on. Both readings are correct.

A way of buying and selling in which an AI agent performs part of the shopping journey for a person: discovering products, evaluating them against the person's stated constraints, and in some cases completing checkout and tracking the order, within limits the person approves. The merchant still sells the product, takes the payment through its own processor and handles fulfillment.

What Is Agentic Commerce? The Plain-English Definition and How It Works →

Commerce where an AI agent — on-site (a Brand Agent, on-site AI search) or off-site (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Alexa for Shopping) — reasons over a store's product data on the shopper's behalf, and in some flows completes the purchase itself. The store's job shifts from persuading a human eye to answering a machine's questions correctly.

The Agency Pitch Deck for Agentic Commerce, Annotated →

A purchase journey in which an AI agent performs discovery, evaluation and sometimes the transaction on a shopper's behalf: querying catalogs, comparing options against the shopper's stated constraints, and either completing checkout in the conversation or handing the shopper to the merchant's checkout.

Agentic Commerce on Shopify: The 2026 Guide →

Where Agentic commerce comes up

The guides that put this term to work, rather than just defining it.

Related terms

Agentic Commerce Protocol: An open standard, licensed under Apache 2.0, for how AI agents, buyers and businesses complete purchases through APIs. Released by OpenAI and Stripe on September 29, 2025; Meta joined as a lead maintainer on April 24, 2026. It defines agentic checkout, cart and product feeds, delegated payment, delegated authentication, and order webhooks. The spec is labeled beta.
Agentic Commerce Suite: Stripe's product for selling through AI agents, launched December 11, 2025. A seller shares a catalog feed with Stripe; Stripe syndicates products to connected agents, manages the checkout, processes the payment and sends the seller an order event. Each stage can be taken over by the seller. Stripe describes it as working across protocols, including ACP and Google's UCP.
Shared Payment Token: A Stripe payment credential an AI agent grants to a seller: a scoped, limited reference to the buyer's payment method, tied to the seller's Stripe profile with a maximum amount and an expiry. The seller charges it like a card and never sees the card number. OpenAI's docs call it the first implementation of OpenAI's Delegated Payment Spec.
Agentic checkout: A checkout initiated or completed by an AI agent for a shopper, either inside the AI surface the shopper is using or on the merchant's site, using payment credentials the shopper has authorized. The merchant remains the seller and merchant of record; the agent handles the steps a person would otherwise click through.
Agentic e-commerce: Online selling in which AI agents, rather than people, carry out some of the shopping steps: searching catalogs, comparing products against a shopper's constraints, and in some channels completing checkout after the shopper confirms. Also called agentic commerce or agentic AI e-commerce.
Merchant of record: The business legally selling the product to the shopper: it takes the payment, owes the tax, issues refunds and handles chargebacks. In every agentic checkout we checked (ACP, UCP, Copilot Checkout, Perplexity's PayPal checkout), the AI company says the merchant keeps this role.

All 164 terms

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