Platform & products

Merchant of record

Definition

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.

Defined in 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.

The legal entity responsible for a sale: it charges the customer, owes the tax, handles refunds and chargebacks, and answers for compliance. With Copilot Checkout, that entity is you — not Shopify, and not the assistant the shopper was talking to.

Copilot Checkout: The Configuration Guide →

Where Merchant of record comes up

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

Related terms

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.
Copilot Checkout: Microsoft's checkout inside Microsoft Copilot, announced in January 2026 — a Microsoft product, not a Shopify one; for Shopify merchants it runs on Shopify's direct checkout, and the order books into the merchant's store like any other.
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 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.

All 164 terms

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