Agentic Commerce explained: What UCP and ACP mean for retailers

In September 2025, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT would be able to make purchases itself in future. In March 2026, the company reversed this decision. In the meantime, Google introduced its own protocol with Shopify, Shopware released an extension that supports both standards, and in Germany, no retailer has yet been able to sell via either of the two platforms. At the same time, according to IFH Cologne, 21 per cent of consumers in this country use AI when searching for products.

This article explains what constitutes the Agentic Commerce standard, what the platforms’ product policies are, and what matters for your shop.

What exactly Agentic Commerce means

The difference from traditional online retail lies not in the channel, but in the actor. In Conversational Commerce, a person chats with a bot and ultimately clicks ‘Buy’ themselves. With Agentic Commerce, the software carries out the transaction. The person places the order and confirms it; the agent handles the steps in between.

Here’s how a transaction might unfold: A customer writes in Gemini ‘I need a bike chain for an 11-speed derailleur, to be delivered by Friday.’ The agent reads the shop’s product list, checks the catalogue for compatibility and stock, adds the suitable chain to the basket, selects the delivery method with delivery by Friday, and asks the customer just once: “Would you like to order this for 24.90 euros including postage?” Once the customer says yes, the order goes into the retailer’s system just like any other.

This involves four phases that reflect both standards:

• Discovery: The agent needs to know that your product exists, how much it costs and whether it’s in stock.
• Capability check: The agent and the shop clarify which functions the shop supports, such as the shopping basket, discounts or checkout.
• Checkout: Address, delivery method, payment.
• Post-purchase phase: Order status, parcel tracking, returns.

Each phase requires a machine-readable interface: structured product data, a checkout accessible via API, and a payment process where the agent does not see any card details. The protocols specify how this works in detail. They do not replace your shop. In both cases, the retailer remains the “Merchant of Record”, i.e. legally the seller responsible for invoicing, warranty and the right of withdrawal.

The state of the market

Demand is measurable, but still small. IFH Cologne and Media Central surveyed 1,000 consumers in the second quarter of 2026, with the results published in September: 21 per cent use AI when searching for products and offers, whilst 79 per cent do not. Search engines (62 per cent) and retailer websites (61 per cent) remain the most important channels.

However, amongst AI users, 53 per cent have already made a purchase based on a recommendation, and 84 per cent cross-check the results. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, usage stands at 32 per cent, whilst among 60- to 69-year-olds it is 10 per cent. ChatGPT and Gemini together account for over 83 per cent of usage.

On the provider side, the picture has shifted since the start of the year. In September 2025, OpenAI launched ‘Instant Checkout’, which allows purchases to be completed directly within the chat, initially with Etsy sellers in the US. In March 2026, the company revised its strategy. The ChatGPT merchant page states that it is moving away from a standalone Instant Checkout and prioritising “better product discovery and merchant-owned checkout experiences”.

Since March, Shopify merchants have been selling via ChatGPT as follows: The product is found in the chat, but the purchase is made in the retailer’s shop, on a smartphone via an in-app browser.

Google took the opposite approach. In January 2026, Sundar Pichai unveiled the UCP at the NRF trade fair; in March, a shopping basket, catalogue and account linking were added; and in May, Google announced the ‘Universal Cart’ for Search and Gemini, with a US roll-out from the summer.

Checkout with Google Pay is live at Nike, Sephora, Target, Walmart, Wayfair and the first Shopify retailers. In May, Google Google named Canada and Australia in May, followed by the UK. There is no date set for the EU.

OpenAI’s change of course highlights the dividing line that matters for planning: the protocols are stable, but the products built on them are not. ACP will continue to be maintained, even though the product it was built for is being phased out. For your planning, this means aligning interfaces and data with the standards, not with the feature set of a single platform.

UCP: the standard from Google and Shopify

The Universal Commerce Protocol was unveiled on 11 January 2026 and developed by Google and Shopify in collaboration with Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart. The project page now also lists Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Salesforce and Stripe as co-developers; in Europe, supporters include Zalando and Carrefour, amongst others. The specification is available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 licence and is versioned by date; with version 2026-08-25 currently in force.

UCP is designed as a modular system, as retailers rarely wish to enable everything at once. The standard defines five key capabilities that a retailer can enable individually: catalogue search, shopping basket, checkout, account linking and order management. Account linking is handled via OAuth 2.0 and allows the agent to access customer accounts, loyalty rewards and membership discounts. Order management works with webhooks, through which your shop reports status changes to the agent.

Discovery works via a manifest: your shop publishes a JSON file at /.well-known/ucp that describes which capabilities it offers and via which channels. An agent reads this profile before making its first request. UCP supports REST APIs, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the agent-to-agent (A2A) protocol and an embedded checkout.

For payments, the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) is intended, whereby the customer grants the agent a mandate. According to its own announcement in May, Google plans to introduce AP2 first in Gemini Spark: The user specifies brands, products and spending limits; the agent only makes purchases within these parameters. On Google’s own platforms, payment is processed via Google Pay.

In practice, this means for a retailer: products are hosted in the Google Merchant Centre, items eligible for checkout carry the native_commerce attribute, and the returns policy and support contact details are provided.

ACP: the standard from OpenAI and Stripe

The Agentic Commerce Protocol was launched on 29 September 2025 alongside Instant Checkout in ChatGPT. OpenAI and Stripe developed it jointly, also under the Apache 2.0 licence. At the end of October 2025, PayPal announced its support for ACP.

ACP consists of three sub-specifications. The Product Feed Spec describes how you supply your catalogue: a file with one product per line. The only formally required elements are a stable product ID and the variants, each with an ID and title; price, availability and description are optional, but are effectively indispensable for discoverability.

The Agentic Checkout Spec defines five REST endpoints that your shop provides: create, update, complete, cancel and query a checkout session. Each request carries an idempotence key, a signature and a timestamp. The reason for this is that an agent repeating a request following a network error must not trigger a second order.

The Delegated Payment Spec stipulates that the agent must only pass a single payment token, which your payment service provider redeems. With Stripe, this is called the Shared Payment Token; other providers can also implement the specification.

Following the change of direction in March, ChatGPT’s merchant page lists three tiers: product feeds as the basis for all merchants, apps for larger merchants who want more control over the shopping experience, and the phased-out Instant Checkout. For purchases that begin in ChatGPT, OpenAI states that it does not charge any fees.

UCP and ACP compared

Both standards solve the same problem using similar methods. The differences lie in the scope of the specification, the payment architecture and the maturity of the products built on top of them.

The licence (Apache 2.0) and the merchant’s role (Merchant of Record) are identical for both. It follows, therefore, that UCP and ACP do not compete for your shop, but rather for the interface on which customers shop. A merchant can use both. Furthermore, both standards share building blocks from the same ecosystem: UCP uses MCP as one of its transport channels, and Stripe is involved in both standards.

What Shopware delivers today

Shopware has set Agentic Commerce as the infrastructure theme for the Community Day 2026 as an infrastructure topic, with full MCP coverage of the platform and UCP readiness. This has been implemented in the free “Agentic Commerce” extension, which is available as a beta in the Shopware Store (version 1.4.0 dated 2 October 2026, compatible with Shopware 6.5.8 to 6.7.15).

The extension creates its own sales channel. You can use this to generate product feeds for OpenAI (JSONL) and Google (XML), including the mapping of your properties to the expected fields. Your ‘Material: Stainless steel’ property is thus mapped to the ‘Material’ field in the feed, and ‘Colour’ to the ‘Colour’ field. A Returns policy URL is mandatory.

For UCP, you enable the capabilities individually: Browse catalogue, Shopping basket, Discounts, Checkout, Orders. The list of toggles does not correspond exactly to the standard UCP list: Discounts are a UCP extension; account linking via OAuth is included in the extension without being shown as a separate toggle.

The available transport methods are REST, A2A, an embedded checkout and, from Shopware 6.7 onwards, MCP. Which toggles you enable to start with is up to you; more on that in a moment. Orders and traffic from the AI platforms run via the existing affiliate infrastructure, so you can analyse them in the admin panel.

Shopware notes in the store listing that some providers currently restrict access to retailers based in the USA. Technically, you can set up the channel; whether an agent makes a purchase via it depends on authorisation by the respective platform.

What this means for your shop in practical terms

Firstly, the data foundation. The most important task is not the checkout, but the data. Both protocols start with the product feed, and an agent can only recommend what it can read unambiguously. If the shop says ‘Colour: dark blue’, the feed says ‘navy’ and the ERP says ‘blue’, the agent sees three products, none of which is definitely what the customer described. If in doubt, it will recommend the competitor offering the unambiguous variant.

The same applies to titles: an agent interprets ‘11-speed chain’ as incomplete, but ‘Shimano CN-HG601, 11-speed, 116 links’ as a match.

Complete titles, variants with GTINs, up-to-date prices and stock levels, correct delivery times and structured attributes form the same data foundation that also counts for Google Shopping and the AI visibility of your shop. If your product data is scattered across multiple systems, a PIM is essential.

The 53 per cent who have already made a purchase based on an AI recommendation did so from a retailer whose data the agent was able to read.

Secondly, the legally required information. UCP and the Shopware extension require a returns policy and a support contact; Google also provides for an attribute for legally required notices. For a German shop, this includes the cancellation policy, price details including the base price, and the mandatory information prior to the conclusion of the contract.

It remains unclear how this works in an agent checkout: who displays the cancellation policy to the customer when the agent places an order via the chat window, and how is it documented that the customer has seen it? Until this question is answered, it is an advantage for the purchase to be completed via your own checkout.

Thirdly, the technology. Whether your checkout is agent-compatible depends on two things: full API coverage and token-based payment. Check whether the shopping basket, addresses, delivery methods, payment and order confirmation can be mapped via API. In Shopware 6, this is handled via the Store API; however, this is often not the case with heavily customised checkouts or older systems, for example where the delivery cost calculation is handled in a theme template rather than via the API.

Check with your payment service provider whether they support delegated, token-based payments. And set up tracking so that you can distinguish orders from agents from those on other channels; without this distinction, you’ll later lack the basis for any decisions regarding the channel.

Fourthly, the decision about what to make available. UCP allows you to open only the catalogue and keep the shopping basket or checkout closed for the time being. For most retailers, this is a sensible starting point: be visible, gauge demand, and roll out the rest once the platforms in Europe go live.

What you don’t need to do right now

Develop your own agent checkout. The standards are open, and OpenAI’s change of course has shown how quickly the product side changes, whilst the protocols remain the same. Developing your own solution today would mean building towards a target that is still shifting by the time the service is activated in Europe.

For this reason alone, switching platforms isn’t necessary either. The key thing is that the data foundation and checkout integration are sound. On an existing Shopware installation, this can usually be achieved with less effort than switching platforms.

Conclusion

Agentic Commerce is a topic to prepare for in 2026. The two standards are in place; the platforms are up and running in the US, with Europe to follow at an unspecified date. Anyone who gets their product data, checkout API and tracking sorted out now will not face a project launch on the day of go-live, but simply a switch.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Agentic Commerce the same as ChatGPT Shopping?

No. ChatGPT Shopping refers to product search using product cards in ChatGPT; the purchase takes place on the retailer’s website or in their app. Agentic Commerce describes the complete process right through to the completion of the purchase by the agent.

Do I have to choose between UCP and ACP?

No. Both standards are based on the same data foundation: structured product data and a checkout accessible via API. Google and OpenAI will determine the launch date in Europe.

Who is the customer’s contractual partner when an agent makes a purchase?

The retailer. Both UCP and ACP designate the retailer as the Merchant of Record. Invoicing, cancellation, warranty and data protection remain your responsibility.

What does it cost to take part?

The protocols themselves are free of charge and openly licensed. OpenAI states that it does not charge any fees on purchases initiated in ChatGPT. Google applies its standard terms and conditions for Google Pay. The Shopware extension is free of charge.