What is agentic commerce? A guide to getting started

Securely pass payment credentials from your buyers to AI agents, without exposing underlying payment credentials. Implement the ACP specification to configure your checkout for agentic commerce, so that any compatible agent can securely initiate checkout. Stand up your first ACP integration with a guided walkthrough and sample payloads.

It also draws on stored preferences, past purchases, and remembered sizes, so the same prompt gets smarter results over time. The buying journey begins with a conversation, rather than a search engine query. A request like “find me a wireless speaker under $100 with next-day delivery” gives the agent its goal. Unlike traditional eCommerce, which requires manual browsing and checkout, agentic commerce delegates decision-making to intelligent AI systems that reason and act across multiple platforms. For example, when you get to a checkout page, it might prompt you to automatically apply a coupon code it found.

• Early adopters of agentic commerce will be able to influence how these intelligent AI systems handle discovery, recommendation and loyalty within the ecosystem.
• Supporting multiple agents means building and maintaining separate integrations – work that can take several months per agent, with ongoing maintenance as requirements change.
• Google’s AI Mode checkout is rolling out for select retailers and ChatGPT surfaces products from brands and directs buyers to complete checkout on the brand’s own store.
• Investment in AI is accelerating, but for most companies, measurable gains have been slow to materialize.
• To make intelligent purchasing decisions, agents need context—your past purchases, your preferences, current market status, user reviews, etc.
• New buyers are placing orders through AI channels at nearly twice the rate of other channels.

Potential applications of agentic commerce include recurring purchases, subscription management, business-to-business procurement, inventory replenishment, and price monitoring. Generative AI systems used in commerce commonly assist users by answering questions or suggesting options, and do not complete transactions autonomously. Traditional e-commerce requires users to manually browse products, select offers, and authorize payments. A defining feature of agentic commerce is the delegation of end-to-end commercial activities to software agents. Agentic commerce (also referred to as agent-based commerce) describes an emerging form of e-commerce in which semi-autonomus and fully autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents independently execute purchasing and payment processes on behalf of users or organizations.

TL;DR: what is agentic commerce?

• We believe agentic commerce will evolve more rapidly, but it won’t be at scale tomorrow.
• About half of LLM users researched and compared product prices in the past month, and 30% to 40% reported making purchases.
• The Shopify Agentic Plan syncs your products to ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, and more—so buyers can discover and purchase from you directly inside AI conversations.
• Once a goal is set, the agent moves through a multi-step workflow, scanning retailers, comparing prices in real-time, checking inventory, applying available discounts, and completing the transaction.
• If you’re a business on Stripe, you can learn more about Stripe’s agentic commerce solutions in its documentation.
• This complexity allows for autonomous actions such as monitoring price changes in real time, reordering inventory when it runs low and completing purchases without repeated human approval.

Shopify Catalog provides the same schema fields automatically for all stores on Shopify. Shopify Catalog handles most of this automatically—effectively providing GEO as a service. Just as early investment in SEO created lasting advantages in search rankings, merchants with rich, structured product data will have a compounding edge as AI shopping scales. Any updates made in admin—new pricing, inventory changes, updated descriptions—are reflected automatically across all AI channels. When a new AI platform adopts UCP, Shopify merchants are automatically ready to sell there—no additional integration required. UCP allows a merchant’s checkout rules, discounts, and terms to work consistently regardless of which AI agent initiates the interaction.

Unlike chatbots or simple automation tools that only respond to prompts, these agents proactively plan and execute actions on behalf of the customer. We’ll also share how BigCommerce helps brands embrace agentic commerce today. Agentic capabilities are expanding as generative AI tools become more embedded in online shopping. Open protocols are making agentic commerce work across the ecosystem, working with your existing systems, so you don’t need to rebuild your checkout to participate. Shopify Catalog automatically broadcasts your product data across those channels. If you are eligible, your products are in Shopify Catalog, and you sell https://clojure-android.info/finding-similarities-between-and-life-8/ to US shoppers, then your products are automatically discoverable in ChatGPT.

Product discovery

If your infrastructure isn’t https://logotype.dev/articles/a-revolutionary-logo-design-tool-that-will-transform-your-branding-game-forever configured for this kind of discovery, you risk being invisible to customers shopping through agents. Instead, they read structured data, parse text files, and rely on technical signals to understand what you sell and whether you’re open to agent traffic. They deepen relationships with known customers, preserve brand control, and make it easier to maintain customer context like identity and preferences. You need to understand which goals you’re solving for with agentic commerce. This guide isn’t exhaustive; rather, it covers key tactics that we’ve seen businesses implement successfully.