Shopify and Google are creating an open-source protocol to let AI agents conduct complex commerce. This universal language moves beyond single-item purchases, enabling nuanced transactions like subscriptions, product bundles, and custom shipping instructions directly within conversational AI, aiming to replicate the full online store experience.
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To scale AI-driven purchases, Stripe and OpenAI developed an open standard for checkouts. The "Agentic Commerce Protocol" provides a standard API for businesses to express their checkout process, allowing AI agents to initiate transactions safely and programmatically, moving beyond brittle methods like web scraping.
Influencing $3 billion in Black Friday sales, AI shopping agents automate both product discovery and price hunting. This ushers in an era of "self-driving shopping" that forces radical price transparency on retailers, as AI can instantly find the absolute cheapest option online for any product.
Anticipating a shift to "agentic commerce," SharkNinja is actively re-optimizing its e-commerce site for Large Language Models. The company believes what drives human conversion today may not rank highest in AI-driven search and expects commerce via AI platforms to be meaningful by Christmas 2025.
Consumer search behavior is shifting from browsers to AI assistants. E-commerce brands must adapt by treating agents like ChatGPT as new traffic sources. This requires making product data discoverable via APIs to enable seamless research and purchasing directly within conversational AI platforms.
By integrating shopping into ChatGPT, OpenAI can become a massive e-commerce engine. With a potential take rate of 15-30%, similar to Amazon or Meta, capturing just 20% of the $1.2T U.S. e-commerce market would generate tens of billions in new, high-margin revenue.
The future of AI in e-commerce isn't just better search results like Amazon's Rufus. The shift will be towards proactive, conversational agents that handle the entire purchasing process for routine items, mirroring the "one-click" convenience of the original Amazon Dash button but with greater intelligence.
Shopify's Harley Finkelstein argues agentic commerce will make SEO obsolete. Instead of brands gaming search rankings, AI will recommend products based on merit and a user's personal context history. This shift could level the playing field, allowing smaller, high-quality brands to be discovered more easily.
OpenAI's partnership with Stripe to enable in-app purchases transforms ChatGPT from an information tool into a transactional platform. This creates a frictionless sales channel for e-commerce brands, directly challenging Google's established search-to-purchase business model.
OpenAI is more public and aggressive with its shopping features (partnering with Shopify, DoorDash) than its ad strategy. By first attracting thousands of merchants to its e-commerce waitlist, it's establishing a foundational transaction layer. This de-risks its future ad platform by ensuring a ready base of paying customers.
Stripe intentionally designed its Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) to be provider-agnostic, working with any payments processor and any AI agent. This strategic decision to build an open standard, rather than a proprietary product, aims to grow the entire agentic commerce ecosystem instead of creating a walled garden.
