Agentic commerce, explained

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• Why discovery comes first for AI shopping agents

  Discovery is the first stage of an AI agent’s purchase attempt: the agent has to be allowed to fetch your store, find the products in it and read what each one is. A store that fails discovery is never evaluated, compared or bought from, so no improvement later in the journey can make up for it.

• Why AI agents abandon carts

  AI agents abandon carts for mechanical reasons rather than emotional ones. A human leaves because of price, trust or hesitation; an agent leaves because something in the page could not be operated. That difference is useful, because mechanical failures are reproducible and therefore fixable.

• ACP, UCP, AP2 and MCP: agentic commerce protocols explained

  An agentic commerce protocol is a standard that lets an AI agent transact with a merchant directly, reading a catalogue and completing a purchase through a defined interface, rather than by driving a storefront designed for a human with a mouse. Four names come up: ACP, UCP, AP2 and MCP. They are not four candidates for the same job.

• The agentic readiness checklist

  An agentic readiness checklist is the set of concrete, checkable properties that decide whether an AI shopping agent can find, understand and buy from a store. Almost all of them are data and markup rather than design, and most can be fixed in an afternoon.

• The state of agentic checkout

  Agentic checkout is the step where an AI shopping agent turns a chosen product into a paid order. As of 28 August 2026 there are two live patterns: ChatGPT sends the shopper to the merchant’s own checkout, while Google AI Mode, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot complete the purchase inside the assistant. This page is maintained rather than published once, because the answer has already changed twice.

• Can ChatGPT buy from your store?

  Since March 2026, a shopper who buys through ChatGPT completes the purchase on your own checkout rather than inside the chat. Whether it succeeds depends on four things in order: whether the agent can find your catalogue, read your prices and terms as text, compare you against an alternative, and drive your checkout as far as the payment step. Failing any one of them ends the purchase, and most stores fail at least one without knowing.

• What is agentic commerce?

  Agentic commerce is shopping carried out by an AI agent acting on a person’s behalf: the shopper states an intent, and software finds candidate products, compares them, and completes the purchase. The shopper may never load the storefront, but as of 2026 the purchase itself often completes on the merchant’s own checkout.