We’ve wrote many times that the endgame for agentic commerce is merchants building their own infrastructure for agents - what we call the machine route.
With the launch of ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol) by OpenAI and Stripe last week, it finally feels real. For the first time, it’s not a concept - it’s live, working, and shaping how commerce will happen between AI agents and merchants.
(You can read our full ACP analysis here.)
What merchants need to join the agent economy
To comply with ACP and be discoverable inside ChatGPT - meaning users can find and buy from them directly - merchants need two main components:
1) Product Feed
Merchants have to publish their product catalog to OpenAI’s endpoint (up to every 15 minutes).
This feed includes all the structured product data (title, price, images) and the contextual data (like Q&A or product details) that helps ChatGPT understand what each product is.
The better the quality and completeness of the feed, the more likely the merchant’s products will show up when users search. In many ways, this is becoming the new SEO layer for agents.
Our friend Scot from Retailgentic wrote a great post breaking down OpenAI’s product feed, highly recommended if you want to get into the details of the product feed.
2) Agentic Checkout
The Agentic Checkout is how agents actually complete a purchase.
It’s a lightweight gateway that connects directly to the merchant’s systems - handling things like cart creation, shipping, taxes, inventory checks, and order confirmation.
From the user’s side, ChatGPT initiates checkout and communicates with this gateway. From the merchant’s side, it feels just like any other order - the system calculates prices, applies discounts, and processes payments through their existing provider.
In short, Agentic Checkout bridges ChatGPT and the merchant’s commerce stack - keeping the merchant in full control while letting agents transact on their behalf.
Why ACP matters
We’re excited about ACP for a few reasons:
It’s already live - Etsy is in production, plus we heard that there is a massive backlog of merchants wanting to participate.
It’s elegantly designed - the architecture is clean and modular.
It’s open source - and that has big implications. A merchant only needs to build it once to become compatible with any agent. Unlike Google Shopping feeds, which merchants mostly maintain just for Google, this infrastructure has far higher leverage. The ROI from integrating once and being accessible across all agentic platforms is enormous. This is a major contribution from OpenAI and Stripe to the broader e-commerce ecosystem.
ACP formalizes something we’ve been waiting for: a universal interface for agents to transact with merchants. And obviously we are excited.
So we planned a hackathon:
And we decided to build and are publishing today two open-source tools that can help merchants and agents that want to comply with ACP.
For Merchants 🛍️
Agentic Checkout Gateway – a ready-to-deploy HTTP service that exposes the required ACP endpoints and connects to your catalog, payments, and order systems. Deploy with AWS SAM or Terraform - no need to build your own API. [link here]
Validation Tool – a simple CLI to verify your implementation complies with the ACP spec. [link here]
Merchants can use our free tools to get set up on ChatGPT and meet ACP requirements.
For Agents 🤖
You can spin up an Agentic Checkout Gateway instance to test requests and verify your ACP implementation end to end. We are also planning to launch our own hosted checkout server for tests next week, so watch out for more announcements.
Only The Beginning
We’re entering an exciting new phase - the opportunity to onboard the world into agentic commerce. Internet history teaches us that this kind of shift takes a village. We’re excited to do our part.
If you have any questions about our implementation, need help getting production-ready, or just want to build a commerce agent and give it an agentic wallet so it can handle payments - Reach us anytime at [email protected].