Over the past year, agentic commerce has moved rapidly from idea to reality. Instead of browsing websites themselves, customers are increasingly asking AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and others to discover products, compare options, and even make purchases on their behalf.
To support these experiences, the industry is developing new technical specifications—known as protocols—that define how AI agents, merchants, and payments systems interact. Protocols like OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) and Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) are designed to enable shopping journeys through different AI surfaces.
PayPal has been on the front lines of internet commerce for nearly 30 years. That experience has helped shape the non-negotiables required to make the ecosystem thrive: clear consumer consent, trusted identity, reliable payments, and built-in fraud protection. We are working closely with both OpenAI and Google, contributing our payments and commerce expertise to help ensure that these protocols reflect these real-world buying and selling requirements.
With recent announcements of protocols centered around agentic commerce, merchants are now trying to understand how these protocols differ and what they mean for adoption. OpenAI’s ACP, for example, is optimized for merchant integrations with ChatGPT, while Google’s UCP takes a more surface-agnostic approach, aiming to standardize how platforms, agents, and merchants execute commerce flows across the ecosystem.
For merchants, this shift brings new opportunities and complexity. New AI-driven discovery surfaces are emerging, integration expectations are becoming clearer, and familiar concerns about trust, payments, and fraud take on new urgency when an AI agent, not a consumer, clicks “Buy.” Understanding how protocols fit together is becoming an essential first step.
Here’s a clear look at what agentic commerce protocols are, how the landscape is shaping up, and what it means for merchants navigating what comes next.
What are agentic commerce protocols—really?
A protocol is a set of agreed-upon rules and standards that govern how data and information is shared, defining how systems communicate or interact with each other. Think of an agentic commerce protocol as a shared language spoken by AI agents, merchants, and payment systems to reliably enable consumers’ AI shopping experience.
A protocol defines how an AI agent can:
- Understand what a merchant sells
- Know which product from a given merchant is the best answer to a consumer prompt
- Initiate a checkout or task on a user’s behalf or on an agentic surface
- Confirm identity of the merchant and consumer
- Complete a transaction with the right permissions and protections in place
- Support the post-purchase experiences including returns, disputes, etc.
While protocols like UCP and ACP have started to lay the foundation for how AI agents interact across these elements, support for multiple protocols will be needed to enable commerce experiences with the leading platforms, including ChatGPT and Google Gemini.
How the Protocol Landscape Is Coming Together
The protocols for agentic commerce that have been announced so far fall into three main categories:
- Commerce protocols (OpenAI’s ACP and Google’s UCP): Define how AI agents handle the shopping process itself, from finding products to completing checkout. They determine if you remain the merchant of record, maintain your customer relationships, and control how your brand appears, even when sales happen inside an AI chat window.
- Payment and trust protocols (Google’s AP2, Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, and Mastercard's Agent Pay): Focused on security, verifying that an AI agent has real permission from a real customer, protecting payment credentials, and helping you tell the difference between legitimate shopping agents and malicious bots.
- Infrastructure protocols (Google’s A2A, Anthropic’s MCP): The underlying "operating system" that makes everything work together. They're less visible to merchants but essential for enabling AI agents to coordinate tasks, access your product data, and communicate with other systems.
What does this landscape mean for merchants
In working directly with merchants, we’ve seen clear evidence that they want to invest in agentic commerce but only while retaining control of your customer relationships and data. But many are struggling with where or how to get started.
Here is a step-by-step guide for how a merchant should assess their approach to unlocking agentic commerce, and how PayPal helps you navigate each step:
1. Audit your product catalog and data structure
What you need to do: Ensure your product data is optimized for AI discoverability—clear titles, comprehensive descriptions, accurate attributes, and rich metadata. Agentic AI surfaces prioritize brands with well-structured catalogs.
How PayPal helps: PayPal's Store Sync handles catalog optimization on your behalf, ensuring your products surface effectively across AI channels while you focus on strategic priorities.
2. Choose your integration path
What you need to do: Decide between direct integration with individual agentic AI surfaces (requiring dedicated development resources and ongoing maintenance) or working with a trusted commerce partner.
How PayPal helps: PayPal provides a single integration point that connects you to multiple AI agents and platforms at once, eliminating the need for separate integrations.
3. Build and deploy your commerce infrastructure
What you need to do: Stage your product catalog and stand up the required commerce API endpoints for each platform and AI agent you want to reach.
How PayPal helps: With PayPal, this complexity is reduced to a single integration that automatically distributes your catalog across AI agents as well as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, and other leading AI platforms. There is no need to maintain multiple catalog feeds and bespoke API endpoints with individual AI platforms.
4. Navigate commercial agreements
What you need to do: For direct integrations, merchants need to negotiate and sign individual agreements with each AI platform covering data usage rights, fraud liability, and other commercial terms.
How PayPal helps: PayPal handles these negotiations on your behalf, shielding you from legal complexity while protecting your interests.
5. Test, launch, and monitor performance
What you need to do: Validate transactions, user experience, and conversion metrics across all integrated platforms before going live, then continuously monitor performance to optimize results.
How PayPal helps: PayPal's infrastructure provides reliable transaction processing and performance visibility across all connected AI surfaces.
6. Maintain protocol compliance
What you need to do: Keep your integrations up to spec as each agentic commerce protocol evolves, requiring ongoing development work and coordination with protocol developers.
How PayPal helps: PayPal manages these updates centrally, working directly with protocol developers so your integration remains current without additional engineering effort.
In Sum, Why PayPal
The merchants best positioned for agentic commerce won't try to individually integrate with every platform—or wait it out entirely. They'll build once and stay adaptable as the ecosystem matures. PayPal simplifies access to agentic commerce at scale by connecting the foundations that commerce depends on: payments, identity verification, inventory management, authorization, and fraud protection.
What sets PayPal apart:
- Protocol-agnostic design: Comply with leading protocols while staying open to new ones—at no additional cost. You don't have to pick winners.
- Trust at the core: With $1.6 trillion in payments processed in 2024, PayPal delivers the verified identity, fraud protection, and payment security that agentic commerce requires.
- Built for all merchants: We make agentic commerce accessible to businesses of all sizes—especially small and mid-sized merchants who need simple, scalable solutions.
- One connection, many surfaces: A single Store Sync integration extends beyond AI agents to social channels and marketplaces as well.
PayPal enables merchants to build once, adapt continuously, and compete —with trust, reliability, and interoperability at the center.
For more information about PayPal's work in agentic commerce, visit PayPal.ai