A guide for Agentic Commerce Protocol merchants: What you need to know in 2025

It’s official: you can now buy products directly inside ChatGPT. A customer can go from asking a question to checking out in a few taps, without ever leaving the chat.

This isn’t just a neat trick. It’s a whole new way of shopping, powered by something called the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP). This standard, co-developed by OpenAI and Stripe, is set to change how we all think about online retail.

For e-commerce businesses, this is a huge chance to get your products in front of the hundreds of millions of people using ChatGPT. But, as with any new channel, it brings its own set of challenges, especially for customer support.

Let’s walk through what the Agentic Commerce Protocol actually is, what the pros and cons are for merchants, and how you can get your business ready for what’s coming next.

What the Agentic Commerce Protocol means for merchants

Think of the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) as a common language for shopping. It’s an open-source set of rules that lets AI agents, like ChatGPT, securely talk to your online store’s backend to do things for a customer, like placing an order.

Before, a person had to go to your website, click around, add items to a cart, and fill out forms. With agentic commerce, someone can just say what they want (like, "I need a good gift for a friend who loves coffee"), and the AI can handle the buying process from there.

The ACP is a team effort between OpenAI and Stripe, mixing conversational AI with a solid payment system. While it’s the first to launch at this scale, it’s part of a bigger trend. Google is working on something similar with its Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), for example.

The goal is to create one standard way for businesses to plug into AI-driven commerce. That way, you don’t have to build a custom integration for every new AI assistant that pops up. It’s designed to be secure, flexible, and relatively easy for merchants to get on board with.

How the Agentic Commerce Protocol works

The best part for merchants is that the ACP plugs into what you’re already doing. You don’t need to rebuild your entire operation from scratch. It just acts as a new, conversational way for customers to buy from you, connecting directly to your existing systems.

A new sales channel without the extra work

Here’s a quick look at how a typical purchase flows.

On the customer’s side, it’s simple:

1. A person asks a shopping-related question in ChatGPT.

2. ChatGPT shows them relevant product results (these aren’t sponsored ads).

3. If a product has Instant Checkout, a "Buy" button shows up. The customer confirms their order, shipping, and payment info right there in the chat.

And here’s what happens on your end:

1. ChatGPT uses the ACP to send the order details to your backend system.

2. You get the order just like any other, and you can accept or decline it.

3. You process the payment with your current payment provider. Stripe’s Shared Payment Token API makes this super smooth, but the protocol is built to work with others, too.

4. You take care of fulfillment, shipping, and any returns using your normal process.

The bottom line is that you’re still the one in charge. You keep control over your customer relationships, your inventory, and how you get products to people. The AI is just a new helper that facilitates the sale.

Key benefits and considerations for merchants

Jumping into this new channel has some serious perks, but it’s smart to go in with your eyes open to the new challenges, too.

The upsides of meeting customers where they are

• A huge new audience: You get a direct line to ChatGPT’s massive user base, which is reported to have over 700 million weekly active users, turning casual questions into actual sales.

• Fewer abandoned carts: By letting people buy the moment they find something they like, you can seriously cut down on the friction that causes them to drop off.

• Organic product discovery: The products shown are based on what’s relevant to the user’s query, not who has the biggest ad budget. This gives smaller businesses a better shot at being discovered. Initial partners include Etsy and over a million merchants on platforms like Shopify.

Things to keep in mind: Trust, data, and a new kind of support ticket

• Trust and security: The ACP is built to be secure, using encrypted payment tokens so the AI never sees raw credit card numbers. Still, it’s on merchants to use these security signals to spot fraud and make customers feel safe buying in this new way.

• Customer data: You still own the customer relationship, but the very first interaction happens on someone else’s platform. This can make it a bit tricky to track the entire customer journey or build detailed profiles for personalization.

• The inevitable wave of support questions: When you open up a new, high-volume sales channel, you’re going to get a new stream of support tickets. Customers will have questions about orders they placed in a chat, and they’ll want answers fast. Is your team ready to answer "Where’s the order I placed through ChatGPT yesterday?" without having the full picture? This is where good automation becomes a lifesaver.

Preparing your business: A guide for merchants

Getting set up has a few technical steps, but the real work is making sure your customer support can handle the new wave of customers.

The technical setup

The process laid out by OpenAI involves applying to join the program, providing a product feed, and building out an API that follows their Agentic Checkout Spec.

But here’s the good news: for a lot of businesses, it’s going to be much easier than that. If you’re on a platform like Shopify or Etsy, you’re likely to be onboarded with little or no custom coding needed. This easy access will probably be what makes adoption really take off.

Scaling support in a conversational world

If you’re going to scale sales with AI, you pretty much have to scale your support with AI, too. Trying to manage the flood of new tickets from agentic commerce with just your human team is a recipe for burnout. An intelligent automation platform stops being a "nice-to-have" and becomes a necessity.

Let’s think about how you’d handle a common support ticket in this new world. Imagine a customer asks, "Where’s my order from ChatGPT?"

Without automation, a support agent has to read the ticket, switch over to your e-commerce platform, manually look up the customer’s order, and then come back to type out a reply. It’s a lot of little steps that add up.

With a tool like eesel AI, the process is different. Because it connects to your helpdesk and knowledge sources (like past tickets and your Shopify store data), it can understand the question instantly. It automatically finds the order details and gives the customer an immediate, accurate update on their shipment. This not only saves your team time but also gets the customer their answer in seconds instead of hours.

A screenshot shows eesel AI drafting an email response inside a helpdesk, which is relevant for Agentic Commerce Protocol merchants looking to automate support.

The future of commerce is conversational

The Agentic Commerce Protocol isn’t just another checkout button. It’s a glimpse into the future of e-commerce, where buying things is a natural part of a conversation.

It gives merchants a wild new opportunity to put their products right inside those AI conversations, meeting customers exactly where they are.

But being a successful "Agentic Commerce Protocol merchant" is about more than just the tech setup. It’s about having a plan to handle the new operational load, especially when it comes to customer support.

The businesses that get ahead will be the ones that pair this new conversational sales channel with equally smart conversational support. When you do that, you create a modern and seamless experience for your customers from beginning to end.

This video introduces the concept of Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, a key feature for Agentic Commerce Protocol merchants.

Are you ready for the agentic future?

As you open your store to millions of new customers through agentic commerce, make sure your support team is ready to grow with you.

eesel AI plugs into your existing tools in minutes to automate your frontline support. It gives customers the instant answers they want and frees up your team for the more complex issues that need a human touch.

Start a free trial or book a demo to see how you can get your support ready for what’s next.