What is Agentic Commerce Protocol?
The shift to agentic commerce
The way people shop is moving into AI. Discovery, comparison, checkout, and even post-purchase monitoring increasingly happen inside AI assistants rather than on a search results page or a brand's own site. This isn't a fringe behavior: 73% of consumers are already using AI in their shopping journey. And the money is following — Accenture estimates that by 2030, more than 30% of online commerce will run through AI agents, close to $3.1 trillion in transactions.
From scraping to brand-controlled protocols
Until now, AI assistants learned about products by scraping the open web – guessing at prices, availability, and specs from whatever pages they could read.
That era is ending.
Brands and the platforms behind these assistants are converging on agentic-commerce protocols: structured, brand-published feeds and endpoints that tell an AI exactly what you sell, what it costs, whether it's in stock, and how to complete a purchase. The difference is control – the brand, not a scraper, becomes the source of truth.
The catch is pace. Several of these protocols have emerged in just the last year, each backed by different platforms, and they ship new releases frequently. Staying compliant is an ongoing commitment, not a one-time integration. And each protocol takes a different approach.
What is ACP?
The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) is an open standard for completing real purchases between buyers, their AI agents, and businesses.
ACP is an Apache 2.0 open-source project, co-developed by OpenAI and Stripe, who are named as its founding maintainers and jointly govern it today, with a stated path toward broader community governance and eventual neutral foundation stewardship.
What becomes possible
ACP standardizes the pieces of an agentic purchase so any compliant agent can transact with you. That starts with a product feed that makes your catalog discoverable and buyable inside an agent, and an agentic checkout flow the agent can drive end to end – with capability negotiation so both sides agree on what's supported. It defines cart, orders, and discount handling for building and completing a real order as well as delegated payment, which securely passes payment credentials from the buyer to the agent without exposing the underlying details. The spec supports physical and digital goods, subscriptions, and asynchronous purchases, and is designed to be REST- and MCP-compatible so it fits the infrastructure you already run.
Who's behind it
ACP's backing is concentrated but significant. OpenAI's ChatGPT is named as the first AI platform to implement ACP, and Stripe as the first compatible payment service provider, via its Shared Payment Token. Both ship production-ready reference implementations. The maintainers are openly working on discovery mechanisms that let AI platforms identify businesses that have implemented ACP.
Where it fits
ACP is one of several agentic-commerce protocols racing toward the same goal of making your products transactable inside AI. And like the others, it ships releases on a fast cadence. Implementing it well is how an agent quotes your real prices and completes a real order, rather than sending a shopper back to a search page.
You can run a completely free check to see how your ACP discovery document and endpoints hold up against the published spec right now. And if you'd rather skip the technical implementation entirely, CorgiMaps connects to your existing data to generate a compliant ACP surface and keep it current as the spec changes – with no changes to your fulfillment stack or operations.