Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)
The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) is an open standard from OpenAI, built with Stripe, that lets a store list its products and complete a checkout inside an AI assistant like ChatGPT. It defines a product feed format and a checkout flow so an agent can buy on a shopper's behalf.
How it works
ACP covers two jobs. First, a product feed: a structured list of your products and their attributes that ChatGPT uses to index and display them with current price and availability. Second, a checkout flow: a standard way for the assistant to place an order, either completing it in the chat or handing the shopper to your own store to finish. The point of a shared protocol is that a store implements it once and any agent that speaks it can transact, instead of every store building a custom integration for every assistant.
ACP vs UCP vs MCP
These get mixed up constantly. Here is the honest, short version.
- ACP (OpenAI, with Stripe): listing and selling products inside ChatGPT.
- UCP (Google): Google's equivalent across its own shopping surfaces.
- MCP (Anthropic): a general standard for connecting an agent to a system's data and actions, not commerce-specific.
A commerce example
If you sell on Shopify, you almost certainly already benefit from ACP without knowing it: Shopify implements the feed and checkout for eligible merchants through its agentic storefront, so your catalog flows into ChatGPT. A WooCommerce store has no automatic ACP feed, so its path into ChatGPT is the open web instead.
What this means for your store
You rarely implement ACP yourself. Your platform (Shopify) or your payment provider (Stripe) does. Your job is to make the underlying product feed worth ingesting: complete titles, categories, identifiers, and attributes. A protocol can carry your catalog to an agent, but it cannot fix a thin catalog.