Agentic commerce is shopping carried out by an AI agent on a customer’s behalf. Instead of browsing a storefront, the shopper asks an assistant like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Claude to find, compare, and guide the user through purchase via standardized checkout UI inside the AI Client. That means the customer is no longer visiting your website, instead products are presented and checkout complete directly in their AI client like ChatGPT. For a merchant, the question shifts from “how does my store rank in search” to “can an agent read my catalog and act on it correctly.” This page explains the protocols that make that possible and what you can do today to prepare.Documentation Index
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What changes for merchants
Discovery moves into the chat
Shoppers increasingly start with an assistant rather than a search engine. Your products are surfaced by an agent reading structured data, not by a page a person scrolls.
Machine-readable beats pretty
An agent does not see your design. It needs complete, consistent, structured product data — attributes, categories, pricing, and availability it can parse.
The customer relationship
Platforms differ on who owns the buyer. Shopify, for example, keeps the merchant as merchant of record, so you retain the customer relationship and post-purchase control.
Attribution and analytics
Orders placed through an agent are attributed to the AI channel, giving you insight into which assistants drive sales and what customers ask for.
The protocols
Several standards are emerging, each connecting AI agents to a store’s live data and checkout. They are young and moving quickly, and in most cases your e-commerce platform builds the integration so you don’t wire it up yourself.| Protocol | Backed by | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Model Context Protocol (MCP) | Open standard | Bridges an agent to live store data such as inventory, pricing, and availability. |
| Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) | Lets Gemini and AI Mode in Search discover products and complete purchases. | |
| Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) | OpenAI and Stripe | Connects ChatGPT to merchant catalogs for product discovery and purchase inside a chat. |
No single protocol has won. The practical takeaway is to keep your product data clean and let your platform handle the protocol integrations as they ship.
How to prepare
The single most impactful step is to make your product data as clean, complete, and structured as possible. An agent can only sell what it can reliably read.- Complete attributes. Fill in size, color, material, and identifiers like GTIN or barcode for every variant.
- Consistent categories. Group products so an agent can infer what they are and when to suggest them.
- Accurate pricing and availability. Keep stock and prices in sync so an agent never quotes something you can’t fulfill.
- Structured data. Add product schema to your pages so the underlying data is machine-readable.
- HS codes for international sales. Correct customs tariff codes keep cross-border orders shippable. See understanding customs.
On your platform
Both platforms Smart Send supports have published their direction for AI-driven shopping. Apply the data hygiene above, then dig into the store-side setup with our Shopify recommendations and WooCommerce integration guide.Shopify Agentic Storefronts
How Shopify syndicates your catalog across AI agents from a single setup.
WooCommerce AI product discovery
How WooCommerce is building toward MCP, ACP, and UCP to keep stores discoverable.