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OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) launched October 2025 with Stripe. 50M daily ChatGPT queries, 36% purchase rate. How it works for users and merchants.
According to OpenAI's announcement in October 2025, Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), developed in partnership with Stripe, introduced a new paradigm in conversational commerce. With ChatGPT processing 50 million daily shopping queries and 36 percent of users who make shopping queries completing purchases, ACP has quickly proven that conversational AI can be a powerful shopping channel.
But what does ACP mean beyond the impressive numbers? How does it benefit OpenAI as a company, ChatGPT users seeking seamless shopping experiences, and merchants looking to tap into conversational commerce? This analysis explores the implications of Agentic Commerce Protocol for all participants in the emerging conversational shopping ecosystem.
Learn more about how ACP compares to Google's competing standard in our comprehensive UCP vs ACP comparison guide.
Before diving deep into the implications, here are the essential facts about Agentic Commerce Protocol:
ChatGPT usage data shows a dramatic difference in conversion performance between ACP-powered conversational commerce and traditional e-commerce:
| Metric | ACP (ChatGPT) | Traditional E-commerce |
|---|---|---|
| Conversion Rate | 36% of users making shopping queries | 2-5% average |
| Shopping Intent | High-intent queries | Mixed intent traffic |
| Checkout Friction | Instant (conversational) | Multi-step forms |
| Platform | ChatGPT Instant Checkout | Traditional checkout flows |
This 7-14x higher conversion rate demonstrates the power of frictionless conversational checkout when users have clear shopping intent.
Agentic Commerce Protocol is an open standard maintained by OpenAI and Stripe that enables AI agents.specifically ChatGPT.to complete purchase transactions within conversational interfaces. As reported by OpenAI, ACP launched in October 2025 and powers ChatGPT's "Instant Checkout" feature, allowing users to discover and purchase products without leaving the chat interface.
The protocol uses a REST API tightly coupled to ChatGPT's conversational flow and Stripe's payment infrastructure. Unlike broader commerce protocols such as Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, ACP focuses specifically on optimizing the checkout and transaction experience within conversational contexts.
ACP is currently live with Etsy sellers, with Shopify merchants coming soon including:
The protocol uses centralized discovery, meaning merchants must apply through OpenAI and be approved before their products appear in ChatGPT shopping experiences. Explore more merchants in our store directory or browse by category.
For payments, ACP implements several key features:
According to Stripe's integration documentation, merchants remain the Merchant of Record under ACP, retaining customer relationships and data ownership despite the transaction occurring within ChatGPT's interface.
Agentic Commerce Protocol represents OpenAI's most significant monetization strategy beyond ChatGPT subscriptions and API usage. With 50 million daily shopping queries, the potential transaction volume is enormous. Even small transaction fees or revenue sharing arrangements with Stripe could generate substantial income.
ACP transforms ChatGPT from a research tool or productivity assistant into a transaction platform. This positions OpenAI to capture value from commercial intent rather than just information-seeking behavior. The shift from answering questions to facilitating purchases fundamentally changes OpenAI's revenue model and valuation potential.
The tight integration with Stripe provides OpenAI with payment infrastructure expertise without building it internally. Stripe handles fraud detection, compliance, payment method support, and settlement.complex operational challenges that would divert resources from OpenAI's core AI capabilities.
This partnership also provides credibility. Stripe's reputation in e-commerce gives merchants confidence that ACP transactions are secure and reliable. The partnership accelerates merchant adoption by leveraging Stripe's existing merchant relationships and technical integrations.
For OpenAI, the Stripe partnership validates conversational commerce as a viable business model and provides infrastructure to scale rapidly as adoption grows.
Google launched Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) in January 2026 with broader scope and more partners, creating competitive pressure in agentic commerce. ACP serves as OpenAI's distinctive approach: narrower focus on checkout optimization, deeper ChatGPT integration, and curated merchant experiences.
While UCP covers the full shopping lifecycle across multiple AI surfaces, ACP optimizes specifically for ChatGPT's conversational interface. This focus allows OpenAI to deliver superior purchase experiences within conversations, even if UCP offers broader capabilities.
ChatGPT usage data shows that conversational checkout, when done well, can achieve conversion rates significantly higher than traditional e-commerce (which typically sees 2-5 percent conversion). This validates OpenAI's focused strategy against Google's comprehensive approach.
Enabling shopping within ChatGPT increases platform stickiness and session duration. Users who can complete entire shopping journeys.from research to purchase.without leaving ChatGPT have less reason to use alternative platforms or revert to traditional search engines.
The convenience of Instant Checkout creates habitual behavior. Once users experience the simplicity of conversational shopping with ACP, they're more likely to default to ChatGPT for future shopping needs. This builds a defensible moat around OpenAI's user base.
Higher engagement also increases subscription revenue as free users hit usage limits and convert to paid ChatGPT Plus subscriptions to maintain access to shopping features.
Every ACP transaction provides training data for improving ChatGPT's shopping capabilities. OpenAI learns which product recommendations lead to purchases, how users describe their needs, and what conversational patterns result in successful transactions.
This data enables continuous improvement of product discovery, recommendation quality, and purchase flow optimization. Over time, ChatGPT becomes better at understanding shopping intent and surfacing relevant products, creating a virtuous cycle of improved experience leading to more usage.
The data also informs OpenAI's broader understanding of user preferences and behavior, enhancing capabilities beyond just shopping.
While ACP creates significant opportunities, it also introduces platform risk. OpenAI becomes responsible for transaction quality, merchant behavior, and customer satisfaction in ways it wasn't as a pure information assistant.
Merchant fraud, product quality issues, or payment problems could damage ChatGPT's reputation and user trust. The curated approach with centralized approval helps mitigate these risks, but OpenAI must develop operational capabilities in merchant vetting and commerce operations.
The tight coupling with Stripe creates dependency. If the partnership sours or Stripe's infrastructure faces issues, ACP transactions could be disrupted. This risk is manageable but represents a strategic consideration as ACP scales.
Agentic Commerce Protocol enables the most natural shopping experience yet: describing what you want in plain language and having ChatGPT find and purchase it without leaving the conversation. This eliminates context switching between research and transaction phases.
Users can ask questions like "find me eco-friendly running shoes under $120" and ChatGPT not only recommends products but enables immediate purchase. The conversational interface allows iterative refinement."show me options in blue" or "what sizes are available".without navigating multiple product pages.
This seamlessness is ACP's primary value proposition. Traditional e-commerce requires manual searching, comparing, and checking out across different interfaces. ACP collapses the entire journey into a single conversational flow.
The 36 percent purchase rate indicates that conversational commerce effectively converts intent into transactions. When users ask ChatGPT for product recommendations, they're often further along the purchase journey than casual browsers.
ACP capitalizes on this high intent by eliminating friction between consideration and purchase. The instant checkout capability means users can complete purchases in the moment of peak interest, before distraction or second-guessing reduces conversion.
For users, this means less time between identifying a need and receiving the product. The efficiency benefits are substantial, particularly for routine purchases or well-defined product requirements.
OpenAI's centralized approval process for ACP merchants creates a curated marketplace. Unlike open web commerce where product quality varies wildly, ChatGPT shopping features merchants that have passed OpenAI's vetting process.
This curation provides quality assurance for users. Products recommended through ACP are more likely to meet quality standards and come from legitimate merchants. This reduces purchase risk and builds confidence in conversational shopping.
The trade-off is limited selection compared to the open web. Users gain quality assurance but may not find niche products or specialized merchants that haven't yet been approved for ACP.
ACP transactions require sharing shopping preferences, purchase history, and payment information with OpenAI and Stripe. Users must trust these platforms with sensitive commercial data.
For privacy-conscious users, this concentration of shopping data is concerning. OpenAI gains visibility into detailed purchase behavior, brand preferences, and spending patterns. While this enables better recommendations, it also creates privacy risks if data is mishandled or security is compromised.
The delegated payment token approach.single-use, time-bound, amount-restricted.provides strong security for individual transactions. However, the aggregate data about shopping behavior remains valuable and potentially sensitive.
ACP is currently live with Etsy sellers and select Shopify merchants. The limited merchant ecosystem means users can't yet shop for all product categories or brands through ChatGPT.
As more merchants adopt ACP and OpenAI approves additional partners, the selection will expand. But in early 2026, ACP offers narrower merchant coverage than traditional e-commerce or Google's UCP with its 20+ major retail partners.
Users seeking specific brands or product categories may find ChatGPT shopping insufficient, requiring fallback to traditional search and e-commerce sites.
When purchases occur within ChatGPT, users may be uncertain about return policies, customer support, and problem resolution. While merchants remain the Merchant of Record, the transaction interface is ChatGPT, potentially creating confusion about responsibilities.
ACP must clearly communicate that merchants handle post-purchase support, returns, and customer service. Users need to understand they're purchasing from individual merchants, not from OpenAI or ChatGPT directly.
The conversational interface can help here.ChatGPT can proactively explain policies and facilitate returns or support inquiries even though the merchant handles the actual resolution.
The most compelling benefit for merchants is access to ChatGPT's 50 million daily shopping queries. These queries represent high-intent users actively seeking to make purchases, not casual browsers.
ChatGPT usage data shows that traffic converts exceptionally well compared to traditional channels. For merchants, this means higher ROI on customer acquisition compared to traditional channels where conversion rates typically range from 2-5 percent.
Early adopters like Etsy sellers and premium Shopify brands gain first-mover advantages as ChatGPT shopping matures. These merchants establish brand presence in conversational commerce before competitors. To see which merchants are already leveraging agentic commerce protocols, visit our UCP store directory.
ACP's tight integration with Stripe means merchants already using Stripe can implement conversational commerce with minimal additional payment infrastructure investment. The delegated token approach handles security and fraud detection, reducing merchant complexity.
For merchants not on Stripe, ACP adoption requires migrating payment processing or maintaining dual payment systems. This creates switching costs but may be justified by the quality of ChatGPT traffic.
The Stripe partnership also provides built-in support for international payments, currency conversion, and compliance requirements that would be burdensome for individual merchants to implement.
OpenAI's approval process for ACP merchants creates a curated marketplace with higher quality standards than open web commerce. This benefits approved merchants by associating them with premium positioning.
However, the approval process also creates barriers to entry. Smaller merchants, new brands, or niche product categories may struggle to meet OpenAI's criteria or face long approval timelines.
The curation is both advantage and limitation: approved merchants gain quality association and reduced competition, but the limited merchant ecosystem may constrain growth potential for ACP as a distribution channel.
ACP focuses specifically on checkout and transactions, not the full shopping lifecycle. Merchants implementing ACP don't get standardized support for product discovery, cart management, post-purchase support, or loyalty programs.
This narrow scope simplifies implementation but means merchants need separate systems for other aspects of the customer journey. For comprehensive agentic commerce capabilities, merchants may need to implement both ACP for ChatGPT traffic and broader protocols like UCP for multi-agent support.
The checkout focus does allow ACP to excel at its specific use case: frictionless purchase completion within conversations. Merchants benefit from optimized conversion without building complex multi-phase commerce infrastructure.
Critically, merchants remain the Merchant of Record under ACP. They retain customer data, own the post-purchase relationship, and control pricing and inventory. This preserves merchant independence while providing access to ChatGPT traffic.
This contrasts with marketplace models where Amazon or eBay control customer relationships. ACP provides distribution without surrendering margin or customer data to a platform operator.
Merchants must still invest in customer support, returns processing, and relationship management. ACP handles the transaction but doesn't replace merchant operational capabilities.
ChatGPT's conversational interface presents products differently than traditional search results or marketplace listings. Merchants must adapt to how ChatGPT describes and recommends products, which may differ from their own brand positioning.
The conversational context allows richer product storytelling and nuanced recommendations that highlight specific features or use cases. This can benefit merchants with differentiated products that are hard to describe in traditional listings.
However, merchants have less control over presentation compared to their own e-commerce sites. They must trust ChatGPT to accurately represent products and brand positioning in conversations.
As premium brands like Glossier, SKIMS, Spanx, and Vuori adopt ACP, competitive pressure increases for their rivals. Brands that delay implementation risk losing conversational commerce traffic to early adopters.
The high purchase conversion rate (36 percent of users making shopping queries complete purchases) makes ACP an attractive channel for customer acquisition. Merchants must evaluate whether potential ChatGPT traffic justifies the implementation effort and Stripe payment processing fees.
The centralized approval process means merchants compete not just for customers but for OpenAI's approval. This introduces a new gatekeeping dynamic absent from open web commerce or protocols like UCP with decentralized discovery.
Because transactions occur within ChatGPT's interface, merchants may have limited visibility into the full customer journey. They receive transaction data but may not understand the conversational context, alternative products considered, or decision factors.
This data asymmetry means OpenAI understands the shopping journey better than individual merchants. While this enables ChatGPT to improve recommendations, it may disadvantage merchants in optimizing their product positioning or marketing.
ACP must provide sufficient analytics for merchants to evaluate channel performance and make informed business decisions. Transparency about how products are discovered and recommended is important for merchant confidence.
For comparison with Google's broader lifecycle approach, see our detailed analysis in UCP vs ACP: Understanding the Two Major Agentic Commerce Protocols in 2026.
Agentic Commerce Protocol validates conversational commerce as a viable shopping channel with mainstream adoption potential. According to OpenAI, the 50 million daily shopping queries and strong purchase conversion demonstrate significant consumer demand for AI-mediated shopping experiences.
For OpenAI, ACP represents both significant revenue opportunity and strategic positioning against competitors like Google. The Stripe partnership provides necessary infrastructure while allowing OpenAI to focus on conversational experience optimization.
For consumers, ACP promises unprecedented convenience in shopping, collapsing research and purchase into seamless conversations. The curated merchant selection provides quality assurance, though at the cost of limited product availability compared to open web commerce.
For merchants, ACP offers access to high-intent ChatGPT traffic with strong conversion rates. The Stripe integration simplifies payment processing, and Merchant of Record status preserves customer relationships. However, the approval process and narrow scope compared to broader protocols like UCP mean merchants must carefully evaluate strategic fit.
The success of ACP will depend on merchant ecosystem growth, continued high conversion rates, and OpenAI's ability to maintain quality while scaling. The partnership with premium brands signals strong early traction, but broader category coverage and merchant diversity will be necessary for ACP to become a mainstream shopping channel.
As conversational commerce matures throughout 2026, ACP's focused approach.optimizing specifically for ChatGPT checkout.positions it as complementary to broader protocols rather than competing directly. Most merchants will likely implement multiple protocols to maximize reach across the emerging agentic commerce landscape.
ACP is an open standard maintained by OpenAI and Stripe that enables ChatGPT to complete purchase transactions within conversational interfaces. It powers the ChatGPT Instant Checkout feature launched in October 2025.
ChatGPT users can describe products they want in natural language, and ChatGPT recommends options and enables instant purchase without leaving the conversation. The protocol uses delegated payment tokens processed through Stripe for secure, frictionless checkout.
ACP is currently live with Etsy sellers and will soon support premium Shopify brands including Glossier, SKIMS, Spanx, and Vuori. Merchants must apply through OpenAI and be approved before their products appear in ChatGPT shopping experiences.
ACP focuses specifically on checkout and transactions within ChatGPT, while UCP covers the full shopping lifecycle across multiple AI platforms. ACP uses centralized merchant approval, while UCP offers decentralized discovery. Most merchants will implement both protocols for maximum reach.
ChatGPT Instant Checkout is the user-facing feature powered by ACP that allows users to complete purchases directly within ChatGPT conversations without navigating to external websites or entering payment information repeatedly.
Merchants must apply through OpenAI for approval and integrate with Stripe's payment infrastructure. The protocol uses a REST API coupled to ChatGPT's conversational flow. Merchants already using Stripe can implement ACP with minimal additional infrastructure investment.
Here are the essential insights about Agentic Commerce Protocol and its impact on conversational commerce:
Understanding what ACP means for each stakeholder is essential for navigating this transformation in digital commerce. The protocol isn't just a technical specification.it represents a fundamental rethinking of how shopping happens, who mediates the experience, and where value accrues in the commerce value chain. Those who grasp these implications early will be best positioned to capitalize on the conversational commerce opportunity.
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