What is the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)?

ACP is an open protocol developed by OpenAI and Stripe that lets AI agents discover merchant products and complete purchases. It powers ChatGPT Shopping: merchants expose a product feed, and checkout is either delegated (agent completes it via the protocol) or handed off to the merchant's site.

How do I get my products into ChatGPT Shopping?

Shopify merchants are largely auto-enrolled. Other merchants should maintain a clean structured product feed, keep schema.org Product/Offer markup accurate, allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt, and follow OpenAI's merchant onboarding for ACP feeds.

Do I lose the customer relationship under ACP?

No — under delegated checkout the merchant remains the seller of record: you process the order, own fulfillment, and own post-purchase communication. The agent is a new demand channel, similar to how marketplaces refer buyers.

SellToAgents

Protocol guide · Updated July 2026 · 7 min read

ACP explained: how ChatGPT Shopping picks products

Direct answer: The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), built by OpenAI and Stripe, is the pipe between ChatGPT and merchant catalogs. Discovery runs on structured product feeds; purchase runs on delegated checkout (the agent transacts, you stay seller of record) or redirect. Your job as a merchant: feed quality, data freshness, and crawler access.

The three layers of ACP

Layer	What it does	What you control
Discovery	ChatGPT matches buyer intent against merchant product data	Feed quality, schema markup, OAI-SearchBot access
Selection	The model shortlists 3–5 products fitting constraints	Price/availability accuracy, specs in text, reviews, policies
Checkout	Delegated payment via Stripe rails, or handoff to your site	Checkout integration, order webhooks, fulfillment SLAs

How selection actually works

When a buyer asks ChatGPT for "a standing desk under $500 that ships this week", the model doesn't rank ads — it composes an answer from products whose data proves they fit every constraint:

Price and availability must be present and current in structured form. Stale = skipped.
Constraints are filters. "Ships this week" requires machine-readable shipping data. No data, no match — even if you actually ship same-day.
Trust compounds. Consistent Organization data, real review signals and third-party citations raise selection odds across all queries, not one keyword.

What a small merchant should actually do

If you're on Shopify: you're likely already enrolled in ChatGPT Shopping. Your work is data quality — titles, GTINs, availability, variant hygiene. Audit your feed like it's your storefront, because now it is.
If you're not: keep a clean structured feed (Merchant Center format is a good baseline), ship schema.org Product/Offer JSON-LD (see the checklist, step 2), and allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt.
Watch your citation share. Monthly, ask ChatGPT to recommend products in your category. If competitors show and you don't, the gap is nearly always data, not brand.

ACP vs UCP vs MCP, in one paragraph

ACP (OpenAI + Stripe) is transaction-focused and powers ChatGPT Shopping. UCP (Google, launched NRF 2026) is broader — discovery through post-purchase across Google surfaces. MCP (Anthropic) is the connectivity standard agents use to query live systems — inventory, pricing, order status. They're complementary rails, and all three consume the same fuel: clean, structured, accessible product data. Optimize the fuel once and every rail benefits.

Is OAI-SearchBot even allowed on your site?

One misconfigured robots.txt line removes you from ChatGPT Shopping. Check free in 10 seconds.

Run the free scan →