What is agentic commerce?

By the Variask team · Updated

Definition

Agentic commerce is shopping done by AI agents on a person's behalf: finding products, comparing options and, increasingly, completing the purchase.

Also called Agent shopping, AI shopping agents

With Variask: The free Variask agent readiness and UCP readiness checks test whether AI shopping agents can find, read and buy from your store.

How it works

A shopper tells an assistant what they need. The agent searches, reads product pages and reviews, builds a shortlist and can check out directly where the store supports it. Open standards such as the Universal Commerce Protocol from Google and the Agentic Commerce Protocol from OpenAI and Stripe define how agents and stores talk to each other.

What stores need

  • Complete, accurate product data: prices, stock, variants, shipping and returns.
  • Product structured data and a clean product feed.
  • Pages readable without JavaScript.
  • Support for agent checkout protocols where available.

What it means for brands

  • If an agent cannot read your price or stock, it will pick a store where it can.

Questions

Agentic commerce:
common questions

Yes, in early forms. Checkout inside ChatGPT and Google's agentic checkout are rolling out with participating merchants.

Related terms

Keep exploring

Commerce

Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)

The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is an open standard, announced by Google with Shopify and other partners in January 2026, that lets AI agents discover what a store supports and complete purchases with it in a common way.

Read

Commerce

Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)

The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) is an open standard created by OpenAI and Stripe that lets AI agents, starting with ChatGPT, complete purchases with merchants on a buyer's behalf.

Read

How AI search works

Agentic search

Agentic search is when an AI assistant plans and runs its own research before it answers: it breaks a question into steps, searches several times, reads pages, compares what it finds and only then writes a reply.

Read

Technical

Structured data

Structured data is code added to a page, usually JSON-LD using the Schema.org vocabulary, that describes its content in a machine readable way, such as a product's price, an article's author or a company's logo.

Read
Full glossary