top of page
Untitled design (1).jpg

OpenAI and Stripe Join Forces to Redefine Online Shopping with the Agentic Commerce Protocol

Updated: 1 day ago


Man in gray hoodie interacts with a holographic screen displaying a chatbot and purchase confirmation. Soft-focus background with plants.

In a milestone moment for conversational commerce, OpenAI has officially rolled out a new feature inside ChatGPT that allows users to buy products directly from the chat. The feature, called Instant Checkout is powered by a collaboration with Stripe, one of the world’s leading payment platforms and built on a new open standard known as the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), a framework that may change how people shop online (OpenAI, 2025; Reuters, 2025).


From Browsing to Buying — Without Leaving the Chat 

For years, users relied on AI tools like ChatGPT to assist with product discovery and decision-making. But transactions still required jumping between tabs and websites. That changes now. With Instant Checkout, users can finalize their purchases seamlessly inside ChatGPT.


Three mobile screens showing payment options on Etsy, with Apple Pay, Google Pay, and link payment methods. Background is a gradient blue.

When a supported product appears in conversation, ChatGPT displays a “Buy” button that enables users to review without leaving the chat interface (OpenAI, 2025). Stripe handles the transaction in the background, while merchants starting with U.S. based Etsy sellers, manage shipping, returns and customer service (Axios, 2025).


The move blurs the line between AI interaction and real-world commerce, signaling the start of a shift from “search, click and buy” toward “ask, decide and buy”, a frictionless conversational economy. 


Inside the Agentic Commerce Protocol

The backbone of this system is the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), co-developed by OpenAI and Stripe and released under an open-source Apache 2.0 license (Stripe, 2025). The protocol defines how AI agents, merchants and payment providers communicate safely and transparently during transactions.


Through features such as Shared Payment Tokens, ACP enables secure checkout flows without exposing user payment credentials. This “tokenized” approach adds a layer of privacy and reduces the risk of data leaks or fraud (Stripe, 2025).


Critically, merchants remain the “merchant of record.” They retain control over pricing, customer relationships, returns and fulfillment. ChatGPT acts merely as the interface, ensuring that the AI agent serves as a trusted facilitator rather than a commercial gatekeeper (OpenAI, 2025).


Early Rollout and Expansion Plans

At launch, Instant Checkout supports only single-item purchases from Etsy sellers in the United States, but OpenAI has confirmed plans to expand to Shopify merchants and additional regions. Reuters reported that OpenAI’s upcoming integrations may include major brands such as Glossier, SKIMS and Vuori; companies already leveraging Shopify’s ecosystem (Reuters, 2025).


Merchants using Stripe can enable agentic payments with minimal technical effort. For those using other providers, ACP includes specifications for delegated payments and shared token APIs, allowing broad interoperability (Stripe, 2025).


Two smartphone screens display an Etsy purchase process for a $75 dinnerware set by BlancPottery. Screens show item details and checkout info.

According to Katie Dill, Head of Design at Stripe, the partnership marks the beginning of a “powerful and helpful agentic economy,” where LLM-powered assistants can conduct secure, efficient transactions at scale (Dill, 2025).


What This Means for Users and Businesses

For users, Instant Checkout means shopping becomes faster and safer. Transactions happen in a single interface, with all consent clearly verified. There’s no need to enter credit card data repeatedly or navigate to multiple pages. 


For businesses, this integration opens a new distribution channel, one embedded directly in  AI platforms where discovery and decision-making already happen. As Dill described in her LinkedIn announcement, ACP establishes a “secure, fast, and easy” way for merchants to connect their stores to the next wave of digital consumers (Dill, 2025).


For the industry, it may signal the dawn of a new standard. By introducing an open commerce protocol, OpenAI and Stripe are essentially building the infrastructure for the “agentic economy”—a world where AI assistants transact autonomously but safely on behalf of humans (TechRadar, 2025).


A Cautious Path Forward

Still, experts urge caution. While the potential of ACP is enormous, questions remain about fraud prevention, liability, and user trust. The ability for AI systems to initiate purchases raises regulatory considerations that could reshape consumer protection standards (AP News, 2025).


Merchant adoption will also take time. As of October 2025, only Etsy sellers are active, and global scalability will depend on how well the protocol handles multiple currencies, regions, and compliance frameworks (Axios, 2025).


There are also competitive implications. If consumers begin buying directly inside AI platforms, search engines, e-commerce sites, and ad models may all need to evolve. As TechCrunch observed, “AI-native commerce could become the next great platform shift, where discovery and transaction happen in one continuous thread” (TechCrunch, 2025).


The Road Ahead

Despite the early-stage rollout, the OpenAI–Stripe partnership is already being viewed as a blueprint for the future of online shopping. If ACP gains traction, it could do for AI commerce what HTTPS did for web security, create a universal, trusted protocol for digital transactions (Stripe, 2025).


As conversational AI continues to mature, shopping may no longer begin with a browser search but with a simple prompt inside ChatGPT. And in that future, every purchase might just start with a conversation.


References

Comments

bottom of page