---
title: "Agentic Commerce — What Is It? Aderlo City Glossary"
url: https://aderlo.city/en/glossary/agentic-commerce/
description: "Agentic commerce: a definition of shopping where an AI agent searches, compares and buys for the customer, the ACP, UCP and MCP protocols, and the UK picture."
language: en-GB
published: 2026-10-17
modified: 2026-10-17
source: "Aderlo City (https://aderlo.city/)"
---

# Agentic commerce

Agentic commerce is shopping in which an AI agent — ChatGPT, Gemini or a retailer's own assistant — does part of the work for the customer: it finds products, compares offers and, in some markets, places the order and pays, usually with the customer's approval. The retailer stays the seller; the agent relies on its data and checkout protocols.

## How does agentic commerce work?

The customer describes a need to an AI assistant ("a desk lamp under £60, delivered by Friday"), and the agent does the steps the customer used to do alone: it searches offers, compares price, stock, delivery cost and returns terms, then sends the customer to a shop or — where it is available — prepares and places the order. An agent does not look at a page the way a person does. It reads data: product feeds, structured data on the page and the retailer's API.

The term covers several levels of agent involvement:

| Level | What the agent does | Who pays |
|---|---|---|
| Shopping assistant | answers questions, recommends products with links | the customer, on the retailer's site |
| Agent with a basket | gathers products, tracks prices, prepares the order | the customer approves and pays |
| Buying agent | completes the purchase within set limits (budget, brands) | the agent, with the customer's payment token |

## Which protocols sit behind agentic commerce?

Two open protocols describe buying through an agent. **ACP** (Agentic Commerce Protocol) is maintained by OpenAI and Stripe and is in beta. **UCP** (Universal Commerce Protocol) was co-developed by Google, Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, Walmart and others; it covers catalogue, basket, checkout, account linking via OAuth 2.0 and order handling. In both, the retailer remains the merchant of record.

A third acronym, **MCP** (Model Context Protocol), is a general standard for connecting tools and data to AI models. It is not a commerce protocol, but a retailer can use it to expose product search, and both ACP and UCP support it as a transport.

## What is live in the UK?

AI assistants already recommend products to UK shoppers — in ChatGPT, in Google's AI Mode and in Copilot. Buying without leaving the chat is still mostly US-only: Google's UCP checkout covers the US, Canada and Australia, with the UK announced for later, and OpenAI withdrew Instant Checkout in ChatGPT in March 2026. When a UK business deploys its own AI agent, the CMA expects it to take responsibility for that agent as it would for an employee.

## How is agentic commerce different from ordinary ecommerce?

What changes is who chooses, and in what order. In an ordinary shop the customer browses categories and filters. In agentic commerce the retailer's first "customer" is the agent that builds the shortlist — so offers with complete, consistent data win. Payment, delivery and consumer rights stay the same: a purchase made through an agent is still a distance contract with the retailer.

Details, a channel-by-channel table and a 90-day plan: [Agentic Commerce UK: What's Live, What's US-Only, What to Do Now](/en/blog/agentic-commerce-uk/).

## Sources

1. [Agentic Commerce Protocol — specification repository](https://github.com/agentic-commerce-protocol/agentic-commerce-protocol) — OpenAI and Stripe (GitHub) (accessed: 2026-10-17)
2. [Universal Commerce Protocol](https://ucp.dev/) — UCP Authors (accessed: 2026-10-17)
3. [Model Context Protocol — specification 2026-07-28](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2026-07-28) — Model Context Protocol (accessed: 2026-10-17)
4. [Google Shopping introduces Universal Cart, agentic shopping](https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/shopping/google-shopping-cart/) — Google (accessed: 2026-10-17)
5. [Complying with consumer law when using AI agents](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/complying-with-consumer-law-when-using-ai-agents/complying-with-consumer-law-when-using-ai-agents) — Competition and Markets Authority (GOV.UK) (accessed: 2026-10-17)