Agentic Commerce in E-commerce: What Will Work in 2026

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Agentic commerce is no longer just a promise—it’s a testing ground with clear winners and losers. In March 2026, ChatGPT effectively discontinued its direct-purchase feature after only about 30 active merchants in six months, while Google’s UCP protocol—backed by Shopify, Walmart, Target, and more than 20 partners—and Perplexity’s Instant Buy with PayPal are generating actual sales. For an e-commerce business, the question is no longer whether AI agents will shop on your behalf, but which protocol to prioritize and what technical requirements to meet before demand arrives. This analysis separates the hype from the verified data: what has failed, what is working, and what to audit in your store this very week.

What Is Agentic Commerce, and Why It’s Important to Separate It from the Hype

Agentic commerce is the process by which an AI agent—a conversational assistant such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity—searches for products, compares options, and completes the purchase on behalf of the user, without the user having to visit the online store. It is neither marketing automation nor a customer service chatbot: it is a complete transaction delegated to an algorithmic third party.

Adoption rates are already high. According to a survey by Midsail Research and On-Call CMO of 600 e-commerce executives—commissioned by Logicbroker and published by Digital Commerce 360—95.5% of e-commerce organizations have deployed at least one AI capability in their operations. The problem isn’t a lack of interest—it’s that most of the protocols that should facilitate these purchases are still in the experimental phase, and not all are progressing at the same pace.

ChatGPT’s Setback: Why Instant Checkout Stopped at 30 Retailers

OpenAI launched Instant Checkout on September 29, 2025, integrated into ChatGPT and built on its own Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), developed in collaboration with Stripe. The promise was to shop without leaving the conversation, with Etsy, Walmart, and Shopify merchants as the first partners.

Six months later, the reality was different. According to Emily Pfeiffer, a principal analyst at Forrester, only about 30 Shopify merchants were actually using Instant Checkout as of February 2026. OpenAI had not resolved the issue of collecting and remitting sales tax in the United States, did not support multi-item shopping carts or loyalty program integration, and struggled to display reliable product data.

On March 4, 2026, OpenAI pivoted: it shifted its focus away from Instant Checkout as a consumer-facing feature and toward “merchant-controlled checkout” models, where AI manages discovery and purchase intent, but the merchant retains control over the final payment. The ACP protocol itself is not dead—it remains active via Stripe and Shopify’s automatic merchant onboarding, and PayPal and the Nexi Group have joined as payment partners—but actual adoption, measured in actual transactions, remains low relative to the available technical infrastructure.

The lesson isn’t that AI doesn’t sell. It’s that a closed protocol, tied to a single messaging platform, takes longer to build trust than an open one backed by multiple players in the payments ecosystem.

The Rise of UCP: The Protocol That’s Gaining Traction

Google announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) on January 11, 2026, at the National Retail Federation conference; it was co-developed with Shopify. Unlike ACP, UCP was launched with simultaneous support from Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart, as well as more than 20 additional partners, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, American Express, Best Buy, and The Home Depot.

UCP is already available on Google AI Mode and Gemini, and will also be available on YouTube Shopping starting in May 2026. At Google Marketing Live on May 20, 2026, Google introduced the “Universal Cart,” which allows users to purchase products from multiple different retailers in a single transaction, with deferred payment options via Affirm and Klarna, and geographic expansion to Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

The structural difference is clear: UCP doesn’t rely on a single conversational assistant to convince users to shop there. As an open standard integrated into Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail, it leverages platforms where users already are, rather than trying to create a new one.

Perplexity’s Instant Buy: The Low-Key Approach That’s Already Generating Revenue

Perplexity launched Instant Buy with PayPal on November 25, 2025, just before Black Friday. Launch merchants included Wayfair, Abercrombie & Fitch, Fabletics, Ashley Furniture, Adorama, and Newegg, along with more than 5,000 merchants in the PayPal network and another 6,000 through BigCommerce, Shopware, and Wix.

The key to its initial traction wasn’t just the product, but the incentive: between November 25 and December 1, 2025, users who completed their first purchase via Instant Buy received a 50% refund, up to $50. But the structural factor behind its continued success is different: Perplexity didn’t build payment infrastructure from scratch; instead, it relied on the identity verification and buyer protection that PayPal had already established. It’s the same logic as UCP: leveraging existing trust, not creating new trust through the AI assistant.

Comparison: ACP vs. UCP vs. Instant Buy in July 2026

“Isn’t it too early to get my e-commerce site ready for this?”

That’s the most reasonable objection, and the data contradicts it. According to Salesforce’s State of Commerce 2025 report, 65% of B2B companies already use or are piloting AI for commerce operations—pricing, recommendations, search, personalization—and 83% of B2B commerce leaders plan to increase their investment in AI by 2026. Only 18% consider themselves “advanced” in terms of AI maturity, which means the competitive window remains open for most.

Medium-term projections underscore the urgency. McKinsey estimates that agentic commerce could account for between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in global retail spending by 2030, with up to $1 trillion in the United States alone—nearly 30% of projected B2C spending across all retail categories. Gartner, for its part, predicts that 90% of B2B purchases will be managed through AI agents by 2028, accounting for more than $15 trillion.

What Your E-Commerce Business Should Audit Right Now

• Structured product feeds: Full schema.org markup, including GTIN, price, and real-time stock availability. AI agents don’t guess—they read structured data or disregard the product.
• Connected inventory APIs: A static feed updated once a day isn’t enough. Protocols like UCP check availability at the time of the query.
• Machine-readable return policies: clear text, free of legal ambiguity, ideally marked up with the FAQ schema, because agents cite the terms and conditions before recommending a purchase.
• Compatible payment gateways: Stripe, PayPal, and Shopify Payments are currently the common entry point for all three protocols.
• Review the new terms of service for the e-commerce and advertising platforms you use to understand exactly what authority you are delegating to automated systems.

At Inprofit, we help e-commerce businesses assess this technical readiness as part of our Shopify development and e-commerce strategy projects, prioritizing what actually drives sales today over what merely makes headlines.

Frequently Asked Questions About Agentic Commerce

Jorge Anduix

Marketing tecnológico en vena. Fanático de las tecnologías Martech que rompen moldes: IA generativa, blockchain, no-code, metaverso, automatización extrema… Convencido de que el futuro no se espera, se construye (y se vende muy bien).
Responsable del marketing más disruptivo y tecnológico.