Agentic Commerce Starts Getting Real
Published on Oct 30, 2025 by dix.
Booking A Ski Trip for 10 People
Every year I go for a ski trip with 7-10 friends and former coworkers. This year I took charge of booking a place to stay. The task came with many constraints: separate bedrooms as much as possible, $x / night / person, a hot tub would be nice, lets be close to the lifts. After an hour or two of searching, I had found four to five options. I sent the options to the other attendees, got consensus and got everything booked. Everyone thanked me for taking charge and getting it done, I replied “next year, AI will do it for us”,
Visa Agentic Commerce Announcement
In April 2025, Visa demonstrated a very similar use case in a flashy video starring Christian McCaffrey.1 The video showed McCaffrey asking his AI agent to book a trip to San Francisco for his family. The video showed a Visa UI that cardholders could use to set and approve a specific budget for the task; this video as well as Visa’s descriptions during the product drop described card holders being directly involved in setting budgets through a Visa hosted UI.
So far it seems that Visa only has opened up the APIs for this functionality to a few partners. Based on this, it’s reasonable to assume that the implementation of these APIs involves quite a bit of hand holding as well as a lengthy certification process.
Now, six months on, we are starting to see somewhat usable, somewhat public implementations of these agentic commerce ideas. Stripe, in concert with OpenAI, announced the first real implementation. WorldPay followed shortly thereafter. By the time I hit publish on this post, it’s likely that other PSPs will have announced their implementations.
Stripe Announcements
In early October 2025, Stripe announced two major building blocks for Agentic commerce, the Stripe Shared Payment Token and the Agentic Commerce Protocol2. This announcement came along with an announcement from OpenAI that customers can use ChatGPT to buy items from Shopify and Etsy, implying that this experience is powered by these two new building blocks.
Stripe Shared Payment Token
As a caveat, my opinions here are based only on reading the product announcements and documentation. I have not implemented a payment integration using either of these new building blocks. Stripe implements similar features to the ones that Visa discussed in their product launch in April, but with a few interesting differences. For one, Visa focused heavily on the cardholder’s control over how the card can be used by the agent. Stripe Shared Payment Tokens 3 have usage limits that can limit the amount of transactions on the card, how long the token is valid for, or what businesses the token can be used at. However, it is not clear that customers will directly be setting these limits or if the agent itself will do so. If the agent itself, are there potential concerns about prompt injection? It is also not clear to me how these usage limits are implemented. Is Stripe issuing virtual cards and checking these limits when authorizing the card? Are they making use of the Visa agentic tokenization feature? What should merchants expect when these limits are breached?
Stripe mentions that these Shared Payment Tokens are forwardable for merchants using a non-Stripe payment provider. However, there does not seem to be specific documentation on how merchants will handle this. Presumably these merchants will need to use the Stripe vault and forward API which does require a Stripe account.It’s certainly reasonable that Stripe would prioritize implementing the easier to handle use cases where the agent and merchant are both already integrated with Stripe, but this will exclude a large number of merchants from Agentic commerce.
Agentic Commerce Protocol
In addition to the Shared Payment Token, Stripe and OpenAI announced the Agentic Commerce Protocol4. The protocol’s website describes it as “An open standard for programmatic commerce flows between buyers, AI agents, and businesses”. I’m sure the ambition of the teams working on this protocol is that it will indeed be an open standard. However, as things currently stand, it is clear that it will only work on Stripe. In fact, as it currently stands, the spec for the protocol only allows stripe as a payment processor.5
If this is just a first pass and interoperability improves as more payment service providers integrate the Agentic Commerce Protocol, this will be a good foundation. However, if Stripe remains to be such a strong default, I suspect this will hamstring adoption of the protocol by merchants. I’d predict that only merchants selling through ecommerce platforms like Shopify and Etsy will adopt this protocol and merchants maintaining their own platforms will not. While the inventories of Shopify and Etsy will certainly provide customers a lot of options, they probably will not be sufficient to ensure continued growth of agentic commerce.
Walled Gardens
Agentic commerce is one of the newest in a long line of features that AI companies have announced that can be bolted into their platforms. Some of these features have been quite open, Model Context Protocol for example, others have been quite closed. While Model Context Protocol was developed within Anthropic, and Claude was the first client to support it. It was quickly adopted by other clients; in fact it is a key part of the ChatGPT Apps feature from OpenAI.
While the Agentic Commerce Protocol seems agnostic from the perspective of Agent implementers, it is certainly not open with respect to a merchant’s payment processor. The other key part of the agentic commerce protocol experience, product discovery is also not particularly open. The OpenAI product feed spec is an open protocol, but participating in the program requires applying to and receiving permission from OpenAI.
I fear that these platforms will grow to resemble the Apple App Store more than a free and open internet.