Stripe has announced that it is helping OpenAI launch a commerce experience called Instant Checkout in ChatGPT. ChatGPT users in the US can buy goods from US-based Etsy businesses—and, coming soon, “over a million Shopify merchants, like Glossier, Vuori, Spanx, and SKIMS—directly in the chat.”
This addition of AI-enabled commerce is “powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), a new, merchant-friendly open standard codeveloped by Stripe and OpenAI, informed by Stripe’s 15 years of experience building commerce infrastructure.”
As more people use AI tools in their everyday lives, interfaces like ChatGPT are “becoming a new kind of storefront.”
The flow is said to be simple: a ChatGPT user asks for “product recommendations in the chat. When they are ready to buy, they are presented with a Stripe-powered checkout inline in the chat.”
After the buyer uses their preferred payment method (including Link, Stripe’s consumer payments product), Stripe issues “a Shared Payment Token (SPT), a new payment primitive that lets applications like ChatGPT initiate a payment without exposing the buyer’s payment credentials.”
SPTs are scoped to a specific merchant and cart total.
Once issued, ChatGPT passes the token to the merchant via API.
The merchant can then process the transaction “through Stripe—or, if preferred, handle the payment with another provider while still benefiting from Stripe’s risk scores for fraud protection.”
ChatGPT acts like the buyer’s AI agent, “helping them buy from businesses just like a personal shopper would.”
Orders flow from ChatGPT to a merchant’s backend via ACP.
Merchants can “accept or decline the order, charge the payment method, calculate and remit sales tax, and handle fulfillment and returns, as they normally would.”
The result is a smooth commerce experience “inside ChatGPT for consumers and a new sales channel for businesses.”
Traditional e-commerce was built for humans—businesses “controlled the interface and payments while shoppers browsed and clicked.”
In AI-led commerce, agents act “for the buyer, carrying their identity, payment method, and purchase context into the transaction.”
To support this shift, businesses must expose their products, pricing, and checkout in a way agents can use, while still “protecting payment credentials and preventing fraud.”
Because agents now sit between businesses and consumers, “everything from payments and checkout to fraud checks must be re-architected.”
And with many AI agents emerging, it’s “not realistic for businesses to maintain integrations with each one.”
That’s why Stripe and OpenAI have created ACP.
It creates a shared language between businesses and AI agents.
With a single integration, merchants will be “able to start selling through AI agents while retaining full control over what’s sold, how their brand shows up, and how orders are fulfilled.”
ACP provides the standardization “needed for businesses to participate in agentic commerce while preserving customer relationships and their existing systems.”
ACP is an open standard: businesses not processing with Stripe can still adopt it “with their existing payment providers, and it works across AI agents.”
Stripe and OpenAI have partnered since 2023, when OpenAI “began using Stripe Billing and Stripe Checkout for ChatGPT Plus subscriptions, detecting fraud with Stripe Radar, and using Link for fast and easy checkout.”