The words of selling online, in plain language.

Agentic commerce is shopping where AI agents do part of the work on someone's behalf. A shopper's assistant searches and compares products and, where the store takes part, buys once the shopper confirms. On the seller's side, an agent prepares catalog, price and order work for a person to approve. Open standards such as Google's Universal Commerce Protocol and the Agentic Commerce Protocol from OpenAI and Stripe set how agents and stores exchange data.

Read on:What is agentic commerce?Getting a store ready for AI shopping agentsWhat an AI agent can run in your store

An AI shopping assistant is a chat or search tool that finds and compares products for a shopper, working from stores' product data. Some can buy too: Google's agentic checkout completes a purchase only after the shopper confirms the details, and in ChatGPT the purchase is completed on the merchant's own site or app by default. Assistants decide from product data, so complete facts and clear policies affect whether a store shows up in an answer.

Read on:Agentic commerce for merchantsGetting a store ready for AI shopping agents

The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is an open standard Google launched on 11 January 2026, co-developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart. It lets agents and stores work together from discovery and checkout to support after the sale. On Google it powers buying in AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app. The store remains the merchant of record, and joining starts with a Google Merchant Center account and product feed.

Read on:Agentic commerce for agent buildersGetting a store ready for AI shopping agentsUCP and ACP, explained for a small store

The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) is an open standard, published under the Apache 2.0 license, that OpenAI and Stripe developed so AI agents and businesses can complete purchases. The store keeps the customer relationship as merchant of record and can accept or decline a transaction per agent or per order. ChatGPT uses ACP to read merchants' product feeds, and by default the shopper completes the purchase on the merchant's own site or app.

Read on:Agentic commerce for agent buildersGetting a store ready for AI shopping agentsUCP and ACP, explained for a small store

A product feed is a structured file or data stream that lists a store's products with fields such as title, description, images, price, availability and identifiers like GTIN. Stores send feeds to Google Merchant Center, ad platforms and AI shopping services such as ChatGPT, which use them to show the products. OpenAI recommends sending the whole feed once a day and the changes through the day, so prices and stock stay current.

Read on:Ally on your catalogProduct pages that answer buyers' questions

Multichannel selling means offering one catalog in several places at once, such as your own website, Amazon, eBay, Walmart or TikTok Shop. Amazon says more than 95% of the independent sellers in its store sell across multiple channels. The hard part is keeping one stock count, the same product facts and each channel's prices and rules in step, since every channel has its own listings, fees and policies.

Read on:Ways to sellIntegrationsSelling on Amazon and your own store

The merchant of record is the business that sells the goods and takes the payment from the customer. Its name appears on the card statement, and it handles refunds and chargebacks. When an AI agent places an order through the Agentic Commerce Protocol or Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, the store stays the merchant of record. The agent's platform and the payment provider don't become the seller.

Read on:Agentic commerce for merchantsPayments

A GTIN (Global Trade Item Number) is the standard number that identifies a product everywhere it's sold, and the barcode carries it. North America mostly uses the 12-digit UPC (GTIN-12), Europe the 13-digit EAN (GTIN-13), and books use ISBN. Amazon requires a GTIN to create new listings in most categories. Google uses it to match products and tells sellers not to guess one or make one up.

Read on:The barcode generatorProduct pages that answer buyers' questions

Structured data is code on a web page that states the page's facts in a standard format, so search engines and other software don't have to guess. On a product page that means the name, image, price, currency, availability and return policy, written in the schema.org vocabulary, usually as JSON-LD, the format Google recommends. Google uses it for richer results and asks sites not to mark up anything readers can't see on the page.

Read on:Product pages that answer buyers' questionsAgentic commerce for merchants

A referral fee is the commission a marketplace takes when an item sells, usually a percentage of the sale. Amazon charges a percentage of the total price, shipping included, with a minimum per item. Walmart's rate depends on the category and is only deducted once a sale completes, and eBay calls its version a final value fee. Listing, plan, advertising and fulfillment fees often come on top, and some marketplaces charge for card processing too.

Read on:The profit margin calculatorWays to sellMarketplace seller fees in 2026, compared

Fulfillment is everything between an order and the customer's door: storing stock, picking and packing items, shipping them and handling returns. A seller can do it in-house or pay a service to do it. Amazon, for example, stores a seller's inventory in its warehouses and ships orders from Amazon and from other channels out of that one pool, using unbranded packaging by default for orders placed elsewhere.

Read on:FulfillmentShipping

Dimensional weight is a billing weight a carrier works out from a parcel's size. The carrier compares it with the actual weight and charges for whichever is greater, which is why a light, bulky box can cost more to ship than a small, heavy one. For Priority Mail parcels over one cubic foot, USPS multiplies length, width and height in inches, each rounded up, and divides by 139 to get pounds.

Read on:ShippingShipping and returns a small shop can keep

A chargeback happens when a cardholder disputes a payment with their card issuer. The issuer opens a formal dispute on the card network, which reverses the payment at once. With Stripe, the seller's balance is then debited for the payment and a dispute fee. The seller can respond with evidence. On Amazon, chargebacks on seller-fulfilled orders count toward the order defect rate, which sellers must keep under 1%.

Read on:Fraud protectionPayments

An AI crawler is a bot an AI company sends to read web pages, and the big companies run several with different jobs. OpenAI's GPTBot collects content that may train its models, while OAI-SearchBot finds pages for ChatGPT search, and blocking it keeps a site out of those answers. Site owners set each bot separately in robots.txt. Fetchers acting on a user's request, such as ChatGPT-User or Google-Agent, may not follow those rules.

Read on:Getting a store ready for AI shopping agentsAgentic commerce for merchants