Ecommerce is entering a new phase – one where transactions can happen entirely off-site, making website visits optional, if not redundant. If your ecommerce and SEO teams are still playing the old game, there could be trouble ahead.
Of course, I’m talking about agentic commerce, where the entire customer journey – from discovery to checkout – can happen within AI. And boy do things move quickly!
In September 2025, OpenAI and Stripe announced their Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), allowing customers to not only research and decide which product to buy, but also complete single-item transactions right there in the chat with Instant Checkout.
In January, Google announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), “a new open standard for agentic commerce that works across the entire shopping journey – from discovery and buying to post-purchase support.”
And then in March, after only six months, OpenAI backed away from Instant Checkout, claiming that the initial version “did not offer the level of flexibility that we aspire to provide.” Instead, ACP is placing more focus on product discovery – driving valuable visibility for your brand and products within ChatGPT – while retailers can decide if and how they integrate their own checkout experiences.
In the same month, Google rolled out a UCP update that included a bunch of new checkout and catalog capabilities, including shopping carts.
So, if there’s one thing we’ve learned already, you’d better stay alert.
My honest prediction is that, sometime in the first half of next year, we’ll start hearing from some retailers that they achieve a better return on investment from agentic commerce than, say, paid social. The difference, and the competitive opportunity, will become clear.
So, I decided to do some research to see just how ready some of the top-performing retailers are for agentic commerce. And it appears a lot of them may be extremely unprepared.
But before we get to the research data, it’s important to understand why agentic commerce presents a very different challenge to retailers.
The End Of Traffic-First Ecommerce
We’ve known for a while that AI is gradually coopting more of the customer journey, particularly in the discovery, research and consideration stages.
The primary challenge for retailers has been getting into that all-important consideration set by ensuring their brand and products are recommended at key points in relevant AI conversations. Get that right, and hopefully, when the customer makes a purchasing decision, it’s your website they click through to.
For three decades now, website traffic has been at the heart of ecommerce. Online retailers have dedicated so much time, effort and money to refining the art of customer attraction – through SEO and content, through email and social media, through special offers and loyalty programs – anything…
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