Agentic commerce: how AI agents shop for customers in Europe

Agentic commerce is shopping in which an AI agent searches, compares and orders on the customer's behalf. Google already lets shoppers in the US and Canada pay inside AI Mode and Gemini, while ChatGPT shows products and sends the buyer to the store to pay. For an online store in the EU, what counts today is complete product data, a Google Merchant Center feed and a fast checkout.

The facts on ChatGPT, Google and the protocols come from official OpenAI and Google pages, linked in the text. How a store gets into AI answers in the first place is covered in the guide to generative engine optimization for online stores; this article starts where the agent has found the product and needs to buy it.

What is agentic commerce?

Agentic commerce is commerce in which an AI agent takes over part of the buyer's decisions and actions. An AI agent is a program that understands a request, uses tools (search, catalogs, cart, payment) and works toward a result on its own. The shopper says what they want and sets the limits, and the agent does the rest. What an AI agent is in general, and how it differs from a chatbot, is explained in the article on why an AI agent is useful for an online store.

It has three levels, by how much of the purchase the machine handles:

Level	What the agent does	What the customer does	Example at the time of writing
1. Recommendation	Searches, compares price, stock and reviews, shows product cards	Clicks through and buys on the store's website	Shopping in ChatGPT, product listings in Google AI Mode
2. Checkout in the chat	Builds the cart, address and payment inside its own interface	Approves the order with one confirmation	Checkout in Google AI Mode and Gemini for merchants in the US and Canada
3. Delegated purchase	Buys on its own once conditions set in advance are met	Sets the limits: brand, product, maximum amount	"Human not present" payments under the AP2 protocol

For a store selling in Germany, Austria, Poland, Italy or anywhere else in the EU, level 1 works today. Levels 2 and 3 are not yet open to EU merchants, but they run on the same data level 1 needs. So the preparation is the same for all three.

How an AI agent shops for the customer: 5 steps

An AI shopping agent goes through the same steps as a person, but it reads data instead of browsing the storefront. Each step depends on something the store either provides or leaves out:

1. It understands the request. "Office coffee machine under €400, with a grinder, delivered to Vienna by Friday" becomes category, price, feature, country and deadline.
2. It collects candidates from product feeds, store pages and structured data. A product without price, availability or brand drops out here.
3. It compares price with shipping to the buyer's country, delivery time, reviews and returns, then shows a few options or picks one.
4. It handles cart and payment. At level 1 it sends the customer to the store; at levels 2 and 3 it opens a checkout session under ACP or UCP and passes a payment token to the store.
5. The store accepts the order as seller of record under both ACP and UCP: it charges the card, ships and handles returns.

As seller of record, you keep every EU distance-selling duty. According to Your Europe, the EU's official business portal, you must show the total price including taxes and delivery before the order, the customer has 14 days to withdraw without giving a reason, you refund within 14 days of being notified, and the order button must make clear that the customer is committing to pay. An agent ordering in a chat does not change any of this. The details are in the article on returns and consumer rights for online stores.

ChatGPT shopping and Instant Checkout: where things stand

Shopping in ChatGPT is live only in the US, and the purchase is completed on the merchant's website or app. That is what OpenAI states on its page for merchants, which says shopping "will expand to additional regions over time" without naming dates or countries. The path so far:

• The launch. In September 2025 OpenAI and Stripe introduced Instant Checkout, a purchase inside the chat, together with the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), the open standard ChatGPT uses to talk to a store's checkout.
• Now. OpenAI is moving away from a standalone Instant Checkout. Products appear as cards, the buyer pays on the merchant's site, and OpenAI charges no fee on purchases that start in ChatGPT.
• Who is in. Shopify and Etsy catalogs are already connected; other merchants apply on chatgpt.com/merchants and join a waitlist.

ACP is still the foundation of shopping in ChatGPT. OpenAI's developer documentation splits it into three parts:

Part of ACP	What it does	What it means for the store
Product feed	The catalog (JSONL, CSV or TSV) with identifiers, descriptions, price, availability, images and shipping, sent by file upload or API	Update the feed when a sale starts or ends and when stock changes
Agentic Checkout	ChatGPT opens, updates and completes a checkout session in the store's system	The store calculates shipping and taxes itself and accepts or declines the order
Delegated Payment	A single-use payment token handled by the store's payment service provider	The payment goes through your provider like any other card payment

One limit in the ACP feed specification matters directly for European sellers: the standard upload currently targets the US, the shared format covers the US, Canada and Mexico, and other markets are used only after OpenAI confirms the countries and currencies. A store selling in euro, złoty or koruna cannot send its own feed to ChatGPT yet.

In ordinary answers ChatGPT still searches the web and can cite stores anywhere in Europe, without product cards and checkout.

Google AI Mode, Gemini and the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)

Google has gone further than OpenAI: in AI Mode and the Gemini app the customer can pay for an order without leaving the conversation, so far with merchants in the US and Canada. The foundation is the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard announced by Google in January 2026.

• What UCP covers. The whole journey: discovering the product, buying it and support after the sale. It is compatible with AP2 (payments), A2A (agent-to-agent communication) and MCP (the Model Context Protocol, which connects an agent to tools).
• Who built it. Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, with more than 20 endorsers including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Adyen and Zalando.
• How the buyer pays. With Google Pay, using details saved in Google Wallet. The retailer remains the seller of record.
• New product data. Google is adding dozens of new attributes in Merchant Center, such as answers to common product questions, compatible accessories and substitutes. They extend the feed the store already sends.

The rollout goes country by country. In November 2026 Google started UCP checkout for shoppers in Canada, first with selected retailers, and plans simpler UCP setup inside Merchant Center from next year. No EU country appears in any of the announcements so far.

For an EU store, level 1 runs through Merchant Center: listings in AI Mode and Gemini come from its data, and the purchase finishes in your store. How to connect the catalog and which attributes you need is explained step by step in the guide to Google Merchant Center and Google Shopping. If you sell into several countries, each target country needs its own feed in its own language and currency. How to structure that is covered in the guide to multilingual and multi-currency stores.

How an AI agent pays: AP2 and payment mandates

The Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) is the open protocol an agent uses to prove the customer authorized exactly this purchase. Google announced AP2 in September 2025 with more than 60 organizations, among them Adyen, American Express, Mastercard, PayPal, Revolut and Worldpay.

AP2 works with mandates: tamper-proof, cryptographically signed records of the customer's instructions. There are two kinds:

• Intent Mandate records the request and its rules: "white running shoes under €120". For a delegated purchase the customer signs it in advance with a price limit, timing and other conditions.
• Cart Mandate locks the exact items and price the customer approved. What they saw is what they pay.

The three protocols side by side:

Protocol	Who and when	What it covers	Status at the time of writing	For an EU store
ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol)	OpenAI and Stripe, September 2025	Feed, checkout session and payment token in ChatGPT	Shopping in ChatGPT for the US, payment on the merchant's site	Not available
UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol)	Google with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, January 2026	Discovery, purchase and post-sale support in AI Mode and Gemini	Checkout in the US and, since November 2026, Canada	Not available; product listings come from Merchant Center
AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol)	Google with more than 60 organizations, September 2025	Proof of the customer's authorization through mandates	Open protocol, compatible with UCP	Concerns payment providers more than the store directly

A store with built-in card payments, Apple Pay and Google Pay is closest to these protocols when they reach Europe.

What your online store needs now: 8 steps

An AI agent buys from the store whose data it understands. Each step below already helps in Google AI Mode, Google Shopping and ChatGPT today, and each is a condition for in-chat checkout once it reaches the EU:

1. Fill in the identifiers. Brand, barcode (GTIN, the EAN on European products) and manufacturer part number (MPN) for every variant. Agents compare products by these fields; without them the same item in two stores looks like two different products. In CloudCart the GTIN sent to Google is taken from the barcode field.
2. Keep price and stock correct in real time. A sold-out product or an old price in the agent's suggestion loses the order. Switch on automatic updates for price and availability in the Google feed.
3. Check the product's structured data. Name, image, price and currency at minimum, plus availability, brand, GTIN, reviews, shipping and returns. Test one product page in Google's Rich Results Test.
4. Publish shipping and returns as data. Shipping price and delivery time per country, the free shipping threshold and the 14-day withdrawal period, with the same numbers on your pages, in Merchant Center and in descriptions.
5. Answer the questions in the description. Who the product is for, what it goes with, what it replaces, sizes, materials. The agent quotes a specific passage, and Google is adding exactly these attributes to Merchant Center.
6. Let AI crawlers in and write llms.txt. OAI-SearchBot, Googlebot and the other search crawlers must be able to read your product pages. The crawler table and a sample llms.txt are in the GEO article.
7. Keep pages fast and readable without scripts. Price, availability and description belong in the page's HTML. See the guide to PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals.
8. Cut checkout down to one tap. The buyer from an AI answer has already chosen. Offer card, Apple Pay and Google Pay in the store, with no extra fields or redirects.

Important: do not pay anyone to "register your store with ChatGPT". OpenAI accepts merchants only through its own form on chatgpt.com/merchants, and Google shows products in AI Mode from Merchant Center, which you connect directly.

Agentic commerce in CloudCart: what is ready and what you do

CloudCart, the ecommerce platform from Bulgaria, provides the data and channels AI agents read today. Here is where each piece sits in the admin, following the platform documentation:

What the agent needs	What CloudCart does	What you do
Your catalog in Google AI Mode and Gemini	The Google Shopping app (Apps → Google Shopping) sends products to Merchant Center, one offer per variant	Connect Merchant Center, map the attributes, switch on automatic updates
Correct price and stock	Automatic updates send up to 8 fields on every save: name, description, images, price, sale price, availability, brand, category	Select at least price, sale price and availability
Selling in several EU countries	The feed uses the store's language, country and currency; for more countries you run a separate store per country, each with its own Merchant Center ID	Set up a store for each target market
Feeds to other channels	32 sales channels (Etsy, TikTok Shop, eMAG, Skroutz, Glami and more) and XML Feed Generator for your own feed	Switch on the channels you sell in
A store description for AI	The "Llms.txt file" card in Marketing → SEO publishes /llms.txt	Write your own text with categories and conditions
Crawler access	sitemap.xml is generated automatically; robots.txt blocks cart and checkout on its own	Check crawlers are not blocked; on trial or an expired plan, robots.txt blocks all with Disallow: /
Fast payment	CloudCart Pay: cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay in the store	Switch it on under Settings → Payment methods → CloudCart Pay
What customers search for	Aura Search shows searches with no results and searches without a purchase	Add the missing products and synonyms; the same words go into descriptions

The searches in Aura Search show the exact words customers will also type to an AI agent, so they belong in your descriptions. Every order an AI agent brings carries 0% commission on sales, just like orders from Google, ads and marketplaces. If you sell across borders, VAT on those orders is explained in the guide to OSS and EU VAT for cross-border sales.

Mistakes that keep a store out of AI shopping

• Different prices on the site and in the feed. Merchant Center disapproves such products, and they vanish from Google Shopping and AI Mode.
• "Price on request" or a €0 price. Google needs a price above zero, and an agent cannot compare a product without one.
• Variants merged into one product. If "size 42, black" exists only in the text, the variant does not exist for the agent.
• Delivery time hidden in the terms. "When will it arrive in Milan?" needs an answer on the product page and in the feed.
• A blanket Disallow: /. It blocks the crawlers that bring buyers too. Block only training crawlers, by name.

Questions about the feed, payments or the AI assistant: support@cloudcart.com.

Frequently asked questions