Agentic commerce explained for Australian retailers

Last reviewed: 23 September 2026.

What agentic commerce is

Agentic commerce is online shopping in which an artificial-intelligence assistant does the buying, not just the browsing: the customer tells an agent what they want, and the agent finds the product, compares the options and completes the purchase on their behalf. It turns the storefront into something a machine reads and transacts with, rather than a set of pages a person clicks through.

How it works

Two open standards have set the shape of the market, both published in September 2025. On 29 September 2025 OpenAI and Stripe introduced Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), which lets a shopper buy inside ChatGPT without leaving the conversation. ChatGPT acts as the customer's agent, passing information between shopper and merchant; the retailer still processes the payment through its existing provider and handles fulfilment and support as it does today. It launched with United States Etsy sellers, with more than a million Shopify merchants — Glossier, SKIMS, Spanx and Vuori among the named examples — to follow, and OpenAI open-sourced the protocol.

Nine days earlier, on 16 September 2025, Google published the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open standard for letting agents pay that builds on its Agent2Agent protocol and the Model Context Protocol. AP2's answer to the obvious question — how does a merchant know an agent is really acting on a customer's instruction — is the mandate: a cryptographically signed record of what the customer authorised. An intent mandate captures the request (for example, find me white running shoes under $200); a cart mandate records the exact items and price the customer approved. More than sixty organisations signed on, including Mastercard, American Express, PayPal, Adyen, Worldpay and Salesforce. In April 2026 Google handed AP2 to the FIDO Alliance to keep it vendor-neutral, and a later version added human-not-present purchases, where an agent buys automatically once pre-set conditions are met.

The two efforts are complementary rather than competing: ACP covers how an agent and a store agree on an order, AP2 covers how the payment is authorised and proven. A retailer that wants to be bought from by agents needs both a machine-readable catalogue and a checkout an agent can call.

Who has deployed it in Australia

As at the last-reviewed date, no Australian retailer has publicly enabled agent-driven checkout through either ACP or AP2. Instant Checkout launched in the United States only, and the Shopify rollout had not been confirmed for Australian storefronts. What is Australian is the groundwork: the payment providers most local retailers already use — Adyen, Mastercard, American Express, PayPal and Worldpay — are all AP2 partners, so the capability will reach the market through existing relationships rather than a new vendor.

Demand-side signals are further ahead than supply. Adyen's 2026 Retail Report (21 July 2026) found that every enterprise retailer it surveyed in Australia was investing in AI tools to automate discovery, decision-making and checkout, and that 95 per cent were familiar with agentic commerce. On the customer side, 64 per cent of Australians said they had already used AI assistants to browse, compare or discover products. The buying step, though, is where Australians hesitate — a point returned to below.

What it costs

The protocols themselves are free: ACP is open-sourced and AP2 is an open standard now stewarded by an industry body, so there is no licence to buy. The cost sits in integration and upkeep, and it depends heavily on the stack. A retailer on a platform that supports the standard natively — Shopify is the clearest example — inherits most of the work and faces a configuration exercise. A retailer on a bespoke or heavily customised stack faces an engineering project: exposing an accurate, structured product feed, standing up a checkout endpoint an agent can call, and securing its payment provider's support for the protocol. As a basis for planning, treat it as comparable to a marketplace or headless-commerce integration — measured in engineering weeks to months, not days — plus a standing operational cost for keeping product data clean, because the feed is now a sales channel rather than a back-office file. Specific figures should come from the retailer's own platform and payments contracts; published vendor pricing for these integrations is not yet meaningful.

Where it breaks

The first failure mode is trust. The same Adyen research found 64 per cent of Australians are uncomfortable letting AI complete a purchase for them, only 26 per cent are comfortable, and just 5 per cent would let an agent buy independently; 91 per cent said they prioritise security checks over speed at the checkout. Discovery through an agent is already normal; delegating the payment is not, and a retailer that assumes the second follows the first will be disappointed.

The second is disintermediation. When an agent stands between the retailer and the customer, it can take the relationship with it — the upsell, the loyalty prompt, the retail-media placement and the customer data that funds them. A retailer optimised to be picked by an agent can win the sale and lose the margin that made the sale worthwhile.

The third is data. An agent is only as good as the feed it reads; a catalogue with missing attributes, stale prices or ambiguous variants leads the agent to the wrong item, or to a competitor. Clean, structured product data is the prerequisite most teams underestimate.

The fourth is accountability. If an agent buys the wrong thing, or a fraudulent agent places an order, who is liable — the customer, the retailer, the platform or the payment provider? AP2's mandates are an attempt to make authorisation provable, but returns, chargebacks and dispute handling for agent purchases are not settled, and the answer will differ by payment provider.

Finally, it is the wrong tool for some categories. For considered, high-touch or experience-led purchases — where the value is in the advice, the fit or the brand — an agent checkout adds little and may erode what the customer came for. Agentic commerce suits repeat, specified and price-driven buying first.

Questions to ask a vendor

• Which protocols do you support — ACP, AP2, or both — and are you aligned with the FIDO Alliance's stewardship of AP2?
• How is our product data exposed to agents, and who is responsible for keeping the feed accurate?
• Do we remain the merchant of record, and how are payments, refunds and chargebacks handled for an agent order?
• What customer data do we receive from an agent transaction, and can we still run loyalty and marketing against it?
• How are authorisation and liability handled when an agent initiates a purchase — what is signed, and by whom?
• What happens, operationally, when the agent gets it wrong?