Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)
The Agentic Commerce Protocol is an open standard, co-developed by OpenAI and Stripe, that lets retailers share product data with ChatGPT and support in-chat purchase. It powers ChatGPT's shopping surface. A retailer reachable through ACP does not necessarily have a plugin in the directory.
What it does
ACP is plumbing for commerce, not a plugin format. It gives retailers a standard way to expose product data — catalogue, pricing, availability — so ChatGPT can surface and compare items, and in some configurations complete a purchase. OpenAI's Instant Checkout was built on it, co-developed with Stripe. Sam Altman has said OpenAI takes a commission on completed purchases, and reporting has cited a merchant transaction fee, so it is a revenue surface as well as a technical one.
Why this confuses people
Major retailers — Best Buy, The Home Depot, Wayfair, Nordstrom among them — are reachable in ChatGPT's shopping experience through ACP without having a plugin in the directory. So you can shop a brand in ChatGPT and find nothing when you search the directory for it. Both facts are true at once. The retailer is participating in a commerce surface, not shipping an installable app.
How to tell which you are looking at
An app or plugin is something you install from the directory, and it can do things beyond shopping — connecting your account, taking actions, rendering its own interface. An ACP integration is product data flowing into ChatGPT's own shopping experience: you never install anything, and it only exists inside commerce queries. If there is nothing to enable and no permission prompt, it is the commerce surface, not an app.
Why we don't rank ACP retailers
There is nothing to review. Our seven criteria assess an integration — setup, in-chat experience, reliability, the permissions it asks for. A retailer feeding a catalogue into ChatGPT's shopping surface has no setup, no permission scope, and no interface of its own; the experience you get is OpenAI's, not the retailer's. Scoring it would mean scoring ChatGPT's shopping feature and attributing the result to a brand. The retailers in our catalog — Target, Walmart, Sephora, Etsy, Shopify, Klarna — are there because each ships an actual app.
Where it is heading
OpenAI has publicly reworked its shopping approach at least once, shifting emphasis from completing checkout in chat toward product discovery with retailers handling the purchase. Expect the boundary between commerce surface and app to keep moving, and treat any claim about what a specific retailer can do in ChatGPT as dated from the moment it was written.