How this differs from ordinary checkout automation
Ordinary e-commerce automation still waits for a person to click buy. Agentic commerce moves that decision inside the agent, so no checkout step is left for a person to take. The card networks have started building for it. Mastercard announced Agent Pay at the end of April 2025. It rests on Mastercard Agentic Tokens, built on the tokenisation the network already uses, and on registering and authenticating trusted agents (PYMNTS, The Paypers, Mastercard). The programme has its own page here: What is Mastercard Agent Pay?.
Identity: Know Your Agent
A merchant also needs to know whose agent it is dealing with. That check is called Know Your Agent, which is Know Your Customer applied to software acting for somebody. On 9 September 2026 Ant International, Mastercard and Visa said they had begun work on a shared Know Your Agent framework, so that agent onboarding and identification work across their networks (Business Wire, via StockTitan, PYMNTS). The detail is in What is Know Your Agent?, and I first wrote about the shift in Know Your Agent is the new Know Your Customer.
The protocols underneath
Three open protocols split the work. The Agentic Commerce Protocol, which Stripe co-developed with OpenAI, standardises the checkout conversation between an agent and a merchant (Stripe, Payments Dive). Google's Agent Payments Protocol carries signed mandates that show a person authorised the spend (Google Cloud, the AP2 specification), and Google handed it to the FIDO Alliance in April 2026 (Google, The Paypers, via the FIDO Alliance). The Universal Commerce Protocol, which Google announced on 11 January 2026 and developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, covers the buying journey from discovery to post-purchase support (Google, TechCrunch). ACP vs AP2 sets the first two side by side, and What is the Universal Commerce Protocol? covers the third. I started tracking them in Five protocols, one checkout.
Where to follow it
Retailers set their own terms as well, and Amazon's are covered in Can AI agents shop on Amazon?. The news desk on this site follows the story with every source named. The regulation is landing too: Nine days out, the stablecoin rulebook finally gets numbers.