Retailers unprepared for agentic commerce shift, AI platforms

Image credit: Search Engine Journal

Many top retailers are unprepared for agentic commerce, where artificial intelligence platforms facilitate entire customer journeys, making traditional e-commerce strategies obsolete.

This new phase of online retail allows consumers to complete purchases, from product discovery to checkout, directly within AI environments, making conventional website visits optional.

Google announced its Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) in January, establishing an open standard designed to support agentic commerce across the full shopping experience, including updated checkout and catalog functionalities like shopping carts.

Previously, OpenAI and Stripe introduced the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) in September 2025, initially focusing on Instant Checkout for single-item transactions, according to statements from the organizations.

However, OpenAI later scaled back its Instant Checkout ambitions in March, pivoting ACP’s focus primarily to product discovery within its ChatGPT platform.

Target Corp. has already begun integrating with Google‘s UCP, demonstrating how customers can complete purchases within AI conversations without needing to leave the chat interface, the company reported.

Agentic commerce relies heavily on detailed, accurate, and real-time product feed data and on-page schema, rather than traditional content optimization or search engine optimization (SEO) techniques aimed at driving website traffic.

Despite this critical requirement, most retailers currently treat product feeds as a secondary project, often providing insufficient data to support seamless agentic commerce transactions, industry analysts have indicated.

This underinvestment in product data leaves a significant portion of top retailers ill-equipped for emerging AI-driven shopping, potentially making their products invisible in agentic environments.

Source: Search Engine Journal