AI Commerce
7 articles
10 Agentic Commerce Protocols, Zero Interop: The 2026 Guide
There are ten active agentic commerce protocols in the market, and none of them talk to each other. That's what a retailer walks into when they ask their engineering team, "so, how do we get our catalog into AI shopping?" The answer used to be "pick ACP." In April 2026, it is a spreadsheet. TL;DR: Ten agentic commerce protocols are live or piloting in Q2 2026 with zero interoperability. Betting on the wrong one locks you out of specific AI surfaces. This guide sorts them by function (di
Google AI Mode Shopping Upgrade: What Retailers Must Do Now
Google AI Mode shopping now delivers organized product responses combining visuals, prices, reviews, and real-time inventory, and the retailers surfacing in those results have one thing in common: complete, structured catalog data matched against Google's Shopping Graph. On April 7, 2026, Google announced its biggest-ever upgrade to shopping in AI Mode, simultaneously expanding shopping features into the Gemini app and Circle to Search on Android. The optimization lever isn't SEO. It's catalog c
Agentic Commerce Product Data: Why Structure Wins
AI shopping agents consistently chose the more expensive product - because it had clean structured data. That's the finding from a controlled experiment published by O'Reilly last week. Even when the cheaper alternative led with polished marketing copy, agents ignored it. With ChatGPT visual shopping now live for 900 million weekly users as of March 25, 2026, your products are being evaluated on the same terms, every day, at scale. Agentic commerce product data optimization is the practice of
Meta Joins the AI Shopping Race. That Makes Five Platforms Retailers Need to Feed.
Bloomberg reported on March 3 that Meta is testing an AI-powered shopping research tool inside Meta AI. The feature shows product carousels with pricing, brand information, and links to merchant websites. No native checkout - just referral links, similar to how Google Shopping has worked for years. Forrester analyst Sucharita Kodali called it "a copycat move," and she's right. But that doesn't make it irrelevant. Count the major AI shopping surfaces retailers now need to think about: ChatGPT,
OpenAI Just Killed Native Checkout in ChatGPT. The Retailers Who Saw This Coming Are Already Ahead.
OpenAI killed Instant Checkout in ChatGPT this week. The Information broke the story on March 6: purchases are moving out of the chat interface and into merchant apps and websites. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed it, saying they're "evolving our commerce strategy within ChatGPT to better meet merchants and users where they are." Translation: building a checkout inside a chatbot turned out to be way harder than demoing it on stage. If you've been in ecommerce long enough, this feels famili
What Is Agentic Commerce Optimization (ACO)? The Complete Guide for Retailers
Agentic Commerce Optimization (ACO) ensures your products are discoverable, selectable, and purchasable through AI interfaces like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode. The complete guide for retailers.
The Week AI Shopping Went Mainstream
Related: evolution from catalog to conversation Key finding: The week of February 17, 2026 marked agentic commerce going mainstream: Bloomberg declared the "age of agentic commerce," Harvard Business Review published an AI shopping strategy guide, Reddit launched AI product carousels, and Loblaw deployed AI checkout across 600+ Canadian stores. Last updated: February 26, 2026 The Week AI Shopping Went Mainstream There are weeks where nothing happens in retail, and then there are weeks wher