Agentic Commerce Glossary

The fast-moving vocabulary of agentic commerce, defined in plain language. Suggest a term or a correction and it will be added.

Editor’s note: Seed glossary. Expand entries and verify before publication.

A

Agent. Software that can take actions on a user’s behalf, including searching for and purchasing products. In commerce, the “shopper” may now be an agent rather than a person.

Agentic commerce. Commerce conducted by AI agents acting for a user: discovery, selection, authorization, and payment with limited human input. See What Is Agentic Commerce?.

ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol). Open standard from OpenAI and Stripe for agent-to-merchant checkout. See the protocol stack.

AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol). Google-led standard for proving a user authorized a purchase, built around three signed mandates.

A2A (Agent-to-Agent). A standard for agents to communicate and delegate tasks to each other.

C

Cart Mandate. In AP2, the signed record of the exact cart the agent assembled for the user to approve.

I

Intent Mandate. In AP2, the signed record of what the user asked for, including constraints like budget.

M

Mandate. A cryptographically signed statement of authorization that an agent can present as proof of consent.

MCP (Model Context Protocol). Anthropic’s standard for how agents discover and call tools and data. In commerce it acts as the discovery layer.

P

Payment Mandate. In AP2, the signed record of what will actually be charged.

T

Tokenization. Replacing sensitive payment details with a token, so an agent can transact without handling raw card numbers.

U

UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol). A neutral standard for the discover-cart-checkout commerce layer.

Universal cart. The idea of a single cart an agent can fill across multiple merchants.

X

x402. A settlement approach reviving HTTP 402 Payment Required for machine-native, often stablecoin, payments.