Agentic commerce: what is open to a European merchant
AI assistants are starting to buy on shoppers' behalf. Program by program, what is actually open outside the US, and the work that pays off today.
Updated on October 9, 2026 · by the skoup team
What agentic commerce covers
Agentic commerce is when an AI assistant no longer just cites products: it compares them, fills a cart, sometimes pays on the buyer's behalf. Over the past year, every major player has announced a program. The announcements are many; what is actually open to a store outside the United States is much less.
This guide sorts it out for European merchants. The facts come from each vendor's official pages, read on October 9, 2026, and where a page could not be read, from a named press source. This table changes every month: check the update date at the top of the page before you decide anything.
The table, program by program
The common thread is plain: payment by an agent is, for now, an American affair. Discovery is not. A shopper in Paris, Berlin or Madrid who asks ChatGPT or Gemini "which mattress for back pain, under €800?" already gets a list of products. That is where the sale is decided, even if it closes on your site afterwards.
OpenAI: discovery before payment
OpenAI launched Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), built with Stripe, in September 2025. On March 24, 2026, it changed course: according to its statement as reported by TechInformed and Storyboard18, the first version of Instant Checkout "did not offer the level of flexibility" it wanted. Merchants now take payment on their own site, and ChatGPT focuses on discovery: comparisons, filters, image search.
Sources disagree on Instant Checkout's exact status: the press speaks of it being dropped, OpenAI's documentation still describes it for approved partners. Keep to what is certain: a European merchant has no access to it, and it is no longer OpenAI's priority.
Today ACP mostly carries product feeds. The documentation says it plainly: feed onboarding is "currently available to approved partners", by application. The specification targets the United States by default; another country requires confirmation from OpenAI. For a Shopify store, OpenAI says the data flows through Shopify Catalog.
In Europe, the most visible example is Carrefour, which launched its app inside ChatGPT in France at the end of March 2026: the cart is built in the conversation, payment happens on carrefour.fr.
The guide ChatGPT Shopping: product pages and feeds details the feed fields and the robots to allow.
Google: UCP, AI Mode and Merchant Center
Google introduced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) on January 11, 2026, designed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart. It adds a "Buy" button to product listings in AI Mode and the Gemini app. The shopper pays with Google Pay; the merchant stays the seller of record.
According to the Merchant Center page, checkout is open to products in the United States, Canada and Australia, for selected merchants. It takes a Merchant Center account, the native_commerce attribute on eligible products, a Google Pay account and an interest form. In May 2026, Google announced the UK "later". No other European country is named.
What already helps in Europe: Merchant Center itself. Google has added "conversational" attributes to describe a product the way people talk about it, and its AI optimization guide names Merchant Center feeds among what helps a product appear in AI answers. A store with a clean feed there is ready for the day checkout opens.
Shopify: the agentic channel, on by default
Shopify launched its Agentic Storefronts on the same January 11, 2026. It is a sales channel in the admin: the catalog goes out to ChatGPT, AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Meta. According to Shopify's help center, it is on by default for eligible stores, and is managed under Sales channels › Agentic.
Two points matter for a European merchant:
- Buying is limited to US buyers. Shopify's blog says so: "purchasing across all channels is currently available to US buyers only". A merchant based anywhere can sell there, provided it sells to the United States.
- On ChatGPT, payment happens on your own checkout. On Google, Copilot and Meta, it can happen inside the channel when that option is on.
Shopify also publishes a figure: in Q1 2026, AI-driven traffic to its stores grew 8 times year over year, and orders nearly 13 times. That is Shopify's figure, on its stores, not a market average.
A dated observation: files for agents
On October 9, 2026, we opened the robots.txt of two North American Shopify stores (Brooklinen and Tentree). Both start with comments addressed to agents, pointing to three addresses: /agents.md (instructions for agents), /.well-known/ucp (the store's UCP profile, version 2026-08-25) and an MCP endpoint for catalog, cart and checkout. One line reads "Checkouts are for humans".
We found no Shopify documentation describing this rollout. A store with a customized robots.txt may not have them. Our robots.txt checker tells you whether your store publishes them.
Microsoft, Perplexity, Amazon
Microsoft launched Copilot Checkout on January 8, 2026, in the United States. Shopify merchants are enrolled automatically, with an opt-out; those taking payment through PayPal or Stripe apply through a form. Microsoft adds that Microsoft Merchant Center feeds inform Copilot's organic results.
Perplexity has offered Instant Buy with PayPal since November 25, 2025, for US users; the merchant stays the seller. Its free merchant program is aimed at large retailers.
Amazon replaced Rufus with Alexa for Shopping on May 13, 2026, for its US customers. Its Buy for Me feature, tested since April 2025, buys on a brand's own site a product Amazon does not sell; Amazon says brands choose whether to take part.
What a European store does now
None of this is won by signing up for the right program on the day it opens. All these assistants read the same things: your site, your feeds, the sites that talk about you. The useful work today is the same for all of them.
- Stay readable. The assistants' search robots must be able to read your product pages, and the price must be in the HTML. The robots.txt checker checks the first point in seconds.
- Make your product pages consistent. One price, one availability and the same specifications on the page, in the structured data and in the feeds. The ecommerce GEO guide details the method.
- Keep a clean feed in Google Merchant Center, and if you target Copilot, in Microsoft Merchant Center. These are the two doors open in Europe today.
- On Shopify, open the Agentic channel to see what it holds, and decide which channels to keep. On WooCommerce, the feed and the product pages do all the work: see skoup for WooCommerce.
- If you sell to the United States, the payment programs already concern you: start with your platform's.
- Measure. What an assistant says about your products is checked by reading its answers, several times, on your customers' questions.
What does not depend on you: when a program opens in your country, how assistants rank products, and how much of their recommendations come from feeds rather than the web.
What skoup tracks
skoup computes, for each brand and market, an agentic commerce readiness score. It covers how the AI robots read the site, the structured data of product pages, feed compliance page by page, and eligibility for ACP and UCP checkout. The score separates what is measured from what is declared: enrollment in OpenAI's merchant program, for instance, is declared by the brand. Details are on the Product page.
To see where you stand today, the free audit asks ChatGPT three real questions about your store.