Preparing IRP for ACP & UCP Agentic Commerce
For the last twenty years, eCommerce has been built around a familiar model of attracting shoppers to a website and persuading them to buy. Merchants have invested in storefront design, SEO, paid search and conversion optimisation with a website at the centre of the transaction.
Currently Agents like Gemini and ChatGPT are used by customers for product discovery. Customers ask these AI Agents to find, compare and recommend products. Over time this will evolve and these Agents will also create carts, initiate checkout and place orders.
September Agentic Commerce Reported as 0.39% of GMV
Agentic Shopping is a New Commerce Channel
AI Product Discovery is significant already. Fully Agentic Shopping is only beginning - the channel is minimal today and the UK share is well below the reported 0.39% for Agentic Commerce. It will be larger in the future.
For Merchants, the important change is not simply another source of traffic. AI systems will increasingly need accurate structured data about products, prices, inventory, delivery and orders.
Two important emerging standards are:
- ACP — Agentic Commerce Protocol, led by OpenAI
- UCP — Universal Commerce Protocol, led by Google and industry partners
IRP is Building Support for Agentic Commerce
IRP is Building Support for Agentic Commerce
Agentic Commerce will require more than a good storefront. It requires a commerce platform capable of distributing accurate, structured and continually updated data.
IRP ProfitOS already has that architecture:
- Unified Product Catalogue
- Feed Management
- Real-Time Inventory
- Structured Product Data
- Pricing and Promotions
- Checkout and Payments
- Order Processing
IRP is developing support for ACP, UCP and WebMCP preparing merchants to compete as AI agents become a more established route to market in 2027 and 2028.
Conclusion
Agentic Shopping is currently much bigger as an idea than as a share of eCommerce sales - but the direction is clear and it must not be ignored.
Over time AI systems will move from searching for products towards participating in the transaction itself. Nobody yet knows how large this channel will become.
IRP is building the infrastructure merchants need to serve customers through ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI agents. eCommerce will evolve but the core concepts remain unchanged - IRP ProfitOS will connect everything together with a single objective - to make Merchants profitable.
