While enterprises looking to sell goods and services online wait for backbone of agentic commerce to be erased, paypal Hopefully its new features will bridge this gap.
The payments company is launching a discoverable solution that allows enterprises to make their product available on any chat platform, regardless of model or agent payment protocol.
PayPal, which is one of the participants Google‘S Agent Payment Protocol (AP2)found that it could pave the way for a smoother transition to agentic commerce by leveraging their relationships with merchants and enterprises and the flexibility they have learned will benefit the ecosystem.
Michelle Gill, PayPal’s general manager for small business and financial services, told VentureBeat that AI-powered shopping will continue to grow, so enterprises and brands need to start laying the groundwork quickly.
“We think that merchants who have historically been selling through web stores, especially in the e-commerce space, are really going to need a way to be active on all of these big language models,” Gill said. “The challenge is that no one really knows how fast this will all move. The issue we’re trying to help merchants think about is how to do all this with low-touch, without doing billions of integrations, using the infrastructure you already have.”
He said AI shopping would also bring about a “resurgence in consumers trying to ensure the safety of their investments.”
PayPal partners with website builder Vicks, symbiocommerce and shop utensils Like to bring product on chat platform distress,
agent driven shopping
PayPal’s agent commerce services include two features. The first is Agent Ready, which will allow existing PayPal merchants to accept payments on the AI platform. The second is called Shop Sync, which will enable companies’ product data to be searchable through various AI chat interfaces. It takes a company’s catalog information and plugs its inventory and fulfillment data into the chat platform.
Gill said the data goes to a central repository where AI models can get the information.
Right now, companies can access Shop Sync with Agent Ready coming in 2026.
Agentic Commerce Services is a one-to-many solution that will be helpful right now, Gill said, as different LLMs scour different data sources to surface information.
Other benefits include:
-
Fast integration with current and future partners
-
More product discovery than traditional search, browse and cart experiences
-
Customer insights and relationships preserved where brands retain control over their records and communications with customers.
Right now, the service is only available through Perplexity, but Gill said more platforms will be added soon.
Fragmented AI Platform
Agentic commerce is still in its early stages. AI agents are just starting to get better at reading browsers. While platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity can now surface products and services based on user queries, people can’t technically buy things from chat yet.
There is a race going on now to create a standard to enable agents to conduct transactions and pay for goods on behalf of users. Apart from Google’s AP2, OpenAI And strip take it Agent Commerce Protocol (ACP) And visa launched it Trusted Agent Protocol,
In addition to enabling a trust layer for agents to transact, another problem enterprises face with agentic commerce is fragmentation. Different chat platforms use different models that also interpret information slightly differently. Gill said PayPal learned that when it comes to working with merchants, flexibility is key.
“How do you decide whether you’re going to spend your time integrating with Google, Microsoft, ChatGPT or Perplexity? And each of them right now has a different protocol, a different catalog, configuration, a different everything. There’s a lot of time to bet on where you should spend your time,” Gill said.
