What is ACP?
Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open checkout standard, associated with OpenAI and Stripe, for an AI agent to complete a purchase directly inside a conversation rather than sending the shopper off to a separate website.
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It's aimed at roughly the same job UCP does, closing a purchase an agent has already worked out, but comes from a different origin and a different coalition of companies building it. Selfe tracks it as part of the wider protocol landscape rather than building against it directly today; which checkout protocols end up mattering most is one of the genuinely open questions in this space, not something settled yet.
Good for
Completing a purchase inside a conversation, OpenAI and Stripe's own path for that.
Not good for
Assuming it's the only checkout standard that'll matter. Several are still competing for that ground.
What is agentic commerce?
Commerce where an AI agent, acting on a real person's goal, does some or all of the finding, deciding and buying that a person used to do by hand.
What is UCP?
Universal Commerce Protocol, the checkout protocol that completes a purchase once an AI agent has already been connected, identified and authorised, handing a business back a confirmed order instead of an unverified promise.
What is WebMCP?
An emerging, still-early standard that would let an autonomous AI agent discover and call actions directly on a website it visits on its own, without a business or developer configuring a connection ahead of time.