There was a flurry of news surrounding PayPal and agentic commerce last week, with every company involved in the partnerships distributing their own announcements and press releases. Let's break it down and make sense of all the noise:
1) PayPal launched Agentic Commerce Services, a suite of tools that enable merchants to make their products discoverable across AI platforms and shoppable through PayPal’s payment infrastructure, identity verification, and buyer protection systems.
Here's what Agentic Commerce Services includes:
- Agent Ready – the name for PayPal's solution that enables merchants to accept payments via AI chatbots and browser automations with built-in fraud detection, buyer protection, and dispute resolution.
- Store Sync – a catalog and order management system that makes merchants’ product data discoverable across AI channels and automatically routes orders to their existing fulfillment systems.
- Customer Ownership – sellers remain as the merchant of record so that customers buy from their brand (versus OpenAI appearing on the credit card statement), and the merchant owns the customer data like name, e-mail, shipping address, etc (unlike Amazon, which owns the customer).
- Multiple AI Integrations – one single PayPal integration connects merchants to multiple AI ecosystems including Perplexity, OpenAI, Google, and PayPal's upcoming AI shopping agent, with more to follow.
- Multiple Platform Integrations – PayPal's new agentic commerce services work in partnership with Wix, Cymbio, Commerce, and Shopware.
Basically PayPal is positioning itself as the bridge that connects merchants directly to all AI ecosystems either through its own merchant services or in partnership with major e-commerce platforms. While Wix, BigCommerce, and other platforms support multiple payment types, this sure gives merchants incentive to accept PayPal!
Okay so next up…
2) PayPal signed a deal with OpenAI to be the first digital wallet embedded into ChatGPT, allowing users to pay for items discovered through the chatbot. PayPal will manage merchant routing, payment validation, fraud protection, and other seller processes so that merchants don't have to sign up with OpenAI directly. As for buyers, they'll receive the same convenient payment methods, protections, package tracking, and dispute resolution that they're accustomed to through PayPal.
PayPal CEO Alex Chriss said:
“We’ve got hundreds of millions of loyal PayPal wallet holders who now will be able to click the ‘Buy with PayPal button’ on ChatGPT and have a safe and secure checkout experience. It’s a whole new paradigm for shopping. It’s hard to imagine that agentic commerce isn’t going to be a big part of the future.”
As you might recall from last month, OpenAI developed is Agentic Commerce Protocol, which powers its Instant Checkout feature, in partnership with Stripe. The protocol was later adopted by Etsy, Shopify, Salesforce, and now PayPal.
So while technically Stripe's Link wallet was the first integration, Link cannot yet store funds and has no consumer mobile app, so many folks don't consider it a “full wallet.” Whereas PayPal provides the full spectrum of digital wallet services (and pretty much invented the category).
What's odd about the PayPal + OpenAI announcement, which was released the same day as PayPal's Agentic Commerce Services announcement, is that the former doesn't mention the latter and vice-versa. The OpenAI release doesn't use the words “Agentic Commerce Services” anywhere and that announcement doesn't mention “OpenAI.” So I guess they wanted to separate the two overlapping announcements so that OpenAI could properly capture headlines.
Last but not least…
3) PayPal also adopted Google's Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol and integrated with its Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), which is a payments layer built on top of A2A and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that provides accountability and fraud controls.
In layman's terms… Google and OpenAI offer competing protocols that effectively do the same thing, and now PayPal supports both of them. Merchants who sell through PayPal or enable PayPal payments through partnering platforms can now get the best of both worlds in regards to the two biggest AI payment ecosystems at the moment.
Technically it's a big more nuanced than that — as Agentic Commerce Protocol is strictly built around commerce and Agent2Agent Protocol centers around interoperability between AI agents (with commerce a part of it) — but for the sake of these announcements, the gist is that “PayPal is everywhere” when it comes to the major agentic commerce ecosystems.