Stripe's 2025 Annual Letter outlines five levels
Stripe's 2025 Annual Letter outlines five levels.
The Five Levels
Level 1 is eliminating web forms. You decide what to buy. The agent just fills in payment and shipping details.
Level 2 is descriptive search. You stop searching for products or specific attributes and start describing situations.
“I need back-to-school supplies for a third grader in Chicago, including clothes (nothing too itchy or tight!), pencils, notebooks, and a lunch box. My son likes KPop Demon Hunters and tennis. School starts in late August.”
Level 3 is persistence. You stop reintroducing yourself.
“Find me options for back-to-school clothes for Bobby.”
Level 4 is delegation. You set constraints like budget. The agent decides and executes.
Level 5 is anticipation. No prompt. The system buys before you ask.
The industry is hovering between Levels 1 and 2.
They compare this moment to the early web. Think Netscape, HTTP, HTML, DNS. Protocol wars. Uncertainty. An AltaVista for every Google. The standards were not obvious. The winners were not obvious.
Stripe believes agentic commerce needs shared infrastructure the same way the web did.
Now, the timeline of events
September 2025
They announced the Agentic Commerce Protocol with OpenAI. ACP is an open standard for programmatic commerce between agents and businesses.
Over the last year
They introduced Shared Payment Tokens. Agents can initiate payments without exposing card credentials. Tokens are scoped by seller, time, and amount.
They launched machine payments. Agents can pay for API calls and services using stablecoin micropayments.
They are now collaborating with Microsoft for Copilot integrations.
December 11, 2025
They launched the Agentic Commerce Suite. This is the practical layer. Hosted ACP endpoints. Catalog syndication. Checkout sessions. Fraud handling. One integration instead of six months per agent.
Participants already onboarding include Etsy, Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, Coach, and Kate Spade.
So, what does Stripe's Agentic Toolkit actually help you with
Discovery
You get a hosted ACP endpoint. Your catalog becomes machine readable and discoverable by agents.
Checkout
Shipping, taxes, sessions, order events. You can use Stripe's stack or plug in your own.
Payments
Shared Payment Tokens reduce credential risk. Agents can transact safely.
Fraud
Radar adapts signals so agents are not misclassified as bots. New fraud patterns are monitored at the token level.
What it does not solve
It does not decide which of your products should be surfaced to which agent.
Agents optimize for user intent signals like low price or best for X. They do not understand your unit economics.
They do not know:
- •Some SKUs have high return rates
- •Some have low repeat purchase
- •Some have high churn
- •Some get damaged/stale/delayed in delivery
- •Some cause support tickets
- •Some have low margins
Agents match query strings. They do not see downstream business impact unless you explicitly encode it.
If you expose your full catalog blindly, you are letting external agents optimize for user's query, not your profitability.
This is the gap most brands are missing.
Stripe is building the rails. Protocols, tokens, checkout, fraud.
But optimization across agents is your responsibility.
And this is where the real game starts.
Brand Readiness Levels
The five levels of agentic commerce are about user autonomy. But brands need their own five levels of readiness:
Basic exposure
Clean structured catalog
Real time inventory and pricing
Profit aware filtering
Cross agent optimization
Most companies are still at level one.
Conclusion
The hype is about Level 5 anticipation. The reality is we are wiring Level 1 infrastructure. That is not a bad thing. It is how platform shifts happen.
If you are interested to know more about Agentic Commerce, follow us. We keep sharing regular updates :)
Also, If you are interested to partner with us, Rankly is an agentic commerce optimization platform that helps you decide what actions to take for which products and for what agents/channels. All in one single platform, without the hassle to keep up with all the agentic commerce platforms.
