PayPal launched its major agentic commerce initiative, introducing Agent Ready, a payment solution purpose-built for the rapidly expanding world of AI-powered shopping agents and platforms. As digital assistants, conversational commerce tools, and browser-based agents become key channels for product discovery and transaction, PayPal’s new services are designed to plug secure, seamless payments directly into the next wave of online commerce, transforming how merchants sell and how customers buy.
What Is Agent Ready?
Agent Ready is PayPal’s agentic payment solution, allowing existing PayPal merchants to instantly accept transactions that originate from AI-powered shopping agents—whether in conversational interfaces, browser automations, or third-party platforms like Perplexity and ChatGPT.
PayPal’s official launch release describes Agent Ready as a payment solution that enables fraud-protected payments on AI surfaces for existing merchants. Merchant integration requires zero additional technical overhaul.
The system is designed to be interoperable across AI platforms, taking advantage of PayPal’s established infrastructure for buyer protection, identity verification, and dispute resolution.
How It Works and Platform Integration
Agent Ready is paired with Store Sync, a system that automatically syncs merchant catalog, inventory, and fulfillment data to AI discovery platforms, making products AI-discoverable and purchasable by agentic tools. Once integrated, merchants can appear in multiple environments, including PayPal’s own in-app agent, browser assistants, and partners like Wix, Cymbio, BigCommerce, Shopware, and Perplexity.
Alex Chriss, PayPal CEO, explained,
“We’re not just enabling payments-we’re enabling AI to act as a trusted intermediary in commerce.”
Instead of manually enabling each new sales channel, Agent Ready and Store Sync let sellers connect once with PayPal and instantly have product data accessible to multiple AI agents, with purchases routed through PayPal’s secure checkout and protection systems.
The Industry Impact and What Sets Agent Ready Apart
Agentic commerce is forecast to revolutionize sales as AI agents autonomously shop for billions of users, handling the entire customer journey—from recommendation and comparison to transaction. Market analysts estimated AI agents are projected to handle $1.2 trillion in transactions by 2030, and PayPal’s early move positions it as a leader in fraud prevention, buyer protection, and seamless merchant onboarding in this space.
PayPal’s Michelle Gill, GM of Small Business and Financial Services, stated:
“AI is driving the next wave of innovation in how payments are made and managed.”
She emphasized the importance of flexibility and merchant control. Merchants remain the merchant of record and retain relationships with customers, even as AI agents execute purchases.
In practical terms, fraud detection, biometric identity, and passkey authentication are built in, with cross-platform compatibility, minimal developer effort, and robust protections for merchants and buyers.
Partnerships and Rollout
PayPal’s service will integrate with e-commerce partner platforms in early 2026 and is available for developer sign-up now. Merchant discoverability on Perplexity will be available before the end of 2025, while Agent Ready payments roll out in early 2026.
This approach means merchants can future-proof their businesses and reach new audiences as consumers increasingly shop via their favorite AI interfaces.
Developer and Consumer Benefit
PayPal has made developer APIs and toolkits available for agentic commerce. PayPal’s Agent Toolkit empowers developers to create next-generation commerce experiences, automate integration, and support contextual personalization at scale.
For consumers, this means shopping in-app, on the web, or within digital environments can be as simple as interacting with an AI agent, finding, comparing, and buying goods on a trusted payments platform with robust security.
