Programmable financial services company Stripe has announced its support to enable a new experience, namely Copilot Checkout.
Microsoft Copilot users across the US are set to be able to buy products from Etsy businesses and retailers such as Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie, without being required to leave the chat.
The current news follows Microsoft being Stripe’s customer since 2022. At that time, the company started leveraging Stripe to enable payments, while later, it adopted Stripe Connect to manage payment acceptance and identity verification for its marketplace initiatives.
How does it work?
When a Copilot conversation leads to a shopping experience, a Stripe-enabled checkout may appear natively within the chat. In order to populate the checkout, Microsoft communicates with Stripe through an integration. Afterwards, Stripe connects with the seller through the Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open standard for agentic commerce codeveloped by the company.
Following the buyer providing its payment credentials, Stripe issues a Shared Payment Token, a primitive that enables payments without exposing the buyer’s credentials. The token is then directed to the seller by Stripe, with the company being able to process the transaction through Stripe or with another payment provider. If they choose the second option, they still benefit from Stripe’s risk signals for fraud protection, as well as maintaining control of the data as the merchant of record.
Furthermore, to onboard more merchants more efficiently, Microsoft is set to collaborate with Stripe to integrate the Agentic Commerce Suite, a solution that supports businesses in making their products discoverable to AI agents and managing checkout, fraud protection, and payments through one integration.
Stripe’s focus on AI
In addition to working with Microsoft, Stripe also recently joined Mirakl to enable merchants to participate in the emerging agentic commerce economy. The collaboration sought to allow Mirakl to utilise Stripe’s connections to AI platforms, including OpenAI, to offer merchants and businesses secure access to agentic shopping channels.
Not long before this, Stripe made another major move, announcing its support for OpenAI in launching Instant Checkout, as part of ChatGPT. This enabled ChatGPT users across the US to buy goods from US-based Etsy businesses directly in the chat. At that time, the two companies made plans to include over a million Shopify merchants, such as Glossier, Vuori, Spanx, and SKIMS.
