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Agent Commerce
MCP
An open standard for connecting AI applications to external systems: data sources, tools and workflows. The official framing is a USB-C port for AI applications, a single connection format so an integration built once works across clients. Supported by Claude, ChatGPT, VS Code, Cursor and others.
Why it matters
It is the substrate the commerce and advertising protocols are built on. ACP is REST and MCP compatible; AdCP is built directly on it. Understanding MCP is what makes the rest of the stack legible.
In practice
For a merchant it usually arrives via the platform rather than a build. Shopify activates MCP servers by default; the operator decision is what to expose, not how to implement it.
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