Stripe predicts the end of the online checkout page

A top Stripe executive says the familiar checkout page, the form-filling ritual behind nearly every online purchase, is on its way out. Should you even need to go to one, or should you just be able to say, 'Buy it on a product display page'? I think so," Will Gaybrick, Stripe's president of technology and business, said during a recent episode of "The a16z Show".

While Gaybrick admitted that there were lots of “open questions” around the nature of how agentic commerce would play out in reality, he believed that even an “admittedly minimalistic version” would mark the death of the conventional checkout process.

"We believe that machines will want to purchase from machines," he explained, painting the upcoming revolution around the question of what constitutes checkout without a human inputting the information in the form.

Stripe has gone beyond theoretical work on the subject, rolling out its Instant Checkout feature within ChatGPT and partnering on developing the Agentic Commerce Protocol along with OpenAI and, more recently, bringing agentic purchasing to Google’s Gemini.

Gaybrick said agentic commerce hasn't yet had what he called its breakout moment but pointed to existing quick-pay tools, Stripe's own Link and Shopify's Shop Pay, as early groundwork for where things are headed.

Internally, he said Stripe has stopped thinking of itself as "a payments company with sort of add-ons" and now operates as a multi-product platform built around that shift.

How fast this transition happens remains genuinely uncertain. Agentic AI differs from chatbots by making decisions with minimal human input, which in a shopping context means handing an AI system real purchasing authority.

A June survey from e-commerce companies Commerce and PayPal, covering shoppers in the US, the UK and Australia, found consumers still reluctant to let AI buy without their direct approval.

"Consumers want the time and money savings that agentic commerce can deliver, but they aren't ready to trust agents as an autonomous buyer," said Sharon Gee, Commerce's senior vice president of AI for products.