PayPal Holdings, Inc. released Agent Toolkit on April 14, 2025, marking its biggest step into agentic commerce. This launch gives developers the tools to build autonomous shopping and payment agents powered by PayPal’s infrastructure. As agent-led shopping grows, PayPal agentic commerce aims to simplify how brands and consumers connect through agentic AI experiences.
What Is PayPal’s Agent Toolkit?
PayPal’s Agent Toolkit is a developer tool that makes it easier for agentic AI to handle payments and commerce tasks.
Normally, connecting an AI system to PayPal’s payment services requires a lot of manual coding. Developers have to build custom API calls, format data correctly, and manage all the payment steps themselves.
The Agent Toolkit simplifies this by offering pre-built tools that handle those details behind the scenes. With it, AI agents can create and manage orders, send invoices, and handle subscriptions without needing to directly interact with PayPal’s complex APIs. Instead, the toolkit provides a clean, easy-to-use interface that fits into modern AI agent platforms.
In simple terms, it helps AI agents talk to PayPal’s payment system, so they can automate buying, selling, and billing tasks. This not only saves developers’ time but also helps brands launch agentic commerce solutions faster.
Why Is Agent Toolkit Important?
The PayPal Agent Toolkit makes it easier to build AI agents that handle payments because:
- It offers easy integration with PayPal services
- It is compatible with leading AI frameworks
- It offers a foundation to build upon
It Offers Easy Integration with PayPal Services
With the Agent Toolkit, you can plug in payments, invoicing, subscriptions, dispute handling, shipment tracking, and reporting with just a few lines of code. That means you’ll spend less time wrestling with individual API endpoints and more time rolling out new checkout experiences or promotional offers.
Imagine setting up an invoicing workflow without having to stitch together half a dozen API calls. In the past, you’d trigger the invoice endpoint, check for valid payment methods, send reminder messages, manage retries on failed payments, and log every error—all by hand.
With the Agent Toolkit, you simply declare “create and manage an invoice,” and intelligent agents handle the rest. It validates payment options, sends follow‑up notices, retries on failures, and surfaces errors in a consistent way.
It Is Compatible with Leading AI Frameworks
The great thing about the Agent Toolkit is that it’s ready to drop into whatever AI setup you’re already using. Right now, it supports TypeScript (with Python support coming soon), so you don’t need to rewrite your code in a new language. In other words, it keeps your tech stack simple and cuts down on extra work.
It also connects smoothly with popular AI platforms like PayPal’s MCP server and Vercel’s AI SDK, meaning you can add PayPal payments to your chatbots, recommendation engines, or inventory tools without learning a bunch of different libraries.
It Offers a Foundation to Build Upon
The Agent Toolkit gives you a foundation to launch end-to-end automated shopping flows quickly and accurately. For example, you might want an AI agent to:
- Offer a membership upgrade right after checkout
- Automatically apply a 10% discount when a cart exceeds $100
- Send a confirmation and invoice email once payment goes through
With the toolkit, you simply add small pieces of custom code or plug in third‑party toolkits at each step. The toolkit automatically manages orders and payments, so you don’t have to link multiple systems.
What Real‑World Benefit Can Merchants Expect from PayPal’s Agent Toolkit?
The quickest way to summarize PayPal’s Agent Toolkit benefits is to tell you that it enables you to implement end‑to‑end digital commerce workflows quickly and reliably. On a more precise note, you can expect PayPal’s Agent Toolkit to help you out with:
Order Management and Shipment Visibility
If you are launching a new product or promotion, you can deploy an AI agent that uses simple toolkit commands to create orders and authenticate payments through PayPal the moment a customer confirms a purchase. The same agent then polls PayPal APIs to track delivery status and reports updates.
Automated Invoicing and Payment Follow‑Up
When you need to bill clients for services or one‑off purchases, the toolkit provides built‑in functions for generating invoices from your templates, sending them via PayPal, and monitoring payment status. It will even issue a reminder notice automatically if you’re invoice remains unpaid past the due date.
Streamlined Subscription and Membership Billing
If your ecommerce business offers subscriptions or memberships, you can use the toolkit to manage the entire billing lifecycle. An AI agent can register new subscribers, apply price changes when customers upgrade or downgrade their plans, and retry failed payments.
Free Up Time for Strategic Initiatives
If you rely on the Agent Toolkit to automate order entry, invoicing, subscription changes, and shipment updates, you can save hours upon hours. As a result, you and your team can redirect their efforts toward higher‑value activities like designing new marketing campaigns, analyzing customer data, or optimizing product launches.
Is PayPal’s Agent Toolkit Usable Today?
Perplexity AI has integrated PayPal’s Agent Toolkit to enable agentic workflows directly within its chat interface. Currently, the feature is only available to U.S. users subscribed to Perplexity’s Pro assistant, who can use it to book a trip or simply shop for regular consumer goods.
This integration uses PayPal’s secure tokenized wallet and passkey checkout technology to streamline the payment process and handle everything: authorize a transaction, track shipments, and handle invoicing.
What Other Companies Are Entering the Agentic Commerce Market?
Several major companies are developing solutions to power agentic commerce revolution. Here’s a quick overview of what’s currently out there:
Visa Intelligent Commerce
Visa’s Intelligent Commerce program provides a suite of APIs and a partner ecosystem that allows developers to integrate AI agents with Visa’s payment network. This enables AI agents to search for products, recommend purchases, and complete secure transactions on behalf of a consumer.
Mastercard Agent Pay
Mastercard’s Agent Pay is a solution that integrates with an AI shopping companion to facilitate secure and personalized payments. It utilizes a strong security network built around agentic tokens to ensure transparent and authorized transactions.
Stripe Agent Toolkit
Stripe offers an Agent Toolkit that enables an AI assistant to engage in transactions with human users and pay third parties. This toolkit allows agents to create single-use virtual credit cards to facilitate purchases, streamlining the payment process within AI-driven workflows.
Kibo Agentic Commerce
Kibo’s Agentic Commerce initiative leverages a multi-agent system built on Google’s Gemini, enabling businesses to deploy pre-trained autonomous agents that handle various commerce functions.
