By the Commerce Operations Foundation
It has never been easier to take an order…and never harder to fulfill one.
Commerce today spans more channels than ever before: marketplaces, social platforms, direct-to-consumer sites, and now AI-driven selling channels like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Each of these new selling channels requires access to real-time inventory, shipping, and pricing data. Each one needs to connect back to the fulfillment system before a single order can be fulfilled.
This is why adding a new channel still takes weeks or months even for sophisticated brands. Teams are not slow. They are solving the same integration problems again and again.
The growth of social commerce highlights how fast the landscape is shifting. According to reporting from The Information (June 2024), TikTok Shop’s U.S. GMV grew from roughly 4 billion dollars in 2023 to nearly 11 billion dollars in 2024. More than doubling year over year. The global social commerce market now exceeds 700 billion dollars, according to Statista. The demand is clear, but the operational reality has not kept pace. Each new selling surface means another twelve weeks of custom work.
Capturing an order is easy. Fulfilling it is not.
The Front End Is Moving Faster Than the Back End
In the last few months, the world’s largest tech and financial companies, including PayPal, OpenAI, Stripe, Mastercard, Visa, Amazon, and Google, have all announced new agentic commerce initiatives.
- PayPal and OpenAI are embedding agentic checkout directly into ChatGPT.
- Stripe and PwC are building enterprise-grade AI agents to automate order capture and payment flows.
- Mastercard and Visa are defining verification standards for AI-powered transactions.
We now have standards for the selling side of this new ecosystem such as OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) and Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2). But no one has defined a standard for what happens next: the movement of that order through the back end of commerce.
These standards define how AI agents and platforms capture orders and process payments. But they stop at the moment an order is captured. None address what happens next. There is still no common language for how orders, inventory, and fulfillment data move across the systems that make commerce real.
That gap is now closed.
Introducing the Order Network eXchange (onX)
onX is the first open, neutral standard that defines how commerce systems communicate after the buy button. Built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), onX provides a universal operational language for the most fundamental components of commerce: orders, products, inventory, shipments, and returns.
Built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the same emerging framework that standardizes how AI systems interact with software and data, onX enables real-time collaboration between AI agents, commerce platforms, and fulfillment networks
Think of MCP as the infrastructure that allows AI agents and applications to discover and interact with systems. onX defines the vocabulary that those systems speak. Any agent or application pointed at an onX-compatible MCP server can understand how to read and write operational data instantly. This replaces brittle APIs, proprietary schemas, manual mappings, and months-long integration work.
If EDI was the backbone of commerce in the 1980s, onX is the backbone for the AI era. EDI exchanged documents. onX exchanges events. It is the difference between sending a letter and having a live conversation.
The first version of onX defines 14 MCP tools and 9 shared resources for actions such as capture order, exchange order, ship order, and reserve inventory. It introduces nine shared resources including orders, inventory, products, customers, and shipments. These are the foundational elements that allow any selling channel, AI agent, platform, or fulfillment system to work together in real time.
The Foundation Behind the Standard
The Order Network eXchange is governed by the Commerce Operations Foundation, a new vendor-neutral standards organization created to ensure openness, transparency, and long-term neutrality, much like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) oversees Kubernetes. The Foundation stewards the specification, maintains the reference implementation, and brings together the ecosystem to evolve the standard.
More than fifty companies across retail, logistics, and commerce technology are involved at launch. This includes major OMS, WMS, 3PL, and fulfillment providers alongside leading brands. Together they represent more than one trillion dollars in annual GMV. This early critical mass ensures that onX begins with real-world use cases, diverse perspectives, and immediate pathways to adoption.
The Foundation’s governance model mirrors the structures that guided the success of other open standards movements. It includes a Board of Directors, a Technical Steering Committee, and Industry and Vendor Advisory Boards. Participation is open. Contributions are public. The specification and reference implementation are freely available.
We are structured as a 501(c)(6) nonprofit organization committed to open collaboration, transparency, and shared governance.
Today at launch, we count 52 member companies representing over $1 trillion in annual GMV, and by Q1 FY26 we expect to exceed 100 members.
“AI has made buying effortless. Now we need to make fulfillment effortless,” said Kelly Goetsch, Founding President of the Commerce Operations Foundation and President of Pipe17. “onX gives the industry a shared operational language so commerce can move at the speed of AI.”
Why Now
Agentic commerce is already redefining how people buy. But without shared standards, the systems that fulfill those orders cannot keep up.
The Order Network eXchange (onX) is that missing layer, the USB-C moment for commerce, a single, universal connection that allows every part of the ecosystem to plug in and work together.
How to Get Involved
Any brand, vendor, or platform can adopt the onX standard directly from our GitHub and gain instant interoperability with every other member.
To help shape the standard, companies can participate in one of our working groups:
- Technical Steering Committee – advancing the specification
- Vendor Advisory Board – representing technology providers
- Industry Advisory Board – representing merchants and retailers
Learn more or apply for membership at commerceopsfoundation.org.