Google have announced the Universal Commerce Protocol, known as UCP. It is an open standard designed to allow AI agents to handle commerce tasks on behalf of users, including product discovery, checkout, payment, and post‑purchase actions.

This announcement marked an important moment for digital commerce because it moves shopping away from websites and apps and into conversational and assistant‑led environments such as AI‑powered search and chat interfaces. Much like OpenAI’s ACP, the move towards in-shopping AI experiences is beginning to take shape.

UCP is intended to solve a long‑standing technical problem.

Retailers and platforms have historically needed to build and maintain separate integrations for every sales channel, marketplace, and emerging AI interface.

This has created cost, complexity, and slow innovation. UCP introduces a shared technical language that allows merchants, platforms, payment providers, and AI systems to interact through a single, standardised integration.

What the Universal Commerce Protocol is

The Universal Commerce Protocol is an open, extensible framework that defines how commerce actions are described and actioned.

Rather than focusing only on payments, UCP covers the full commercial lifecycle. This includes browsing products, creating carts, applying offers, completing checkout, managing orders, and handling fulfilment and returns.

UCP works through a system of defined capabilities. Each capability represents a specific commerce action such as checking availability, calculating pricing, applying discounts, or completing payment. AI agents can discover which capabilities a merchant supports and then call them in a structured and predictable way.

This allows AI systems to act with confidence while merchants retain control over how their commerce logic works.

The protocol is transport‑agnostic, meaning it can work across different technical setups such as REST APIs or agent‑to‑agent communication frameworks. This design choice is important because it allows UCP to evolve alongside new AI architectures without forcing merchants to rebuild their systems.

Why UCP matters for retailers

For retailers, UCP reduces the need for repeated custom development. Instead of building separate integrations for each AI assistant, marketplace, or platform, a merchant can expose their commerce functionality once through UCP. Any compliant AI agent can then interact with that functionality.

This approach allows retailers to keep ownership of pricing logic, inventory rules, fulfilment decisions, and brand experience while still participating in AI‑led shopping journeys. Payments continue to be processed through existing providers, and merchants are not required to hand over customer relationships to third parties.

UCP also prepares retailers for a future in which customers increasingly expect commerce to happen wherever they ask questions, whether that is inside search, messaging apps, or digital assistants. Rather than reacting to each new interface, UCP provides a stable foundation that supports them all.

Google Merchant Center

For merchants looking to participate in UCP-enabled experiences, Google Merchant Center plays a central role. While UCP itself is an open protocol, access to Google-led agentic commerce surfaces relies on merchants meeting existing Merchant Center requirements and data standards.

At a practical level, this means merchants must maintain a complete and accurate product feed. Core attributes such as product titles, descriptions, pricing, availability, images, shipping details, and returns policies must be kept up to date.

AI agents rely on this structured data to understand what can be sold, under what conditions, and with what constraints. Poor data quality limits an agent’s ability to act and may exclude a merchant from transactional flows.

Merchants must also comply with Google’s existing commerce policies around payments, consumer protection, and transparency. This includes clear pricing, visible taxes and fees, supported payment methods, and compliant fulfilment and returns processes.

UCP does not bypass these rules.

Instead, it exposes them programmatically so AI systems can respect them during decision making and checkout.

From a technical perspective, Merchant Center acts as a trust and validation layer. It helps confirm merchant identity, verifies product eligibility, and ensures that commerce actions executed via AI agents align with approved business logic. This is particularly important in an agentic context, where transactions may occur without a user visiting a traditional checkout page.

For retailers, this raises the importance of Merchant Center from a feed management tool to a strategic capability. High quality product data, consistent policy configuration, and reliable fulfilment signals become prerequisites for visibility and participation in AI-led commerce journeys.

Why UCP matters for AI platforms and developers

For AI platforms, UCP removes much of the uncertainty involved in enabling commerce. Agents no longer need bespoke logic for every retailer. Instead, they interact with a consistent set of schemas and actions that describe what can be bought and how.

This makes it easier to build shopping agents that can reason across multiple merchants, compare options, and complete transactions safely. It also enables more advanced behaviour, such as applying loyalty benefits, respecting delivery preferences, or handling post‑purchase questions, all within a conversational flow.

For developers, the open nature of UCP lowers the barrier to entry. It allows experimentation and innovation without locking teams into proprietary systems, which increases the likelihood of adoption beyond a single platform.

The shift to agentic commerce

UCP supports a broader shift known as agentic commerce, a new area to learn in addition to the standard ecommerce optimisation model. This is a model where AI agents do not simply recommend products but actively carry out transactions on behalf of users. Instead of clicking through pages and forms, a user can express intent in natural language and allow the agent to handle execution within agreed boundaries.

This approach aims to reduce friction throughout the buying process. Tasks such as comparing prices, checking availability, applying discounts, and completing checkout can be handled automatically, which reduces abandonment and speeds up decision making. Over time, this model has the potential to reshape how people think about shopping online.

Agentic commerce also changes the role of visibility. Being present in an AI‑led journey is no longer just about ranking or exposure. It is about being technically accessible and trusted enough for an agent to transact with directly.

Early adoption and industry response

UCP launched with support from a wide range of retailers, commerce platforms, and payment providers. This level of early backing suggests that the industry sees standardisation as necessary for AI‑driven commerce to scale.

Retailers have already begun experimenting with conversational shopping experiences where customers can build carts and place orders inside AI interfaces. Payment providers have also aligned with UCP to ensure that security, authorisation, and compliance requirements are met within these new flows.

Industry commentary has highlighted two key outcomes. The first is reduced fragmentation, as merchants avoid repeated custom integrations. The second is a shift in competition, as differentiation moves away from checkout mechanics and towards brand, service quality, and product value.

Challenges and open questions

Despite its promise, UCP raises important questions. Consumer trust will be essential, as users must feel comfortable allowing AI agents to act on their behalf. Clear controls, consent mechanisms, and transparency will be critical.

Security and regulation also remain central concerns. Commerce involves identity, payments, and personal data, which means implementations must meet strict standards across different markets and legal environments.

Finally, the success of UCP depends on broad adoption beyond its initial supporters. Its value increases as more platforms and merchants participate, making interoperability a shared incentive rather than a competitive risk.

Conclusion

The Universal Commerce Protocol represents a foundational change in how digital commerce is structured for an AI‑driven world. By creating a shared, open standard for commerce actions, it enables AI agents to move from recommendation to execution while allowing merchants to retain control of their businesses.

As conversational and assistant‑led interfaces continue to grow, UCP provides the technical groundwork needed to make agentic commerce practical at scale.

For retailers, platforms, and developers alike, it signals a future where commerce is no longer tied to a website but embedded directly into how people ask questions and make decisions.