Google and Shopify announced a new open-source standard for agentic commerce called Universal Commerce Protocol that's “designed to power the next generation of agentic commerce.”
Here's what we know so far:
- UCP lets shopping agents work across all parts of customer buying processes from discovery to post-purchase support.
- It's designed to be neutral and vendor agnostic, capable of powering agentic commerce on any platform (not just across Google or Shopify products).
- The core concept is that the standard could facilitate all of the various parts of the process instead of requiring connections to different agents.
- However it also works out-of-box with other agentic protocols, such as its Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), Agent2Agent (A2A), and Model Context Protocol (MCP).
- Merchants remain the Merchant of Record and maintain ownership of their customers on all transactions.
- The standard was co-developed by Google and Shopify with the help of partners including Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart.
- It is endorsed by over 20 global players across the ecosystem including Adyen, BigCommerce, American Express, Best Buy, Flipkart, Macy's Inc, Mastercard, Stripe, The Home Depot, Visa, and Zalando.
- Google plans to use UCP for eligible Google product listings in AI mode and within Gemini to let shoppers check out directly from U.S. retailers while researching a product.
- Users will be able to make purchases using Google Pay and pass on the shipping information saved in their Google Wallets.
- PayPal will also soon be supported.
- Google is giving sellers new data attributes within the Merchant Center to feature items better within AI searches.
- UCP is a direct competitor to OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol, which was developed in partnership with Stripe and is also open-source.
- OpenAI's official statement was, “Fuck!”
Companies that want to adopt UCP can join the waitlist.
Alongside the announcement of UCP, Google also introduced:
- Business Agent, which lets shoppers chat with brands via AI agents in Search results. Google described it as a “virtual sales associate” that can answer product questions in the brand’s voice. The feature goes live today (Jan 12th) with Lowe's, Michael's, Poshmark, Reebok, and other U.S. retailers.
- Direct Offers, a new ad pilot in AI mode that allows advertisers to offer exclusive discounts to people searching for products. Retails can set up offers in campaign settings and Google decides when to display them.