Google has launched the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open-source standard designed to enhance commerce on AI-powered platforms. UCP creates a common language for agentic shopping, enabling seamless interactions among consumers, businesses, and payment providers. It integrates with existing retail infrastructure and the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) for secure payments, offering businesses flexible connection options via APIs and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication.
UCP was developed in collaboration with major players such as Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart, and endorsed by over 20 global partners. The protocol is designed to serve the entire commerce ecosystem: businesses maintain control over their products and checkout, AI platforms can onboard merchants quickly, developers can build on a neutral open standard, payment providers gain interoperability, and consumers enjoy frictionless shopping experiences.
The protocol addresses a major challenge in today’s commerce infrastructure: the N by N integration problem. Traditional systems require separate connections for each platform or sales channel, which can slow down the rollout of agentic shopping experiences. UCP provides a single, secure layer that standardizes the full commerce workflow, from product discovery to checkout and order management. It allows agents to discover business capabilities and available payment options dynamically, supports multiple communication methods, including APIs, Agent2Agent, and MCP, and separates payment instruments from handlers to work with a broad range of payment providers.
In practical terms, UCP allows agents to access a business’s services, initiate checkout processes, and apply discounts through standardized requests. Google’s reference implementation demonstrates this by enabling purchases via AI interfaces such as AI Mode in Search and Gemini, using Google Wallet or other compatible payment methods. Businesses can connect their inventory through a Merchant Center account, making their products accessible to agents without custom integrations for each platform.
Andy Reid, Chief Innovation Officer and AI advocate, raised a question on LinkedIn about potential implications for smaller brands:
If UCP allows Gemini to collapse the entire shopping journey into a single 'Pay' button, does this accelerate the move toward your 'Default Economy' where only one brand is surfaced as the definitive answer? How do smaller brands survive if the protocol favors the single most coherent 'default' rather than a marketplace of choices?
James Massey, AI lead at Google, responded:
Andy Reid, interesting perspective. I think that while a single ‘pay’ button simplifies the final step, UCP is designed as an open standard rather than a closed marketplace. In my opinion, this actually means it could be even better for smaller brands. By using UCP to become 'discoverable' to AI agents without needing the massive ad budgets required for traditional search, if their product is the most relevant, the protocol allows Gemini to surface them as the primary option, regardless of brand size. Actually, it’s about data quality. Interesting though, I think it’ll take a while to see!
UCP's open architecture enables developers to explore functionalities such as checkout, discounts, and order management, with Python-based SDKs for rapid implementation. Google and its partners aim to simplify integration and enhance shopping experiences for consumers and businesses through a shared standard for agentic commerce.
The Universal Commerce Protocol is available as an open-source specification on GitHub, and the project encourages community contributions through pull requests and discussions.