Google has released an open standard that can be used to turn AI interactions into sales. The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) establishes a common language and functional primitives to enable systems to pass data between “consumer surfaces, businesses, and payment providers”.
The UCP standard is compatible with Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) to provide secure agentic payments support. It also provides businesses flexible ways to integrate via APIs, Agent2Agent (A2A), and the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
UCP has been developed by Google in collaboration with retail companies including Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart and is endorsed by over 20 global partners across the ecosystem including Adyen, American Express, Best Buy, Flipkart, Macy’s Inc, Mastercard, Stripe, The Home Depot, Visa, and Zalando.
In a blog post on the Google developers’ blog, the post says that current infrastructure doesn’t support agentic commerce well, and businesses are required to build bespoke connections for every surface. UCP is designed to standardize the full commerce journey – from discovery and consideration to purchase and order management – through a single, secure abstraction layer.
There are four key elements to UCP:
A single integration point for all consumer surfaces
Shared language to standardize discovery, capability schema, and transport bindings
Extensible architecture that can scale as new agentic experiences emerge
A security-first approach that provides tokenized payments and verifiable credentials so that agents and businesses can securely communicate.
From a commerce perspective, Google says the new standard will let businesses:
“showcase their unique product and service offerings at shopping touchpoints across consumer interfaces such as AI Mode in Google Search and Gemini app, and others in the future.”
The technology will let AI platforms enable agentic shopping via the standardized APIs. The platforms will be able to use MCP, A2A and existing agent frameworks of their choice.
The developer angle is that Google says UCP is an evolving open-source standard designed to be community-driven, and Google “invites you to build the next generation of digital commerce with us”.
The unspoken part of this is that if UCP takes off, it means whichever company controls the AI discovery stage controls the process right through to the final sale, giving that first company even more control than they already have.
Google UCP is available now.
More Information
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