Universal Commerce Protocol Is Here — And Ecommerce Won’t Look the Same

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The Gist

Commerce is shifting from storefronts to agents. Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) enables AI agents to move beyond recommendations and complete purchases end-to-end, collapsing discovery, checkout, and payment into a single conversational flow.
Discovery power is moving upstream. As buying decisions happen inside AI agents, visibility depends less on product pages and rankings and more on whether an agent trusts, selects, and successfully transacts with a merchant.
Funnels, metrics, and monetization must be rethought. Clicks, sessions, and conversion rates lose meaning when transactions happen invisibly inside agents, forcing brands to adopt new signals around intent satisfaction, agent selection, and transactional reliability.

Last month, during NRF, Google launched its Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), which will change the way we do ecommerce. Allow me to explain why.

Ecommerce, at its core, is just buying and selling stuff online. You’ve got a website, maybe an app, maybe even a voice assistant or a smartwatch. People scroll, search, toss things in a cart and pay. Over the years, we’ve obsessed over making it smoother: faster searches, less friction, button color tests, better offers, endless funnel tweaks, SEO hacks—the whole playbook to squeeze out more sales.

But LLMs are about to change all of that. Soon, we will not be buying from websites or apps full of product grids and comparison tables. We will buy through chatbots and agents. And that will happen for a simple reason. It will be easier. It will be faster. It will probably be safer too.

Voice or typed prompts like these will become the standard way we shop online. “Buy my groceries like last week, but add bacon.” “Get a STEM-based gift for my nephew who is turning eight next week. Keep it under forty dollars.” “I need new wipers for my car. The last ones were not great.”

One day, my grandkids will hear how we shopped in the 2020s and probably laugh, just like my kids do when I show them those giant department store catalogs from back in the day.

FAQ: Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)

Editor’s note: Key questions CX, digital and commerce leaders are asking as AI agents begin to reshape how discovery, checkout, and monetization actually work.

So, What Exactly Is UCP?

UCP is an open standard that enables AI agents to communicate with merchants in a simple, structured way. Starting with Gemini, but not limited to it, the idea is to give AI a shared language for commerce. A store publishes a single manifest that explains what it sells, what is in stock, pricing rules, and how payment works. Any compliant agent can read it and act on it. That is what allows AI agents to move from recommending products to actually completing purchases.

Without UCP, every ecommerce store that wants to sell through AI has to build custom integrations for each agent and platform. That does not scale. For buyers, it means hitting the same wall at checkout over and over, re-entering addresses, payment details, shipping preferences, and taxes on every site. UCP removes that friction. Your agent can carry your intent, preferences, and payment information across stores, compare options, and complete transactions end to end, without dragging you through a checkout page each time.

Key Aspects of UCP

These pillars explain why Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol is more than an experiment — and why it has the potential to reshape how AI-driven commerce actually works.

Aspect	What It Means
It is an open protocol	UCP is a specification created by Google, and of course, it will be used first by Google tools like Gemini. But it is open source by design, and that matters. It means other players can adopt it, extend it, and build on top of it. It follows the familiar Google pattern of open source, but I go first, very similar to what they did with Android. According to Google, UCP works with existing ecommerce infrastructure and plays well with current standards such as Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), Agent2Agent, and the widely adopted Model Context Protocol (MCP).
It is not a pet project	This is not one of those “let’s see if it works” projects, but rather a well-organized and well-supported initiative. Big players like Walmart, Target, Etsy, Wayfair, Best Buy, Adyen, Amex, Mastercard, Stripe, Visa, and, more recently, Salesforce, amongst others, tell a store. This has all the elements to be the de facto standard for commerce within LLMs.
It covers the whole buying journey	Unlike OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), UCP defines the entire shopping journey by dissecting it into a set of capabilities: discovery, cart creation, checkout rules, promotions, loyalty, delivery constraints, and regulations for when automation fails. Stores will even be able to create extensions to it. This greatly facilitates the integration of existing ecosystems into any AI agent.

Key Components of Universal Commerce Protocol

Discoverability War

UCP is not just about convenience. It is about control over discovery. Commerce has always been shaped by whoever controls the most crucial moment of choice. For decades, that was the supermarket shelf. Then it became search engines and online marketplaces. Now, it is LLMs. Being trusted by the agent becomes critical. If an agent does not take you into account, you simply do not sell.

Amazon’s Absence From UCP: What Does it Mean?

Amazon’s absence from UCP is not an accident. UCP shifts power away from storefronts and toward agents. And Amazon’s business depends on owning the moment of discovery.

Product grids, rankings, sponsored placements, and subtle nudges are the model. An agent that flattens all of that and turns Amazon into just another merchant behind a protocol weakens its leverage at the exact moment that matters.

That is also why AI-driven discovery makes Amazon uncomfortable. Tensions with Perplexity are not about search quality. They are about bypassing the front door that Amazon has spent decades protecting. UCP accelerates that shift. Discovery becomes portable. Checkout fades away. The most valuable real estate in commerce becomes the agent itself.

Amazon is not resisting AI. It is resisting the loss of control over who is shown, in what order, and why.

Funnels Lose Relevance

Traditional funnels will matter less. Many buying journeys will not include a product page to land on, a cart to optimize, or a checkout flow to test. UCP makes it possible for transactions to happen entirely inside an AI experience, with merchant capabilities running quietly in the background. This shift represents a fundamental change in customer experience, where the journey from intent to purchase collapses into a single conversational moment.

Channels Blur

Just like printed catalogs still exist today, ecommerce sites will not disappear. But they will stop being the place where most decisions are made. They will become reference points, sources of truth for models to learn from, and fallback experiences when automation fails. The job will shift from designing pages to convince humans, to exposing clear capabilities that agents can work with what you sell. Under what conditions? With what guarantees?

New Measurements

Clicks stop mattering when there is no page. Sessions fade when there are no visitors. Even conversion rates become tricky when transactions occur within an agent spanning multiple surfaces. New signals take over. How often does your product appear in high-intent prompts? How frequently does an agent pick you when several options meet the same constraints? How well you satisfy price limits, delivery windows, or availability rules. How often does an agent fail to complete a transaction with you? Traditional customer journey mapping will need to evolve to account for these invisible, agent-mediated interactions.

Monetization

Monetization will get interesting. What do ads look like in an LLM-driven world? Where does paid media go when there are no banners or sponsored listings? It might look something like this.

Buyer: “I want a vacuum cleaner under two hundred dollars.”
AI: “This is the best option based on your preferences.”
Ad: “Consider brand B for a more premium experience. Twenty percent off for first-time customers.”

Or maybe it goes further. Perhaps you do not advertise to the buyer at all. Maybe you pay the model, or the agent, so it leans toward your product when several options look equally good. That question alone should make every brand and regulator a little uneasy.

What Should Digital Customer Experience Leaders Do About UCP?

Like most big shifts, it’s tough to say exactly how this will shake out. But one thing’s for sure: change is coming, and it’s coming fast. Now’s the time to get your basics sorted. Your data, your connections, your APIs. You need to be ready for a flood of new stuff, whether you want it or not.

More than anything, you need to shift your mindset. These new standards will trip up anyone who isn’t ready. But if you move early and get what’s really changing, there’s a real shot to get ahead.

Learning Opportunities

UCP has just been born, and like most protocols, its impact will depend on adoption and evolution. Many questions are still open. Regulation. Bias. The fight for discoverability. But the train is already moving. If you want to go somewhere, you need to get on.

This is the reality of agentic commerce.

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