Target, Walmart, Shopify back Google’s AI shopping standard

Google has teamed up with Shopify, Target, and Walmart to launch an agentic commerce standard – that will let shoppers buy things via AI. 

The open-source Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), announced by Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Sunday (January 12) lays the groundwork for native checkout in Google’s AI mode and Gemini – but it already has a rival. 

UCP’s launch comes less than 14 weeks after OpenAI and Stripe announced their Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) – and directly brings on board a retailer (Shopify) that OpenAI had promised to onboard to its systems.

See also: OpenAI launches shopping inside ChatGPT

Like ACP, Google’s new standard can be implemented via REST APIs or MCP (Model Context Protocol). It can also be implemented via the A2A protocol.

At the National Retail Federation on January 11, Pichai said: “The industry needs a protocol that works at global scale and takes into account the nuances of commerce journeys, and this is a critical building block for it.”

What is the UCP standard?

The protocol facilitates interactions between agents or AI platforms acting on behalf of users, businesses selling goods and services, credential providers such as Google Wallet, and payment service providers (PSPs) like PayPal and Stripe, via a range of modular capabilities and standards

At launch, UCP supports checkout, identity linking and order management capabilities, building on existing standards including OAuth 2.0 and PCI-DSS, and with support for inter-agent protocols MCP and Google’s own A2A built-in.

A roadmap shared by Google says future capabilities will cover product discovery, support for multi-item checkout, loyalty benefits, and post-order management.

A phased rollout will see UCP first support payments in markets including India, Indonesia and Latin America. “We are adapting the protocol to support broader regional use cases and localized payment interoperability,” said Google.

A new agentic battleground

Commerce is proving to be a new battleground for agentic standards, with UCP Google’s second standard in the sector after it launched the Agent Payments Protocol (APP) to support financial transactions made by agents in 2025.

While APP was designed for payments companies, UCP appears to be a direct competitor to OpenAI’s ACP, launched in September 2025 with the support of fintech Stripe.

The world’s two largest payment companies, Visa and Mastercard are also looking to power agentic commerce, launching their Intelligent Commerce and AgentPay platforms in summer 2025 to manage agent-led payments on their networks.

Writing late last year, analysts at London firm TTL LLP noted of agentic commerce and AI shopping that “the commercial implications are enormous. If AI agents become the primary gateway to shopping: Consumers may bypass traditional e-commerce websites altogether. Search volumes on platforms like Google could fall dramatically… New revenue models are emerging. OpenAI, for instance, plans to charge merchants commission for sales completed through its integrated checkout system…”

They added: “This represents a new commercial ecosystem where brands compete not for clicks, but for algorithmic visibility within AI systems.”