This is part 1 of our Agentic Protocol for Ecommerce series. 

Read Part 2: The Model Context Protocol (MCP): The Agentic AI “USB-C Port” for Ecommerce

Read Part 3: Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol: Enabling AI Agents to Transform Ecommerce

Well, it’s official: your customers’ shopping journeys are changing yet again, and this time it seems like a massive shift in how ecommerce businesses and their customers interact is underway. 

Shopify and Google have just unveiled a Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) to help standardize how ecommerce stores and AI-powered agents interact online, fundamentally changing the way products can be surfaced and purchased online.

In this article, we’ll be digging into what exactly the UCP is, how it works, and why you should be jumping on and leveraging it to grow shopping carts and increase sales, no matter where or how your customers shop.  

What is the Universal Commerce Protocol?

Co-developed by some of the biggest companies in ecommerce and retail, such as Shopify, Google, Etsy, and Walmart, the Universal Commerce Protocol aims to define the building blocks and provide a standard for agentic commerce across the online platforms and services we use every day. 

Think of it like an API for shopping: it provides a common set of rules and data formats that let different systems, such as ecommerce stores, payment providers, loyalty programs, and AI agents, communicate with each other in a consistent way. 

This allows AI agents (agentic AI shopping assistants) to directly discover products, negotiate purchases, and complete orders on any UCP-enabled store. For example, Google AI Mode in search can use UCP to find a product on a Shopify store, confirm the price/stock status, and securely check out, all within an AI interface. This open commerce standard essentially makes conversational commerce possible on a broad scale. 

With the broad support of the brands we mentioned earlier, and its adoption by payment networks like Visa and Stripe, the Universal Commerce Protocol is vendor-neutral and part of the foundational infrastructure for online shopping. 

Why UCP Was Developed 

Right now, online shopping is fragmented. Shoppers might start browsing via a Google search, on social media, or through product recommendations from an LLM, but still have to leave that platform to add items to their carts and complete purchases. 

Unfortunately, as ecommerce merchants know, each one of these extra steps–like navigating to a website, searching for a product, adding to cart, creating an account/logging in, and actually checking out–is a chance for a person to give up and abandon their cart or plans to purchase altogether. By minimizing context-switching, we expect to see a reduction in cart abandonment with UCP, as it streamlines the path to purchase. 

The Universal Commerce Protocol also solves integration headaches. Historically, if you wanted your online store to integrate with a new platform, such as a voice assistant or a new marketplace, you’d need a custom integration for each. This often takes time and developer assistance. 

Small and mid-sized businesses often lack the resources for constant development. UCP eliminates this pain by providing one standard integration to “connect everywhere.” i.e. integrate your store with UCP once, and you’re compatible with any platform or agent that also adopts UCP. This levels the playing field; even independent merchants can easily tap into large discovery channels without bespoke development.

UCP also simply keeps AI-driven commerce open and collaborative, ensuring that businesses aren’t left out of the agentic AI trend. As more and more people rely on AI chatbots and tools for shopping, running an ecommerce store that is discoverable by these tools is more important than ever. 

How UCP Works: Key Features and Architecture

UCP defines a core set of commerce building blocks. These are things like creating a checkout session, listing items in a cart, calculating totals, etc., which cover the universal aspects of a transaction. On top of that, it includes capabilities (modules for major functions like Checkout, Orders, Product Catalog, etc.) and extensions for specific needs. This layered design means UCP can handle common workflows out-of-the-box and easily adapt to niche requirements.

For example, there’s a standard extension for fulfillment options (shipping, pickup, delivery windows, etc.), but if your store has a unique fulfillment model, you or the community can create a new extension without breaking the whole protocol.

UCP currently offers the following core capabilities:

• Checkout: Standardizes the process of handling a shopping cart and completing a sale across platforms. It covers cart items, dynamic pricing (tax calculations, etc.), and payment steps in one unified session that can run with or without direct human input.

• Identity Linking: Uses OAuth 2.0 to let customers securely link their accounts on a platform with their account on the merchant’s site. This allows the platform to perform authorized actions for the user, like applying loyalty rewards or viewing order history, without the user sharing passwords.

• Order: Webhook-based updates for order lifecycle events (shipped, delivered, returned). It provides a standard record of a completed purchase (what was bought and how it will be delivered) once a checkout is finalized. 

• Payment Token Exchange: Protocols for PSPs and Credential Providers to securely exchange payment tokens and credentials.

UCP also currently includes the following extensions:

• AP2 Mandates Extension: Transforms a standard checkout session into a cryptographically bound agreement by adding an extra security layer via the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) standard for digital payment mandates. 

• Buyer Consent Extension: Allows the platform to capture and pass along the shopper’s consent preferences during checkout for things like marketing emails, analytics tracking, or data sharing. This helps businesses honour each customer’s privacy choices (such as opt-outs under GDPR or CCPA) by receiving these consent settings in a standardized way.

• Discounts Extension: Lets merchants accept promo or coupon codes in a consistent way during checkout. The platform can submit one or more discount codes to the merchant and get back which discounts were applied with human-readable names and amounts, or if any codes were rejected. It also supports automatic discounts without a code. 

• Fulfillment Extension: Introduces shipping and pickup options into the checkout process for physical goods. Merchants can present available delivery methods, specify where items can be shipped or picked up, and let buyers choose their preferred option for each item, all through a standard format in the checkout data. 

One of the smartest aspects of UCP is how it connects buyers’ agents with sellers’ systems. Each merchant publishes a UCP profile declaring what capabilities and options they support, while each agent–in this case, AI or platform–also has a profile stating what it can handle. When the agent contacts the merchant, UCP automatically compares these two profiles and finds the overlap. 

This dynamic negotiation ensures that both sides agree on all aspects of the transaction (e.g., processing a standard checkout using discounts and loyalty points via Google Pay), so the transaction can be completed without any human intervention. 

If, during checkout, it is determined that the agent or merchant can’t handle something, UCP allows merchants to provide a special continue_url that redirects the customer to an embedded web checkout to complete the transaction instead. 

This is powered by the Embedded Checkout Protocol (ECP), which is essentially an embedded iframe of the merchant’s checkout within the agent’s interface. The handoff happens smoothly: the shopper might hardly notice they left the AI chat. Once they have completed the required steps, control can return to the agent. In short, UCP’s design means an AI will do as much as it can, but invite the user to step in when necessary, so the sale still completes.

Benefits of the Universal Commerce Protocol for Merchants 

One of the biggest benefits of using the Universal Commerce Protocol is that smaller merchants can reach more customers without extra work. This could be an AI shopping assistant in Google Search, a chatbot in a popular app, or a new platform that emerges in the future. Online retailers who put in a little effort to be early adopters can gain a competitive advantage by showing up wherever customers browse and chat about products. 

UCP also improves customer experiences, increases product discovery, and reduces friction, directly correlating with higher conversions and lower cart abandonment rates. Imagine a customer finds your product via a voice assistant or AI search suggestion. With UCP, they can go from discovery to payment instantly, without being redirected to an external site or forced to re-enter info. Google’s initial implementation already allows direct purchases in its AI Search results using saved Google Pay details. 

Things like loyalty points, promo codes, subscriptions, and different fulfillment options are all part of the standard, so your customers won’t miss out on those perks even when shopping through an agent. 

Similarly, you, as the merchant, can stay in control of your brand and data. A big concern for retailers is that selling through third-party platforms or AI intermediaries might erode their customer relationships. UCP is specifically designed to avoid that. 

You remain the Merchant of Record for all sales, even if the transaction happens on Google or in a chatbot. This means you still own the customer and product data, manage the order, and handle post-purchase interactions like shipping updates and returns. Also, because you integrate your own systems (like your existing Shopify store or ERP) with UCP, you maintain your usual business logic, whether that’s tax calculations, fraud checks, or loyalty program rules. 

The benefits go even further for merchants on Shopify. Since Shopify helped develop the UCP, the platform is actively integrating its capabilities into its backend so that merchants can start benefiting from it immediately. 

Shopify has even released a Checkout Kit that lets any Shopify store enable agent-driven checkout with just a few lines of code. If you’re on another platform or a custom site, you can implement UCP by exposing your store’s capabilities via API endpoints. Developers can use the open spec and libraries. 

Getting Ready for UCP

The Universal Commerce Protocol just launched, so if you want to be an early adopter, here’s how to get started:

1. Check your platform’s UCP support: Start by understanding how (or if) your current ecommerce platform is involved with UCP. If you’re a Shopify merchant, the good news is that Shopify is a co-creator of UCP and is likely to begin to roll out support for it across Shopify Plus and other services. Keep an eye on Shopify’s announcements or developer docs for updates and feature announcements. You will likely get many capabilities out-of-the-box via updates or apps.

2. Join the waitlist: Google is launching UCP functionality across its products, such as AI Search and the forthcoming Gemini shopping app, initially with a limited set of partners. To be an early adopter on Google’s side, you can join their UCP waitlist (U.S. only, for now).

3. Audit your store’s capabilities: UCP integration will involve exposing the features your store supports (product catalogue, variants, discount rules, shipping methods, etc.) in a structured way. For example, if your checkout process is highly custom or your discount logic is unusual, plan how to represent that via UCP’s extension mechanism.

4. Partner with experts: If you’re looking to get started with UCP but aren’t sure if you have the bandwidth to handle it yourself, consider bringing a development agency on board to get you set up. As a Shopify Plus Partner agency, we at Blue Badger are excited to get started with helping out clients leverage UCP and related tech. Whether it’s migrating your store to Shopify for direct UCP access, building a headless commerce solution that takes advantage of UCP’s API, or integrating agentic AI shopping experiences into your customer journey, we have the skills you need ensure you’re discoverable to AI shopping assistants. 

Agentic shopping is here, and with it comes cart abandonment reduction, user experience improvements, and an overall shift in how people interact with online stores moving forward. 

Conclusion

Ecommerce is changing yet again, and with it comes a new opportunity for merchants to get in early and meet customers wherever they’re shopping this time around. By integrating with UCP, you ensure that your customers can access your products wherever they choose to shop – on your ecommerce site as usual or through AI-assisted tech like shopping assistants or chatbots.

If you’re looking to be a part of this new online shopping experience, we at Blue Badger would love to help you get started. Contact us today to learn more.

Next:  The Model Context Protocol (MCP): The Agentic AI “USB-C Port” for Ecommerce