Agentic commerce
UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol)
UCP is an open standard from Google and Shopify that lets AI agents read merchant catalogs, retrieve live pricing and inventory, manage carts and complete purchases.
UCP sits at the discovery and cart layer. Its design goal is cross-platform reach — any conformant agent should be able to transact with any participating merchant, rather than each assistant negotiating bilateral integrations with each retailer.
For a merchant the practical requirement is the same one every agentic protocol imposes: a catalog exposed as structured data with price and availability that are actually current. That work is not specific to UCP and is not wasted if a different protocol prevails.
In depth: What is UCP? A merchant guide