Platform & products

Universal Commerce Protocol

UCP

Definition

The open standard behind Shopify's Catalog, Cart and Checkout MCPs, which lets AI surfaces such as Microsoft Copilot complete purchases inside a conversation.

Defined in The Agentic Commerce Glossary.

The full guide: Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP): Getting Google Checkout in AI Mode and Gemini.

How else it gets framed

The same term carries different emphasis depending on the surface it’s used on. Both readings are correct.

An open-source standard for agentic commerce that gives AI agents, businesses and payment providers a shared way to handle discovery, checkout and post-purchase steps. Google announced it on January 11, 2026, co-developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart. It works over REST APIs, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent2Agent (A2A), and is compatible with the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2).

Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP): Getting Google Checkout in AI Mode and Gemini →

An open standard for agentic commerce, covering discovery through checkout and post-purchase, that lets AI agents talk to a business's commerce backend. Google published it in January 2026, developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart. Businesses publish their capabilities in a manifest at /.well-known/ucp, and the business remains the merchant of record.

AI Shopping Channels: How Products Get Into ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity →

An open standard, co-developed by Google with Shopify and major retailers, that gives AI agents a common way to search catalogs, build carts, run checkout and track orders with a business.

Agentic Commerce on Shopify: The 2026 Guide →

Where Universal Commerce Protocol comes up

The guides that put this term to work, rather than just defining it.

Related terms

Agentic Commerce Protocol: An open standard, licensed under Apache 2.0, for how AI agents, buyers and businesses complete purchases through APIs. Released by OpenAI and Stripe on September 29, 2025; Meta joined as a lead maintainer on April 24, 2026. It defines agentic checkout, cart and product feeds, delegated payment, delegated authentication, and order webhooks. The spec is labeled beta.
Agentic Commerce Suite: Stripe's product for selling through AI agents, launched December 11, 2025. A seller shares a catalog feed with Stripe; Stripe syndicates products to connected agents, manages the checkout, processes the payment and sends the seller an order event. Each stage can be taken over by the seller. Stripe describes it as working across protocols, including ACP and Google's UCP.
Shared Payment Token: A Stripe payment credential an AI agent grants to a seller: a scoped, limited reference to the buyer's payment method, tied to the seller's Stripe profile with a maximum amount and an expiry. The seller charges it like a card and never sees the card number. OpenAI's docs call it the first implementation of OpenAI's Delegated Payment Spec.
Agentic checkout: A checkout initiated or completed by an AI agent for a shopper, either inside the AI surface the shopper is using or on the merchant's site, using payment credentials the shopper has authorized. The merchant remains the seller and merchant of record; the agent handles the steps a person would otherwise click through.
Agentic e-commerce: Online selling in which AI agents, rather than people, carry out some of the shopping steps: searching catalogs, comparing products against a shopper's constraints, and in some channels completing checkout after the shopper confirms. Also called agentic commerce or agentic AI e-commerce.
Agentic commerce: Commerce transactions initiated, researched, or completed with an AI agent acting on the shopper's behalf, rather than a human clicking through a storefront unassisted.

All 164 terms

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