Universal Commerce Protocol

Sundar Pichai announced Universal Commerce Protocol on 11 January 2026, at the opening of NRF 2026 in New York. It is open source under Apache 2.0, co-developed with Shopify, Walmart, Target, Etsy and Wayfair, and backed by more than 60 organizations including Visa, Mastercard and PayPal. Its architecture is layered like TCP/IP, with four transports: REST API, MCP, Agent2Agent and an embedded JSON-RPC protocol. Payment is delegated to Agent Payments Protocol.

For a merchant the work is concrete: six capabilities (agent-facing product discovery, cart handling with complex pricing rules, identity linking through OAuth 2.0, checkout, order management via webhooks, vertical extensions), and a capability profile at /.well-known/ucp. Nicolas Marette places schema.org underneath it all, the cement uniting the ontologies. Wayfair and Etsy were running direct AI-driven purchases on 11 February 2026. Carrefour positioned itself as the first large European grocery retailer to adopt it.

The protocol arrived into an already fragmented field. Agentic Commerce Protocol, from OpenAI and Stripe, had been operational since September 2025; Stripe and commercetools announced Agentic Commerce Suite the day after Pichai spoke. Amazon, which controls 40% of US e-commerce, stayed out and built Rufus and Buy for Me instead. Sam Ragsdale reads both as the AOL of agentic commerce: better UX inside a walled garden, a dead end for innovation. Max Thilén notes that 70-90% of purchase journeys are already invisible to conventional analytics, and agentic commerce approaches 100%.