Google unveils new agentic commerce protocol for retailers

• Key insights: Google unveiled the Universal Commerce Protocol at the National Retail Federation’s annual conference in New York on Sunday.

• What’s at stake: The Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP is an open standard that establishes a common language for agents and systems to work together, and will allow consumers to purchase products from retailers directly through Google’s AI Mode in the browser or the Gemini app.

• Forward look: UCP will initially use saved payment information from Google Wallet. PayPal will also be integrated in the future.

NEW YORK — Google is rolling out an agentic commerce protocol for retailers at the NRF 2026, the National Retail Federation’s annual convention in New York, on Sunday, the technology giant said.

The Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP, is an open standard that establishes a common language for agents and systems to work together from discovery to purchase to post-purchase support.

UCP will first serve as the backbone of a new Google checkout feature that will allow consumers to make purchases in AI Mode in the browser search and in the Gemini app. UCP will initially use saved payment information in Google Wallet, with support for PayPal payments coming “in the future,” according to Google.

“Instead of requiring unique connections for every individual agent, UCP enables all agents to interact easily,” Vidhya Srinivasan, vice president and general manager of Google Ads & Commerce, said in a blog post.

UCP is the second open agentic commerce protocol that Google has developed in as many years. Last year, Google launched its Agentic Payments Protocol, or AP2, which established a payment-agnostic framework for users, merchants and payments. UCP also works with other agentic protocols, such as Agent2Agent and Model Context Protocol.

Retailers and e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair and Target helped co-develop the protocol. Adyen, American Express, Stripe, MasterCard and Visa have also endorsed the protocol.

“Shopify has a history of building checkouts for millions of unique retail businesses. We have taken everything we’ve seen over the decades to make UCP a robust commerce standard that can scale,” said Shopify Vice President Vanessa Lee in a statement.

Retailers will remain the merchant of record, and Google plans to roll out additional features such as related product recommendations, loyalty and rewards and custom shopping experiences on Google in the coming months.

With UCP, Google and Shopify are “trying to provide a degree of comfort to the merchant that they’re going to increase sales and discoverability and conversions by supplying their product data to Gemini and Shopify for an off-site sale,” Richard Crone, CEO of Crone Consulting, told American Banker.

“The other side of this is that if the checkout goes to Gemini, the merchant loses the last touch point,” Crone said, adding the merchant loses the chance to influence cross-selling or “one more item,” and that accounts for 33% to 76% of the upsell / cross-sell.

“The product detail pages are the fuel that they need to feed their agentic commerce engine,” Crone said.

Agentic commerce requires three parties to build a market. Consumers have to want to use AI agents to discover and purchase products — which they’ve already shown a penchant for; merchants have to make their inventory discoverable by those agents; and payment companies need to verify the legitimacy of the agent and establish and record consumer intent and communicate that intent to merchants in order to combat fraud and charge-backs.

Payment companies have been moving fast to develop agentic payment protocols, but merchants have been slower to get on board as they work to retain direct relationships with their customers.

“That whole concept of driving the customer outside of the merchant’s control has unprecedented disintermediation costs and channel conflict risk,” Crone said. “You’re going to let somebody shop using your inventory and close the sale off-site? That has the potential to dramatically erode your franchise value and reduce you to nothing more than a warehouse or fulfillment center.”