Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)

UCP is an open standard for agentic shopping announced by Google with Shopify and other retailers in January 2026. It describes how an AI agent discovers products, builds a cart, checks out and manages orders with a merchant in a consistent way, so one agent can work with many stores without custom integration for each.

It is not a replacement for MCP. UCP describes the commerce capabilities and the shape of the requests; MCP is one of the transports an agent can use to make them. Shopify's current catalog and cart endpoints are documented as an MCP binding of UCP, which is why older 'Storefront MCP' tool names were retired in favour of the UCP endpoint. Payment authorisation is handled by a separate protocol, AP2.

Most merchants will meet UCP as settings and features inside their platform rather than as something to build. The things to check are which capabilities your platform exposes, whether your product data and policies are complete enough to be useful through them, and what controls you have over inclusion.