# Universal Commerce Protocol

> An emerging open standard for agentic shopping flows across merchants, AI platforms, and commerce systems.

- Category: AI-Native Product
- Stage: Watch
- Also called: UCP
- Canonical: https://www.joelcsaji.com/ai-dictionary/universal-commerce-protocol

## Plain English

It is an attempt to give agents and stores a shared language for shopping journeys.

## Example

A retailer exposes product discovery, checkout, and post-purchase operations in a way agent platforms can understand.

## Why it matters

If commerce becomes agent-facing, retailers will need machine-readable journeys, not only human web pages.

## Related

- [Agentic Commerce](https://www.joelcsaji.com/ai-dictionary/agentic-commerce)
- [A2A](https://www.joelcsaji.com/ai-dictionary/agent2agent)
- [MCP](https://www.joelcsaji.com/ai-dictionary/model-context-protocol)

## Sources

- [Google: Universal Commerce Protocol](https://developers.googleblog.com/under-the-hood-universal-commerce-protocol-ucp/)