Retailers adopt agentic commerce protocols
Major retailers are choosing between competing “agentic commerce” protocols that allow consumers to complete transactions within conversational AI interfaces. Early adopters like Urban Outfitters and Gap are selecting between Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP). This emerging standard aims to future-proof digital commerce by integrating purchasing directly into AI-powered conversations and experiences.
- OpenAI co-developed its Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) with Stripe, while Google's Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is backed by a consortium of partners including Shopify, Target, Walmart, Visa, and Mastercard. - The protocols differ in technical scope; ACP focuses primarily on standardizing the checkout and payment process, whereas UCP is designed to address the entire commerce lifecycle, from product discovery to post-purchase support. - For secure transactions, ACP uses a "Delegated Payment Spec" where payment providers issue single-use tokens, preventing the AI from handling raw credit card details. UCP integrates with existing tokenization systems like the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and Google Pay. - Under both protocols, the retailer remains the merchant of record, maintaining the direct customer relationship and full control over order fulfillment, returns, and the post-purchase experience. - From an integration standpoint, ACP utilizes a REST API-only approach for communication, a familiar standard for most e-commerce development teams. UCP offers more flexibility by supporting multiple transport methods, including REST, gRPC, and GraphQL, to accommodate a wider range of enterprise architectures. - To function, the protocols rely on different data sources: ACP requires merchants to provide structured product feeds for ingestion by AI agents like ChatGPT, while UCP leverages existing Google Merchant Center feeds. - These standards are a recent development, with OpenAI and Stripe introducing ACP in 2025 and Google launching UCP in January 2026.
