Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol aims to simplify life for shopping bots… and CIOs

Google has published the first draft of Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard to help AI agents order and pay for goods and services online.

It co-developed the new protocol with industry leaders including Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart. It also has support from payment system providers including Adyen, American Express, Mastercard, Stripe, and Visa, and online retailers including Best Buy, Flipkart, Macy’s, The Home Depot, and Zalando.

Google’s move has been eagerly awaited by retailers according to retail technology consultant, Miya Knights. “Retailers are keen to start experimenting with agentic commerce, selling directly through AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. They will embrace and experiment with it. They want to know how to show up and convert in consumer searches.”

Security shopping list

However, it will present challenges for CIOs, in particular in maintaining security, she said. UCP as implemented by Google means retailers will be exposing REST (Representational State Transfer) endpoints to create, update, or complete checkout sessions. “That’s an additional attack surface beyond your web/app checkout. API gateways, WAF/bot mitigation, and rate limits become part of checkout security, not just a ‘nice-to-have’. This means that CIOs will have to implement new reference architectures and runtime controls; new privacy, consent, and contracts protocols; and new fraud stack component integration.”

Info-Tech Research Group principal research director Julie Geller also sees new security challenges ahead. “This is a major shift in posture. It pushes retail IT teams toward deliberate agent gateways, controlled interfaces where agent identity, permissions, and transaction scope are clearly defined. The security challenge isn’t the volume of bot traffic, but non-human actors executing high-value actions like checkout and payments. That requires a different way of thinking about security, shifting the focus away from simple bot detection toward authorization, policy enforcement, and visibility,” she said.

The introduction of UCP will undoubtedly mean smoother integration of AI into retail systems but, besides security challenges, there will be other issues for CIOs to grapple with.

Geller said that one of the issues she foresees with UCP is that “it works too well”. By this she means that the integration is so smooth that there are governance issues. “When agents can act quickly and upstream of traditional control points, small configuration issues can surface as revenue, pricing, or customer experience problems almost immediately. This creates a shift in responsibility for IT departments. The question stops being whether integration is possible and becomes how variance is contained and accountability is maintained when execution happens outside the retailer’s own digital properties. Most retail IT architectures were not designed for that level of delegated autonomy.”

Google’s AI rival OpenAI launched a new feature last October that allowed users to discover and use third-party applications directly within the chat interface, at the same time publishing an early draft of a specification co-developed with Stripe, Agentic Commerce Protocol, to help AI agents make online transactions.

Knights expects the introduction of UCP to accelerate interest in and adoption of agentic commerce among retailers. “Google said that it had already worked with market leaders Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart to develop the UCP standard. This will force competitors to accelerate their agentic commerce strategies, and will help Google steal a march on competitors, given that it is the market leader,” she said.

For online retailers’ IT departments, it’s going to mean extra work, though, in implementing the new protocols and in ensuring their e-commerce sites are visible to consumers and bots alike.