Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is "a new open standard for agentic commerce", meant to let AI agents and commerce systems work together across the shopping journey, from product discovery to post-purchase support. Google's Merchant Center help page says it is compatible with A2A, AP2 and MCP.
What UCP does in Google Search and Gemini
Google uses UCP for a checkout feature. Eligible merchants can add a checkout button to product listings in AI Mode in Google Search and in Gemini. The merchant stays the seller of record. Buyers pay with Google Pay, using details saved in Google Wallet. Google says only standard card numbers (FPANs) are supported for now.
Where it is available
Google says the feature applies to products eligible in the United States, Canada and Australia, for participating merchants and partners. Only selected merchants can join, through an early access programme that rolls out in phases. India is not mentioned, and we found no launch date for India. That is as of 9 November 2026.
What a merchant must set up
Google's page lists these steps: meet the eligibility requirements, submit the interest form, complete the technical implementation, add the native_commerce(checkout_eligibility) attribute to product listings (the Buy button needs it) and create a Google Pay and Wallet Console account. Merchants that take payments without a payment service provider must also set up encryption and upload PCI compliance documents.
What it means for an Indian marketplace seller
Nothing to switch on today. UCP concerns merchants with their own checkout, so Amazon.in and Flipkart sellers do not integrate it. We did not find who developed the standard on the Merchant Center page, which links to ucp.dev for details. The sensible work is the same as for any AI shopping tool: complete titles, attributes, correct prices and stock. See agentic commerce for the Indian UPI pilot and Amazon Rufus for Amazon's own assistant.
Who is behind UCP?
The Merchant Center page does not name the developers, but the project site ucp.dev says UCP is co-developed by industry players. Its shopping list includes Google, Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, Walmart, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Salesforce and Stripe. It is licensed under Apache 2.0. Being listed as a co-developer does not mean a company has launched UCP checkout in India.
What the standard covers. For shopping, ucp.dev specifies catalogue search and lookup, cart, checkout, identity linking and order management. Account linking uses OAuth 2.0, payments use AP2 mandates and verifiable credentials, and businesses stay the merchant of record. Lodging is marked draft and food is "coming soon". The site gives no version number we could quote.
UCP and NPCI's UPI pilot. These are different things. The Indian pilot announced on 9 October 2025 uses UPI features with OpenAI and Razorpay, as described under agentic commerce. UCP is a protocol for how agents talk to merchants; the UPI pilot is a payment route.
Blooprint, a Bengaluru e-commerce agency, can tidy the catalogue data these systems read through its catalogue and listing optimisation service.