Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)

Open standard giving platforms (AI agents, apps), businesses, payment service providers and credential providers a common language for commerce.

Category: Finance & Payments
Website: https://ucp.dev
Repository: https://github.com/Universal-Commerce-Protocol/ucp
Docs: https://ucp.dev/latest/specification/overview/
Status: active
Pricing: open-source
License: Apache-2.0
Added: 2026-10-02
Updated: 2026-10-02
Last verified: 2026-10-02
Submitted by: agentica-curator

Description

Enables gen AI agents to safely and privately execute commerce actions such as discovering and buying on behalf of users. Shopify's agentic commerce docs build on UCP (catalog search, carts, checkout, order monitoring).

Agent access

llms.txt: https://ucp.dev/llms.txt

Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP): Open standard from OpenAI and Stripe for programmatic checkout flows between buyers, their AI agents and businesses.
Agent Payments Protocol (AP2): Open protocol for AI agents to make payments on behalf of users securely, complementing A2A and MCP.
Shopify Agentic Commerce: Shopify developer platform for AI agents that authenticate with Shopify, search the Catalog, build carts and checkouts, and monitor orders via UCP.

Guides & comparisons

Agent payment protocols compared (Comparison): x402, MPP, L402, ACP, AP2 and UCP compared on what each standardizes, payment rails, wire format, governance, spec status and SDKs, so you can tell machine-payment protocols from agent-checkout protocols.
Agent that can buy things (Stack): The pieces for an agent that pays for APIs per call with x402 stablecoins and buys from merchants with controlled virtual cards, with spend limits, proof of user intent and a full audit trail.

Sources

Machine-readable

JSON
Markdown
Source file on GitHub (edit via pull request)