Earlier this month, Google launched the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) in partnership with more than 20 companies, including Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart – an open standard designed to enable agentic commerce at scale. Unlike previous attempts to standardise AI-driven transactions, UCP’s merchant-centric architecture and layered design signal a different approach, one prioritising operational control and transactional integrity over rapid experimentation.
Dave Joshua, Stelia’s Chief Growth Officer, recently spoke with Michael Dobell, entrepreneur, advisor, Vice-Chair of SoDA (Society of Digital Agencies), and Co-founder of Monks, to consider what this launch means beyond the announcement itself, and its potential to reshape commerce infrastructure.
Dave Joshua: So, when you look past the announcement, what actually changed with the Shopify Google launch?
Michael Dobell: I think what’s different about this is that it’s so merchant-centric in comparison to the OpenAI and Stripe protocol, the agentic commerce protocol, which is definitely a competitor. It’s much more focused on the end customer, and I think what’s significant and important about Universal Commerce protocol being merchant-centric is that as an industry, every transaction counts, right? And so, I think as an industry, they’re not comfortable with move fast and break things. And because it’s designed from the ground up to be a layered architecture and just start from basic transactions and works all the way up to, you know, discounting stacks, and each one of those layers is optional to the merchant. I think that’s very confidence-inducing.
The distinction between UCP’s merchant-centric design and competing protocols addresses a key priority facing agentic commerce adoption. Where some approaches prioritise frictionless customer experiences, potentially at the cost of merchant control, UCP’s layered architecture allows retailers to opt into capabilities incrementally. In an industry where every transaction carries operational, financial, and reputational weight, the ability to adopt without complete commitment at the outset reduces risk and creates a more credible path to production deployment.
Dave Joshua: Do you think this is about Google and Shopify repositioning themselves in this kind of commerce intelligence stack?
Michael Dobell: Absolutely. I mean, we’re seeing a search engine by background and a commerce platform by background, helping people find the things that their hearts desire and a platform for helping merchants fulfil those needs. I think it’s a perfect pairing and the right companies to be building, if you will, the TCP IP for agentic commerce. I think too, looking at the partners that they worked with, both to develop the protocol as well as those that are going to market with it, it’s an impressive stack, and a large enough slice of the e-commerce pie that I think it’s worth betting on. Home Depot, Walmart, Etsy, Wayfair, it’s a pretty big launch, right?
The scale of industry participation – with co-development partners including Shopify, Target, and Walmart, plus endorsements from payment providers like American Express, Mastercard, Stripe and Visa – illustrates a coordinated response to the architectural demands agentic commerce creates: interoperability, transactional reliability, and shared standards which allow AI systems to operate across platforms without bespoke integrations for each agent or consumer surface. Yet indeed, coordination at the protocol level cannot eliminate initial operational friction.
Dave Joshua: Where do you see the real friction once this moves from launch, as we are now into day-to-day operation?
Michael Dobell: Well, change of management is always the biggie, and I think just the internal inertia. What’s neat about what Shopify is doing is that they’ve started to open up their platforms. It’s worth reading the papers on this, but you don’t necessarily need to be a Shopify merchant in order to adopt this protocol. It’s an open-source protocol, and that really is an important piece here.
Being open-source, the Universal Commerce Protocol creates optionality for enterprises evaluating agentic commerce strategies, reducing vendor lock-in risk while enabling any merchant, regardless of platform, to adopt the standard. This openness means retailers can integrate UCP capabilities using their existing commerce infrastructure, whether through REST APIs, Model Context Protocol (MCP), or Agent2Agent (A2A) bindings, without being forced into a specific vendor ecosystem. However, this flexibility also introduces complexity: merchants must assess which protocol layers align with their operational maturity, existing tech stacks, and fulfilment capabilities. And as adoption accelerates, the implications extend beyond individual merchants to redefining the entire commerce ecosystem.
Dave Joshua: Where do you see the second-order effects being across agencies, retailers, or just the whole ecosystem?
Michael Dobell: Let’s start with internal IT teams and those who are making the decisions about how they, as retailers, will interface with their customers. That’s about getting to know the protocol, understanding what parts of the layered architecture make sense, and then I think for the consultants and for the agencies, it’s about developing new service offerings that are much more focused on these types of protocols, helping to advise the merchants whether UCP or ACP is the better route for them. For customers, and just for people in general, it takes time for new patterns of behaviour to start to emerge. We’ve seen this shift from search to generation for research. And I think there’ll be a little bit of latency before we see people starting to get habituated to that idea of turning to Gemini, Copilot, ChatGPT or Perplexity to initiate that commerce journey or take that product research through to transaction and get comfortable with it.
This behavioural latency underscores that infrastructure adoption and user adoption operate on different timelines. For retailers, IT teams, and agencies, the immediate work must be architectural: understanding which protocol layers make sense, how to integrate them with existing systems, and what new capabilities require governance frameworks that don’t yet exist internally.
As agentic commerce moves from experimentation to operational reality, the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) represents an attempt to provide shared infrastructure that balances innovation velocity with transactional reliability. For enterprises, the challenge now lies in how to build the foundations – technical, operational, and advisory – that best prepare them for proactive adoption of these capabilities, allowing them to integrate agentic commerce without compromising control, security, or customer trust.
