Detailed Introduction
The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is an open, standards-driven specification that provides a common language and primitives for commerce interactions between AI agents, platforms, merchants, payment service providers, and credential providers. By defining Capabilities and Extensions, UCP enables platforms to discover merchant-supported features and securely initiate checkout and order flows with or without human intervention.
Main Features
- Capability-driven, composable architecture: commerce actions are expressed as discrete Capabilities (e.g., Checkout, Identity Linking, Order) with optional Extensions for enhanced experiences.
- Dynamic discovery and configuration: merchants publish capability profiles so platforms can automatically discover and configure integrations, reducing one-off integration work.
- Transport-agnostic design: the protocol is transport-neutral and supports REST, MCP (Model Context Protocol), or agent-to-agent (A2A) transports.
Use Cases
- Agent-assisted shopping: agents can discover products, populate carts, and complete payments on behalf of users, enabling autonomous shopping experiences.
- Platform integration: third-party platforms can call unified capabilities across multiple merchants for seamless cross-merchant experiences.
- PSP and credential provider integration: standardized token and credential exchange flows simplify payment and identity integrations.
Technical Features
- Built on open standards: UCP prefers existing standards for payments, identity, and security to avoid reinventing solutions.
- Extensible capability model: keeps core capability definitions concise while allowing targeted extensions for specialized features.
- Developer-friendly: comprehensive documentation, examples, and SDKs support rapid implementation and conformance testing.