Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)

An open standard enabling interoperability between various commerce entities to facilitate seamless commerce integrations.

Documentation | Specification | Discussions

Overview

The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) addresses a fragmented commerce landscape by providing a standardized common language and functional primitives. It enables platforms (like AI agents and apps), businesses, Payment Service Providers (PSPs), and Credential Providers (CPs) to communicate effectively, ensuring secure and consistent commerce experiences across the web.

With UCP, businesses can:

• Declare supported capabilities to enable autonomous discovery by platforms.
• Facilitate secure checkout sessions, with or without human intervention.
• Offer personalized shopping experiences through standardized data exchange.

Why UCP?

As commerce becomes increasingly agentic and distributed, the ability for different systems to interoperate without custom, one-off integrations is vital. UCP aims to:

• Standardize Interaction: Provide a uniform way for platforms to interact with businesses, regardless of the underlying backend.
• Modularize Commerce: Breakdown commerce into distinct Capabilities (e.g., Checkout, Order) and Extensions (e.g., Discounts, Fulfillment), allowing for flexible implementation.
• Enable Agentic Commerce: Designed from the ground up to support AI agents acting on behalf of users to discover products, fill carts, and complete purchases securely.
• Enhance Security: Support for advanced security patterns like AP2 mandates and verifiable credentials.

Key Features

• Composable Architecture: UCP defines Capabilities (such as "Checkout" or "Identity Linking") that businesses implement to enable easy integration. On top of that, specific Extensions can be added to enhance the consumer experience without bloating the capability definitions.
• Dynamic Discovery: Businesses declare their supported Capabilities in a standardized profile, allowing platforms to autonomously discover and configure themselves.
• Transport Agnostic: The protocol is designed to work across various transports. Businesses can offer Capabilities via REST APIs, MCP (Model Context Protocol), or A2A, depending on their infrastructure.
• Built on Standards: UCP leverages existing open standards for payments, identity, and security wherever applicable, rather than reinventing the wheel.
• Developer Friendly: A comprehensive set of SDKs and libraries facilitates rapid development and integration.

Key Capabilities

The initial release focuses on the essential primitives for transacting:

• Checkout: Facilitates checkout sessions including cart management and tax calculation, supporting flows with or without human intervention.
• Identity Linking: Enables platforms to obtain authorization to perform actions on a user's behalf via OAuth 2.0.
• Order: Webhook-based updates for order lifecycle events (shipped, delivered, returned).
• Payment Token Exchange: Protocols for PSPs and Credential Providers to securely exchange payment tokens and credentials.

Getting Started

• 📚 Explore the Documentation: Visit ucp.dev for a complete overview, the full protocol specification, tutorials, and guides.
• 🎬 Review our samples for implementation examples.
• 🛠️ Use our SDKs to start building your own integrations.
• 📝 Check conformance with our conformance tests.

Contributing

We welcome community contributions to enhance and evolve UCP.

• Questions & Discussions: Join our GitHub Discussions.
• Issues & Feedback: Report issues or suggest improvements via GitHub Issues.
• Contribution Guide: See our CONTRIBUTING.md for details on how to contribute.

What's Next

Take a look at our roadmap on ucp.dev. Future enhancements include:

• New Verticals: Applications beyond Shopping (e.g., Travel, Services).
• Loyalty: Standardized management of loyalty programs and rewards.
• Personalization: Enhanced signals for personalized product discovery.

About

UCP is an open-source project under the Apache License 2.0 and is open to contributions from the community.