Universal commerce protocol: How Shopify and Google are redefining where (and how) we shop
As Shopify and Google introduce the Universal Commerce Protocol, the traditional path from search to checkout is being reimagined, bringing shopping directly into search results, AI interfaces, and other digital touchpoints.
People have been buying and selling things for thousands of years, but the mechanics behind how a purchase actually happens have rarely evolved as quickly as they are right now, elk Marketing reports.
For most of the internet era, shopping followed a familiar sequence. A consumer searches, clicks through to a website, browses, and eventually checks out. Google and Shopify are now working to change that sequence entirely.
At the National Retail Federation’s annual show in January 2026, the two companies announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open framework built to let AI agents handle the entire shopping journey, from finding a product to completing a purchase, without requiring the shopper to leave the platform where they started.
UCP works by giving AI agents a common language to communicate with merchant systems, so instead of each retailer building separate technical connections for every AI tool or platform, one framework handles it all. Retailers keep full control over their pricing, inventory, and customer relationships throughout.
The protocol was co-developed with Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart, and endorsed by more than 20 organizations across payments and retail, including Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, and The Home Depot. That level of institutional support, coming from across the commerce ecosystem, points to UCP being built as foundational infrastructure rather than a product feature.
How User Behavior Is Changing
Shopping expectations are getting more immediate and more specific. People are no longer approaching online buying with the patience that has traditionally been required of them.
Finding something on one platform meant navigating to a separate website, often creating an account, re-entering payment details, and working through several screens before an order was actually placed. Consumers want faster answers, clearer options, and a smoother path from “I need this” to “it’s on the way.”
Research shows 70% of shoppers have already used AI tools to assist with their purchases, from comparing products to managing transactions. And Capital One Shopping tracked a 4,700% rise in AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail websites between 2024 and 2025. More of that traffic is arriving with a purchase decision already underway, shaped by a conversation with an AI tool rather than by browsing a brand’s site.
John Carroll, President of Connected Commerce at Acosta Group, called generative AI tools “the new gatekeepers of the shopper journey,” with buying decisions moving steadily out of traditional storefronts and into AI-powered interfaces.
The Rise of Zero-Click Commerce (and Its Challenges)
A growing part of that movement is what the industry calls zero-click commerce, where a shopper completes a purchase without ever visiting a brand’s own website. Instead of clicking through to a product page, adding to a cart, and checking out across multiple screens, the entire transaction happens inside the platform where the search or conversation began.
For shoppers, it feels fast and frictionless, but for marketers, it creates a real gap in visibility. When a sale happens entirely within an AI interface, the research and consideration that led to it often go untracked.
Research from Bain and Company found that 80% of consumers rely on zero-click answers for at least 40% of their searches, and for brands that built their measurement strategy around website traffic and click-through data, a growing portion of the customer journey is now happening somewhere they cannot see.
Why Product Feeds Are Becoming Critical Infrastructure
Behind every AI-assisted purchase is a set of product data that an AI agent reads before a shopper ever sees a recommendation. For that transaction to happen inside a search result or AI interface, the agent needs accurate, readable information about a product’s price, availability, and specifications.
A product feed is exactly that, a structured and continuously updated file that tells AI systems what a retailer sells and how to sell it. In a traditional retail environment, keeping that data organized was important. In an agentic commerce environment, it has become foundational, because an AI agent can only recommend or purchase a product it can fully understand.
Google has moved in this direction by introducing new data attributes inside Merchant Center, the platform retailers use to manage how their products appear across Google surfaces, expanding what brands can share beyond basic keywords to include things like product compatibility and answers to common buyer questions.
John Readman, CEO of ASK BOSCO, described the long-standing challenge as a “fragmentation tax,” the cost retailers absorb when product data is out of sync across platforms, and noted that in an AI-driven environment, that inconsistency directly affects whether a product gets surfaced at all.
What This Means for Digital Marketing Strategy
As product data takes on more weight in how AI systems make buying decisions, digital marketing strategy has to adjust around it. Visibility still matters, but now it extends across search, AI interfaces, and other buying environments where products are surfaced, interpreted, and acted on before a shopper ever reaches a brand’s website.
That puts more pressure on brands to think beyond traffic alone and pay closer attention to how they appear across multiple surfaces at the moment a decision is being made. It also raises the value of data quality and consistency, because even strong creative work can lose ground if the underlying product information is incomplete or out of sync.
The Future of Commerce Is Everywhere
Nobody can say with certainty what buying and selling will look like a decade from now, but the signals are already clear in how people shop today. More purchasing decisions are being shaped by AI before a shopper ever opens a browser, and more transactions are being completed in environments that brands do not own or fully control.
That is why UCP matters. It is part of a broader change in digital commerce, one where the boundaries between search, content, recommendation, and checkout continue to blur.
“The future isn’t about whether a consumer visits your website; it’s about whether your data is structured well enough to be ‘hired’ by an agent to do a job,” says Steve McQuaide, VP of Strategy at elk Marketing. “UCP is the bridge that turns fragmented AI experimentation into a standardized, scalable reality.”
McKinsey has projected that AI-powered tools and agentic commerce could represent between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in global retail opportunity by 2030, which speaks to how much of the buying journey is already moving in this direction.
Brands that recognize where commerce is heading, and prepare for it now, will be better positioned for a market where the next purchase may begin with a question and end with an answer.
This story was produced by elk Marketing and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
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