Under the Hood: Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)- Google Developers Blog

This post introduces the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) as an open-source standard for agentic commerce, detailing its architecture, benefits for businesses, AI platforms, developers, payment providers, and consumers. It outlines a unified integration approach, a shared language for commerce, an extensible architecture, and a security-first approach with tokenized payments and verifiable credentials. The post provides a practical walkthrough of setting up a business server, preparing it for agent requests, discovering business capabilities via a UCP manifest, and invoking checkout and discount capabilities using cURL commands. It highlights the separation of payment instruments from handlers and support for multiple transports like A2A, MCP, and APIs.