Amazon, Meta & Microsoft join UCP technical council

Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce and Stripe have joined the Technical Council of the Universal Commerce Protocol, doubling its membership to 10 organisations.

The Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP, is an open-source standard that enables AI agents to interact with retailers across product search, basket building, checkout, and post-purchase support. The council oversees technical proposals, sets the protocol's direction and manages the codebase behind the standard.

The five new members join Google, Shopify, Etsy, Target and Wayfair. The expansion comes as large technology groups, retailers and payments companies compete to shape the rules that could govern AI-led shopping.

Google unveiled UCP at the National Retail Federation conference earlier this year. The goal is to reduce the need for retailers and AI platforms to build separate integrations with each other by using a common framework.

Support for that framework has become a closely watched issue as companies race to define how autonomous software agents could make purchases for consumers. Microsoft has already made UCP feeds generally available in Merchant Centre, allowing businesses to surface products through Copilot, while rival approaches from OpenAI and others are also gaining traction.

The new council members reflect the range of interests gathering around that debate. Amazon is the world's largest online retailer. Meta controls major consumer discovery platforms, including Instagram. Microsoft is pushing AI assistants into commerce workflows. Salesforce has a large presence in retail software, while Stripe handles payments for a wide range of online businesses.

The body has expanded its available seats to 16 in response to growing interest from contributing organisations. The new members are Greg Smith of Amazon, James Andersen of Meta, Patrick Jordan of Microsoft, Prasad Wangikar of Stripe and Scot DeDeo of Salesforce.

The council's role is not ceremonial. It reviews and votes on changes to the specification, including proposals on identity, payments, loyalty programmes, local inventory and returns. Meeting notes published by the project show members debating how AI agents should verify a shopper's identity across sessions and merchants. That is seen as a key step toward allowing an agent to complete a transaction without sending the customer back to a conventional checkout page.

Those records also show some of the new members have already begun contributing to the project's technical work. Meta's representative submitted a documentation change related to card credentials and payment compliance, while Microsoft's representative contributed documentation fixes.

The latest version of the protocol included more than 60 merged pull requests, making it the largest release since launch. Additions included support for basket building, catalogue search and lookup, signed requests and responses, revised error handling, discount handling before checkout and risk signals intended to help merchants assess fraud and abuse.

Loyalty is another area under discussion. The council has been working on an extension that would allow agents to verify customer status and use rewards during checkout, although meeting notes suggest the effort is being narrowed to simpler use cases first. Local commerce has also been identified as a priority, with proposals for store-level inventory and fulfilment options that could allow an agent to answer whether a product is available nearby.

Returns remain more complex. Project discussions describe them as difficult to standardise because merchants differ on return windows, refund methods, partial returns and eligibility rules. As a result, a full agent-managed returns process may take longer to emerge than basic product discovery or basket functions.

Market forecasts cited by the organisations behind the protocol estimate that agentic commerce could account for between USD $190 billion and USD $385 billion in US eCommerce spending by 2030, or roughly 10% to 20% of the market. Those projections remain speculative, but the arrival of Amazon, Meta and Microsoft on the governing body suggests the largest digital platforms do not want to be left outside any standard that gains broad adoption.

Vidhya Srinivasan, Vice President and General Manager of Ads and Commerce at Google, said the company sees broad industry backing forming around the project.

"The Universal Commerce Protocol is quickly paving the way for this new era of agentic commerce," Srinivasan said. "We're proud to see the industry come together around this shared, open standard that will benefit businesses and consumers everywhere."

Vanessa Lee, Vice President of Product at Shopify, pointed to the need for common rules across platforms and retailers.

"AI can enable so many new ways of shopping to flourish, but only if there's a clear standard between retailers, businesses and applications," Lee said.