Harvey Finkelstein, the president of Shopify, was recently interviewed about their open source Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), which enables agentic AI shopping. Co-developed with Google, he explains how UCP enables brands to be discovered by customers based on personalized recommendations, as opposed to advertising and classic search paradigms that are less personalized.
Finkelstein said that the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is designed to enable AI agents to surface products in a manner that merchants can control, show consumers personalized recommendations based on users’ preferences, and deliver a shopping experience that’s as good as any ecommerce store platform.
Shopify is also opening agentic commerce access to brands that are not Shopify customers through their Agentic plan, which he briefly mentions. This plan is designed for enterprise brands and merchants who do not use Shopify to upload their product data to Shopify’s infrastructure so it can be discovered and purchased directly by AI agents.
This positions Shopify as infrastructure for agentic commerce, not just a hosted commerce platform. This makes it easier for brands to gain immediate access to agentic shopping channels without having to migrate platforms.
Finkelstein also points out that agentic commerce only works if consumers can access all brands, not just those on Shopify.
Shopify’s Finkelstein said that UCP will enable merchants to more effectively control how their products are shown. He also discussed their strategy of bringing agentic shopping to all brands, regardless of whether they are on Shopify or not.
He explained:
“We created this protocol called Universal Commerce Protocol which effectively is this universal language is open sourced so that all merchants can speak directly to every single one of the agents.
And the best way to explain it is up until now, it was really just about like a single transaction.
So I can buy something on ChatGPT or Gemini or Microsoft. there’s no concept of loyalty or subscription or bundling or, you know, if it’s furniture, for example, please don’t ship it to me on Thursday. I’m not home Thursday. Send it Friday.
So this idea of creating this universal protocol that we co-developed with Google means that now merchants can actually tell these agents exactly how to show their products on these agentic tools. And it should be as good as it is on the online store. So that was a really, really big one.
The second thing we announced also with Google is that now we’re actually expanding. You can sell everywhere commerce is happening from an agentic perspective.
So we’re going beyond the agentic storefronts of just ChatGPT, which is what we said, you know, in Q3. Now it’s also, we’re going to be working with Gemini, with AI mode in Google Search, and also with copilot.
And maybe the last one is that we’re actually bringing agentic commerce to every brand, whether or not they’re on Shopify.
So if…
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