UCP Explorer

UCP is an open standard for AI agents to connect and transact with any merchant. It is governed by the UCP Tech Council, whose founding members are Google, Shopify, Etsy, Target, and Wayfair. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe joined the Tech Council in April 2026. The specification is published under the Apache License 2.0.

Commerce is complex — payment options and rules differ based on the cart, buyer, and market; discounts have stacking and combination rules; fulfillment options multiply with every permutation. UCP provides a standard way for agents and merchants to negotiate these capabilities dynamically, rather than requiring custom integrations for every merchant.

UCP uses a layered architecture. Services define API surfaces per vertical — Shopping today, with Food and Lodging verticals added in the 2026-08-25 release. Capabilities add major functional areas — Checkout, Cart, Orders, Catalog — each independently versioned and named with reverse-DNS namespaces (e.g. dev.ucp.shopping.checkout). Extensions augment capabilities with domain-specific schemas via composition — a vendor can publish its own, like dev.shopify.catalog. Merchants declare what they support, agents discover these capabilities and negotiate what they can handle.

Merchants publish a JSON manifest at /.well-known/ucp. Everything lives under a top-level ucp member: the protocol version (plus a supported_versions map for older clients), services with their transports and endpoint URLs, capabilities, and payment_handlers. A top-level keys[] JWK Set can carry the merchant's public signing keys. AI agents fetch this manifest to discover what a merchant offers and how to interact with them — and agents publish a profile of their own in the same format, which merchants fetch and validate on every request. This is the starting point for any UCP interaction.

UCP is transport-flexible — the spec defines REST, MCP, A2A, and embedded bindings. The idea is to swap the transport and envelope, not the business logic. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is one of these transport options, and the one this tool uses to interact with store endpoints. The 2026-08-25 MCP binding defines tools covering the full commerce lifecycle: search_catalog, lookup_catalog, and get_product for discovery; create_cart through cancel_cart for baskets; create_checkout through complete_checkout for purchase; and get_order for tracking.

The August 2026 release is the largest since launch. It restructures the protocol around multiple verticals (Shopping, Food, Lodging), adds location search and grocery support (operating hours, pickup destinations, fractional quantities), brings vendor-agnostic 3D Secure authentication via a new Actions primitive, overhauls identity and consent (delegated identity providers, reverse-DNS consent maps), formalizes a Loyalty extension, and adds namespace authority binding — a capability's schema URL origin must match its reverse-DNS namespace, which this tool verifies. It also promotes keys[] as the sole signing-key field and renames several Shopify MCP tools (get_product_details became get_product).

This tool performs the same requests an AI agent would make when interacting with a store via UCP. It fetches the UCP manifest, connects to the MCP endpoint, lists available tools, and lets you call those tools interactively. All requests and responses are shown transparently so you can see exactly what data is exchanged between agent and merchant.

The UCP Tech Council includes Google, Shopify, Etsy, Target, Wayfair, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe. Shopify currently provides UCP-compliant MCP servers for stores on its platform. The standard is open — any platform or merchant can implement it. Actual store-level availability depends on the platform and merchant.

The official UCP specification is at ucp.dev. Shopify's engineering blog post on building UCP is at shopify.engineering/ucp. Shopify's implementation documentation is at shopify.dev/docs/agents.