Commerce is no longer starting on websites.
Today, buyers are discovering products inside AI conversations, asking questions, comparing options, and making decisions without ever visiting a traditional storefront. From search-powered AI experiences to chat-based assistants, the entire shopping journey is shifting from pages to agents.
But while discovery has moved into AI, checkout hasn’t kept up.
Most e-commerce systems are still built around web pages, plugins, and brittle integrations. They weren’t designed for AI agents that need to:
- Compare products across brands
- Check real-time inventory and pricing
- Apply discounts dynamically
- Complete purchases directly inside a conversation
This gap is exactly why the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) exists.
UCP introduces a standardized way for AI agents to discover products, initiate checkout, and complete purchases, securely and at scale. It’s the foundation that enables AI-native commerce.
And as agentic shopping becomes mainstream, a new category is emerging: agentic commerce platforms, systems that don’t just enable checkout, but orchestrate intelligent, end-to-end buying experiences across merchants, tools, and payment providers.
This is where CodeConductor comes in.
In This Post
- What Is the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)?
- Why Traditional Ecommerce Infrastructure Breaks in AI
- How UCP Enables AI-Native Checkout
- What UCP Does Not Solve (And Why That Matters)
- Introducing CodeConductor
- CodeConductor as a UCP Orchestrator
- CodeConductor as an AI Checkout Workflow Builder
- Why Agentic Commerce Increases Discovery and Conversion
- In a Nutshell: Why CodeConductor Powers the Future of AI Commerce
- FAQs
What Is the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)?
The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is an open, standardized protocol designed to enable agentic commerce, where AI agents can discover products, negotiate capabilities, and complete purchases on behalf of users.
At a high level, UCP gives AI systems a common language for commerce.
Instead of every AI platform building custom integrations with every retailer, payment provider, or service, UCP collapses that complexity into a single, reusable abstraction layer.
In practical terms, UCP allows:
- AI agents to discover what a business can do (browse products, apply discounts, check out)
- Businesses to expose their commerce capabilities once, in a standardized way
- Payments to be executed securely, with clear user consent and verification
- Merchants to remain fully in control as the Merchant of Record
UCP was developed by Google in collaboration with major commerce leaders like Shopify, Etsy, Walmart, and Stripe, signaling a broader industry shift toward AI-first buying experiences.
What makes UCP especially powerful is that it works with existing commerce infrastructure. Merchants don’t need to rebuild their stores or migrate platforms. UCP simply sits on top of current systems, exposing standardized capabilities that AI agents can understand and use.
In short:
- UCP is not a checkout UI
- UCP is not a marketplace
- UCP is the protocol that makes AI-native checkout possible
It defines how commerce happens in AI-driven environments, across search, chat, and agent-based experiences.
Why Traditional Ecommerce Infrastructure Breaks in AI
Traditional e-commerce was built for a page-based world.
Product discovery happens on websites. Checkout happens through forms. Integrations are handled via plugins, SDKs, or custom APIs. This model works when humans are clicking through pages, but it starts to break down when AI agents become the interface.
Here’s why.
Most ecommerce systems rely on point-to-point integrations. If you want to sell on a new surface, another marketplace, a new app, or an AI assistant, you often need a brand-new integration. Multiply that across platforms, and you end up with an N×N problem: every new surface requires custom work.
AI agents don’t work that way.
Agents need to:
- Discover products dynamically
- Understand what actions a business supports
- Compare options across multiple stores
- Initiate checkout without hard-coded flows
- Operate inside conversational contexts
Page-based systems, plugins, and SDKs weren’t designed for this level of flexibility.
As a result, brands face a growing gap:
Discovery is happening inside AI
Checkout is still trapped on websites
Without a standardized way to expose commerce capabilities, AI experiences become brittle, incomplete, or limited to simple redirects. This leads to lost intent, broken flows, and missed revenue, right when users are ready to buy.
This is the core problem UCP addresses: standardizing how commerce works for agents.
But standardization alone isn’t enough.
To actually deliver real-world AI checkout experiences, something else is required, intelligence, orchestration, and workflow control. That’s where the next layer comes in.
How UCP Enables AI-Native Checkout
UCP changes checkout by making it agent-native, not page-native.
Instead of hard-coded flows or redirects to websites, UCP allows AI agents to interact with commerce systems through clearly defined capabilities, such as product discovery, checkout, discounts, and fulfillment, using a standardized protocol.
Here’s how AI-native checkout works with UCP:
1. Capability Discovery
Businesses publish a simple, machine-readable profile that declares:
- What commerce actions they support
- How agents can invoke those actions
- Which payment methods and handlers are available
This allows AI agents to dynamically discover what a merchant can do, without prebuilt integrations.
2. Checkout Sessions Inside Conversations
Once an agent knows a merchant supports checkout, it can:
- Create a checkout session programmatically
- Add line items, quantities, and buyer information
- Update the session in real time (pricing, discounts, fulfillment options)
All of this happens inside the AI conversation, without breaking user context.
3. Secure, Verifiable Payments
UCP separates:
- Payment instruments (what the user pays with)
- Payment handlers (how the payment is processed)
This design allows:
- Secure tokenized payments
- Cryptographic proof of user consent
- Compatibility with existing wallets and payment providers
Importantly, the merchant remains the Merchant of Record, preserving trust, compliance, and ownership.
4. Extensible Commerce Logic
UCP is built with extensions in mind.
That means checkout can be enhanced with:
- Discounts and promotions
- Fulfillment logic
- Identity linking
- Order lifecycle updates
All without changing the core protocol.
The result is a checkout experience that feels natural in AI:
- No redirects
- No broken flows
- No loss of intent
Users go from question → decision → purchase in one continuous interaction.
However, while UCP defines how checkout works at the protocol level, it intentionally avoids defining how decisions are made or how workflows are orchestrated.
And that’s the gap we’ll explore next.
What UCP Does Not Solve (And Why That Matters)
The Universal Commerce Protocol is intentionally focused.
It standardizes how commerce actions are exposed and executed, but it does not attempt to define how AI agents think, decide, or coordinate complex workflows. That’s by design.
UCP does not handle:
- Agent memory: UCP doesn’t remember users, preferences, or past interactions across sessions.
- Business logic or decision-making: There’s no logic for comparing products, choosing vendors, or optimizing outcomes.
- Multi-merchant orchestration: UCP enables checkout with a merchant, but not coordination across multiple stores.
- Workflow control: It doesn’t define when to pause for human approval, retry steps, or branch flows.
- Post-checkout automation: UCP doesn’t manage CRM updates, support handoffs, refunds, or lifecycle workflows.
This is an important distinction.
UCP is a protocol, not a platform.
On its own, it enables AI checkout, but it doesn’t deliver intelligent commerce experiences. Without an orchestration layer, teams are left stitching together logic, memory, and workflows manually on top of UCP.
That’s where most implementations struggle.
To turn UCP into something brands can actually deploy at scale, you need a system that:
- Coordinates agent behavior
- Maintains context across conversations
- Orchestrates checkout, discounts, fulfillment, and follow-up
- Integrates with the rest of the business stack
This missing layer is exactly what agentic commerce platforms are built to provide.
And it’s where CodeConductor enters the picture.
Introducing CodeConductor
As AI agents become the new storefronts, commerce needs more than a protocol. It needs intelligence, coordination, and control.
CodeConductor is an agentic commerce platform designed to sit between AI agents and commerce systems, turning UCP-powered checkout into real, production-ready buying experiences.
Where UCP defines how commerce actions are executed, CodeConductor defines when, why, and in what order they occur.
At its core, CodeConductor provides the missing orchestration layer that allows teams to:
Coordinate AI-driven discovery and checkout flows
- Maintain context and memory across user sessions
- Control decision logic, approvals, and fallbacks
- Integrate commerce with the rest of the business stack
Instead of hard-coding logic into agents or rebuilding commerce systems, teams use CodeConductor to compose intelligent workflows on top of UCP.
This makes AI checkout:
- Stateful instead of stateless
- Intent-aware instead of transactional
- Flexible instead of brittle
From a founder or ecommerce brand’s perspective, CodeConductor acts as the commerce brain behind AI experiences, connecting agents, merchants, and payment providers through a single, orchestrated system.
In the next sections, we’ll break down exactly how CodeConductor works in practice:
- As a UCP orchestrator
- As an agent commerce engine
- And as an AI checkout workflow builder
CodeConductor as a UCP Orchestrator
At a technical level, CodeConductor acts as a UCP orchestrator, the system that coordinates how AI agents interact with UCP-enabled merchants and payment providers.
Rather than forcing agents to manage protocol details themselves, CodeConductor handles the full lifecycle of UCP interactions in a structured, reliable way.
Orchestrating Commerce Capabilities
CodeConductor enables AI agents to:
- Discover merchant capabilities dynamically
- Initiate and manage checkout sessions
- Apply discounts, promotions, and extensions
- Handle fulfillment and order updates
Each capability is treated as a modular building block that can be composed into larger workflows.
Supporting Multiple Transports
UCP is designed to work across different communication models, and CodeConductor supports them natively:
- REST APIs for traditional integrations
- Model Context Protocol (MCP) for AI-native tooling
- Agent-to-Agent (A2A) flows for multi-agent systems
This allows brands to adopt UCP without being locked into a single agent framework or AI provider.
Vendor-Neutral and Future-Proof
CodeConductor doesn’t tie commerce to any single surface.
Whether checkout happens inside search-powered AI, chat assistants, voice interfaces, or embedded apps, CodeConductor routes and orchestrates UCP interactions consistently, keeping your commerce logic centralized and reusable.
For founders and ecommerce brands, this means:
- One orchestration layer
- Many AI surfaces
- No duplicated integrations
But orchestration alone isn’t enough.
To deliver truly differentiated AI commerce experiences, agents need memory, reasoning, and decision-making power. That’s where CodeConductor’s role expands next.
CodeConductor as an AI Checkout Workflow Builder
For founders and ecommerce brands, the real challenge isn’t just enabling AI checkout, it’s controlling it.
CodeConductor solves this by providing a workflow-based approach to AI commerce, allowing teams to design, test, and deploy checkout logic without rebuilding their existing systems.
Instead of writing custom code for every scenario, teams use CodeConductor to visually compose AI-native checkout workflows that run on top of UCP.
Visual, No-Code Commerce Logic
With CodeConductor, you can define:
- When an agent should initiate checkout
- How products are selected or bundled
- When discounts apply
- Where approvals are required
- What happens after purchase
All through configurable workflows that are easy to iterate and scale.
Human-in-the-Loop or Fully Autonomous
Not every transaction should be fully autonomous.
CodeConductor allows teams to:
- Pause checkout for user confirmation
- Route decisions to human operators
- Enforce spending limits or compliance checks
This makes AI checkout safe, controllable, and adaptable to real business needs.
Post-Checkout Automation
Checkout isn’t the end of the journey.
CodeConductor workflows can automatically:
- Update CRM systems
- Trigger fulfillment or logistics
- Notify support teams
- Handle refunds, exchanges, or follow-ups
This turns AI checkout into an end-to-end commerce system, not a disconnected transaction.
Next, we’ll look at how this all comes together for ecommerce brands, especially those running on Shopify.
Why Agentic Commerce Increases Discovery and Conversion
Traditional ecommerce funnels are built around navigation and friction.
Users search, click, browse, compare, and eventually, sometimes, check out. Every step introduces drop-off. Even high-intent buyers often abandon the journey before completing a purchase.
Agentic commerce flips this model.
Instead of forcing users through pages, AI agents meet buyers at the moment of intent, inside conversations where decisions are already being made.
Discovery Happens Earlier, and Everywhere
With agentic commerce:
- Products are surfaced while users ask questions
- Recommendations are contextual, not generic
- Discovery isn’t limited to search rankings or ads
This dramatically expands where and how brands are found.
Fewer Steps, Less Friction
Because checkout happens inside the AI experience:
- There are no redirects
- No form-heavy flows
- No context switches
Users move seamlessly from interest to purchase, which significantly improves conversion rates.
Personalization That Actually Works
AI agents powered by CodeConductor can:
- Remember preferences
- Adjust recommendations in real time
- Offer bundles or alternatives dynamically
This level of personalization is difficult to achieve with static storefronts.
Trust and Control Are Preserved
Even though the experience feels conversational, the underlying commerce is still:
- Secure
- Verifiable
- Merchant-controlled
UCP ensures merchants remain the Merchant of Record, while CodeConductor ensures logic, approvals, and compliance remain under business control.
Together, these factors create a buying experience that feels effortless for users, and more effective for brands.
Next, we’ll cover how founders and ecommerce teams can actually get started.
In a Nutshell: Why CodeConductor Powers the Future of AI Commerce
Commerce is entering a new phase.
Discovery, decision-making, and checkout are moving out of websites and into AI-driven conversations. In this world, traditional ecommerce tools fall short, not because they’re broken, but because they were never designed for agents.
The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) lays the foundation by standardizing how AI systems interact with merchants and payment providers.
But protocols alone don’t create great experiences.
CodeConductor provides the missing layer:
- Orchestrating UCP-powered checkout
- Powering intelligent, stateful agents
- Enabling flexible, controllable AI commerce workflows
- Connecting Shopify and other commerce systems to AI-native surfaces
Together, UCP and CodeConductor turn AI agents into real storefronts, capable of discovering products, completing purchases, and scaling across platforms.
UCP defines the rules of agentic commerce. CodeConductor makes it real.
FAQs
What is the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)?
The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is an open standard that allows AI agents to discover products, initiate checkout, and complete purchases using a single, standardized integration. Instead of building custom connections for every platform, UCP enables merchants to expose commerce capabilities once, making them accessible across AI-powered experiences like search, chat, and assistants.
Is UCP only for Google or Gemini experiences?
No. While Google provides the first reference implementation of UCP for AI-powered search and assistants, UCP is vendor-neutral and platform-agnostic. It can be used across any AI agent, app, or conversational interface that supports agentic commerce.
Founder CodeConductor
