PayPal has confirmed support for Google’s artificial intelligence-powered Universal Commerce Protocol and will soon appear as a payment option within the new checkout, as revealed in a press statement released over the weekend.
According to Cryptopolitan, the payments platform’s chief executive officer and president, Alex Criss, said on social media platform reported.
Google publicly introduced the protocol on Sunday during the National Retail Federation’s annual conference in New York. Executives at the technology company named UCP an open agent commerce standard that connects AI systems, retailers, and payment providers through a “common language.”
Google said at the conference that it is launching an agent commerce protocol that will support retailers with AI agents responsible for product discovery, checkout, and post-purchase support.
Google doubles down on agent commerce with UCP
According to a statement from Google, UCP is open and platform agnostic, supporting any authentication provider and reducing one-time integrations between individual agents and sellers.
“UCP makes it easy for all agents to interact, rather than requiring each agent to have a unique connection,” said Vidhya Srinivasan, vice president and general manager of Google Ads & Commerce, in a blog post.
UCP is the second open agent commerce protocol developed by Google in recent years, following last year’s release of Agent Payments Protocol (AP2). The tech giant reiterated that the new protocol is aimed at working with other agent networks such as Agent2Agent and Model Context Protocol (MCP).
Google plans to add more shopping features to UCP in the coming months, including related product recommendations, loyalty and rewards programs, and customized shopping experiences through the platform.
PayPal joins multiple retailers who helped develop UCP
Google revealed that several major retailers and e-commerce platforms participated in the creation of the protocol, including Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart. Shopify Vice President Vanessa Lee said the company’s experience in building large-scale checkout systems was instrumental.
“Shopify has a history of building checkouts for millions of unique retailers. We’ve incorporated everything we’ve seen over the decades to make UCP a scalable and robust commerce standard,” Lee said in a statement.
paypal executives said This protocol has the potential to break down the barriers that have hindered the adoption of agent commerce services, which have hindered interoperability between platforms and AI environments.
“Protocols like UCP turn agent commerce into something that merchants can actually deploy at scale. Interoperability allows retailers to connect and access many environments at once while maintaining trust, transparency, and control,” speculates Prakhar Mehrotra, SVP and head of AI at PayPal.
Michelle Gill, general manager of small business and financial services at PayPal, believes that PayPal, in combination with UCP, will become even more adept at providing reliable payments.
“The next generation of commerce will depend on how well we can build an open and trusted infrastructure that serves everyone, and Google’s support and collaboration on UCP shows how a trusted payments experience layer can make agent commerce possible for consumers,” said Gill.
However, some industry analysts believe that agent commerce will not work without coordination between consumers, merchants, and payment providers. Richard Krone, CEO of Krone Consulting, said Google and Shopify are “trying to provide some peace of mind to sellers,” promising to increase sales, discoverability and conversions by “providing product data to Gemini and Shopify for off-site sales.”
“The flip side of this is that once the checkout goes to Gemini, the seller loses their last touch point. The product detail page is the fuel that needs to feed the agent’s commerce engine,” Crone says.
PayPal joins Klearly in €12 million funding round
UCP’s announcement comes on the heels of PayPal Ventures’ involvement in European payments company Klearly, which raised €12 million in Series A funding, which closed on Tuesday. Italian Founders Fund, Global PayTech Ventures, Antler Elevate and Shapers also participated in the round, bringing Klearly’s total funding to €20 million.
Amsterdam-based Klearly said it has more than 4,000 merchants processing payments on its platform and plans to use the new funding to move operations deeper into Italy and Belgium.
In the U.S., PayPal has signed its largest office lease in the past year in New York City, deepening its reach into Hudson Square, home to Google and Disney.
Landlord Hudson Square Properties announced Monday that it has signed a 10-year lease covering 261,000 square feet in the combined office complex at 345 Hudson Street and 555 Greenwich Street.
