Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) Explained: What Every Ecommerce Brand Must Know

AI is coming for your checkout — and the infrastructure behind it is called Universal Commerce Protocol. 

In this episode, Mike Ryan breaks down exactly what UCP is, why Google and Shopify built it together, who's already on board, and what ecommerce brands actually need to do to prepare.

Whether you're being pressured by an AI mandate at work, confused by wildly conflicting advice online, or just trying to understand what "agentic commerce" actually means for your business — this episode cuts through the noise.

What you'll learn:

1. What UCP is (and what it's not — it's NOT an AI browsing your website) 
2. Why OpenAI's competing standard (ACP) already lost 
3. Who has endorsed UCP: Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Shopify, Walmart, Zalando and more
4. The core implementation steps — without boiling the ocean
5. New conversational feed attributes available globally right now 
6. UCP analytics coming to Google Merchant Center

Mike's key takeaway: Don't panic. Start with Google. Improve your feed. The rest will follow.

About Smarter Ecommerce (smec):

Smarter Ecommerce (smec) empowers e-commerce brands with AI-driven PPC automation that optimizes for profit and business outcomes while maintaining strategic control.

The platform activates first-party data - profit margins, customer lifetime value, and key business metrics - to automate campaign optimization toward goals like profitability and efficient growth, while detailed campaign insights provide full transparency and enable PPC teams to focus on strategic oversight rather than manual execution.

As a Google Premier Partner and three-time Microsoft Retail Partner of the Year, smec manages over €500 million in ad spend and drives €5B+ in annual e-commerce revenue for 350+ global retail clients including THG, Snipes, REWE, and Intersport.

Make sure to follow smec - Smarter Ecommerce for more performance marketing insights:

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Transcript

Introduction — what UCP is and why everyone's talking about it

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hello and welcome to another episode of Growing E-Commerce. I'm one of your hosts, Mike Ryan. Unfortunately, Chris can't join us today, but we'll be back in the studio for normal production next week, and we'll look forward to seeing you then. Meanwhile, I'm going to revisit a topic that we first covered back in February: UCP, Universal Commerce Protocol. What is it? How does it work? This was one of our actually, it was our single most popular episode of the year so far. Um, it even beat an interview with Chinny Marvin about AIMAX for search, which I we accidentally sent to the podcast feed. So that shows you how popular and this topic is, how much interest there is. And um, we'll get into a little bit about why that is, or let's just jump into it. I think the situation right now is one of fear and confusion or also impatience. There's a lot of emotions going on. Organizations, broadly speaking, have this kind of AI mandate, right? There's uh across many levels like are our employees using AI enough? Are they using it too much? But also when it comes to topics like the future of search, web traffic, the impacts on our customer acquisition channels and stuff like that. I believe everyone saw what happened to publishers when AI overviews rolled out and people are spooked. You know, uh, no one wants to go dark or become invisible. No one wants to get left behind or miss this. So that is the urgency that's sort of driving interest here. And then the next thing that comes into place is that the topic is complicated, it's hard to understand. You'll see wildly varying information about how to implement it or what is really necessary. And so, because of all this, I want to hopefully simplify this topic. I think it's worth revisiting. We know a lot more now than we did back in February, and just spell out what is UCP? Really? What is it? Why does it matter? And why is Google building this and everyone signing on? And then we'll get into some of the basics of implementation. I want to give you a reasonably detailed answer that can help you understand what this is actually about. But I I guess you understand in the scope of a podcast episode, I can't get into every single implementation detail or scenario. But I and by the way, I'm not a developer, but I think that's valuable here because I'm just out here trying to pay attention in January. I was reading all the documents and I've come back and looked at them again more than once. And so just I think we can talk about this at eye level and come a bit further together. That's the goal of this episode. Um to kick that off, what the

What "agentic commerce" really means (and what it's not)

SPEAKER_00 3:16

F is UCP? There's the this in and of itself is the subject of a lot of confusion, in my opinion. Um like to describe what it is, though, I think first we have to take a step back and look at this topic of agentic commerce, agentic shopping. Um, if you're a longtime listener of the show, you'll know I don't particularly like that phrase. Uh me, I would view this more as AI-assisted shopping. It's a little less buzzwordy to me, and it describes more how consumers experience this. Consumers don't know what agentic commerce is. Consumers know that an AI is helping them find products and do stuff. If you just go back a year, um the idea back then, the very popular idea, and it's still in the public's mind, was that computers would be literally navigating our e-commerce shops and like literally scrolling through and adding things to the basket and doing the whole checkout. And there were big articles about this in all kinds of publications. Um that, you know, and the feedback was not good, or like the it didn't because frankly, this was never how this whole thing was going to work. That's my take. Maybe we'll get there one day. But it's dangerous, it's slow, it's expensive, it doesn't scale. You'd hear these stories about an AI spending 45 minutes to buy the wrong product with the most expensive shipping option or stuff like this. And the this got everything off on a very bad footing because um this isn't really should shouldn't have been how we imagined this happening. And again, there's a lot of public awareness of this now, which increases what we call the trust gap in terms of consumer adoption of AI for shopping. Um, because consumers think things like, I would never give my credit card to an AI. And that's good. You shouldn't give your credit card details to an AI, in my opinion. I also wouldn't do that. Um, but that's not how agentic commerce or AI-assisted shopping would is actually working or will work in the future. This is basically a misconception at this point. Um so the alternative to this kind of would be the old school plumbing situation. And this is also not a proper solution to agentic shopping. What you can do here is on the one hand, imagine an indeterminately large list of all the AI surfaces where consumers are and might use an AI assistant. And this could be things like ChatGPT, um Google AI mode, or if we look at the way the direction that Google is taking this in, uh that could also be YouTube, Gmail. You know, Google wants to embed a universal cart across all of their surfaces so that you can shop agentically uh from basically anywhere on Google. Um, but it can also be other surfaces in the future like AI-powered experiences in a marketplace or wherever. Really, we don't even know yet, but an indeterminately long list of surfaces, consumer services. And then on the other hand, you'd have all the merchant shops and the merchant catalogs behind that. And you would need a connection, like an API or something like this, between every single one of these with each other. And this is something that I nicknamed the glass spider web because that's what it would be. It would be this unimaginably complex network of connections and totally brittle and fragile, um, ready to break, built to break practically. So this was also not going to be the way that this was going to work. Um and what we have instead is the solution, a pretty elegant solution in the end. Well, you can that's very debatable. It it is complicated, but once you wrap your head around it, it's not bad. And it's this

How UCP works: architecture, adoption & who's signed on

SPEAKER_00 7:52

thing co-developed by or co-founded and co-developed by Google and Shopify called Universal Commerce Protocol. Um, and this is exactly to provide a third way here. So it it is more like conventional plumbing, but it's scalable. And it does give AIs the freedom, but can also power experiences that have nothing to do with AI. Um, so you know, we have that whole list of consumer surfaces and platforms, and then we'll have a whole list of business platforms, um, retail shops and stuff like this. And the other complexifying layer is that there's payments in here, CRMs, ERPs, PIMs. There's uh all kinds of things that need to happen in here. I think let's universal commerce protocol. I think we know what universal means, right? It it means that it should be compatible. Everyone should be able to use it, it should be completely compatible. Um commerce, I hope we all know what commerce is. And then the the maybe the mysterious word here is a protocol. So just to give another example that might make this more familiar, a protocol is is uh basically a way for systems to communicate. Let's look at um I work at a company that uses Google Workspace. Some of my friends or customers work at companies that use Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, whatever. And um, we're able to send emails to each other, despite that fact. And it's because there's an email protocol that standardizes things and allows these different systems to communicate with each other. And so we're talking about a universal commerce protocol, and it consists of these different layers that help bridge between the consumer platforms and the business platforms. Um the first layer of that is a services layer, and this is very abstract. In this case, we're talking about shopping because actually commerce is a lot bigger than just buying products. Um like the there's also um travel, there can be yeah, hotels and booking, there can be a lot more that will be supported here eventually. But the first use case being tackled by UCP is shopping. So that should, by the way, give you a glimpse into how big this topic can be, perhaps will be, we'll see. Um, but they want to reinvent not just shopping, but all of commerce. They want an infrastructure to handle this across these different kinds of verticals. Um but within the vertical surface of shopping or service of shopping, that's where we are, uh it comes down then to capabilities. This is the next layer in the communication between these two sides of the market, basically. Capabilities, this is basically just about defining what is e-commerce, actually. What are the main things that need to be done? What are the biggest Lego blocks that of which this whole thing is is built? And so this is things like catalog, carts, checkout, order management, these core areas of activity that we're all familiar with. In order for AI to navigate this, we'll get to that, there just needs to be these def these defined areas of activity. And then there's another level to this, which are called extensions. And these are things like discounting and others. But that's these are smaller things. And the reason they want to, the difference between capabilities and extensions, capabilities are basically the building blocks or the cornerstones. And extensions are the smaller things. I think they recognize that there's a risk of scope creep here. And they don't want to kind of trivialize what a capability is. They're keeping another more detail there of extensions, which is for handling this other stuff that might come up as we go along. The purpose at a high level of these things, basically, you can have something like AI mode, this agentic thing, and then your web shop, for example, um on your built-on your e-commerce platform, whatever it is. And the cape, you're you will support certain capabilities, the AI will support certain capabilities, and they talk to each other. This is a thing called negotiation, and they basically, because we'll get into how that works in a little bit more detail, but they look at each other and say, hey, I have this capability and this one, this one. Oh, I have these. They find out what they have in common, and they know that is how they can interact with each other. So this is very important. And then the final most technical layer of this whole thing are what's called transports. And this can be um APIs like a classic REST API. This is a very this is uh architectural style for building an API, and it's the way a lot of the internet is functions using these. And then there's these newer flashier ones like MCP, model context protocol, agent-to-agent protocol, and uh and others. So these newer, a more general purpose AI protocols that have been built. What Google and Shopify did here is they don't care which of how you want to transport information, it's going to be supported. This is the point that it's universal. Um so they've they've built this system that just helps businesses and AI services talk to each other. That's the point of all of it. And there doesn't need to be a custom API between every single thing, and the AI does not need to be going on your actual effing website and clicking around on it. That is the whole point of this. That's what UCP is. So I hope I've explained it clearly enough for viewers. I'll there'll be a visual a visual on-screen to support that. But and the next thing that I want to mention about UCP, which is very important because we, you know, we talked about this idea of universality or it being universal, this is important. For any kind of standard like this to succeed, it needs to be accepted, it needs to be adopted. Now we talked about this on past episodes. OpenAI had a competing standard. Actually, theirs came out first. They were co-developing it with Stripe, and it was called ACP. It still exists, I guess, but it's not going to make it. They've lost. At this point, across every layer, UCP has been endorsed and accepted, which is very important to it actually becoming a standard. And if we look at this, it doesn't matter which category you're talking about. The big AI hyperscalers have all accepted it. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, of course, Google. Google likes to joke that this is probably the only thing they ever agreed on, which might actually be true. Uh then marketplaces and retailers. There have been big endorsements from Walmart in the US, Zalando here in Europe, Etsy, Wayfair. The list goes on and on. Everyone who's anyone has endorsed this. Then there are the commerce platforms, and there's probably a little bit more work to do here, actually. Uh, but Shopify, uh, of course, they're a co-founder of this, Salesforce, Commerce Tools, it's seeing acceptance here as well. Um, and this is where it gets a little complicated when it comes to implementation, because not everyone is a Shopify shop. And even for Shopify, it's not perfectly plug and play. Um, but we know plenty of retailers and brands who are using other Commerce platforms or have bespoke Commerce platforms. So we have to see how this will develop as well. Um, and then also I just want to mention the payments layer because this is also super important. Visa, MasterCard, MasterCard, uh, PayPal, Stripe, Klarna, and every other one that you can think of. The probably the broadest adoption is among payment processors. They're all like, yes, get me on board. If there are payments to be processed, I will be there. Uh, they're very excited about this. And that's important too because some of this will push you toward like Google Pay, but ultimately

How to implement UCP — where to actually start

SPEAKER_00 17:13

every payment processor is supported. So let's talk about implementation a little bit. Um, friend of the podcast, Joey Bidner, expressed some frustration that there are videos out there on YouTube or wherever saying that all you need to do is populate this one field in your Google Merchant Center and you're good to go. Um, and you know, then there's people like me mentioning that if you would print out the entire UCP.dev documentation, it would probably be a 300-page book. It's a frustrating situation. Like, where does the truth lie and what's going on here? Um and actually, maybe before we get into a couple of details, I want to answer that at a higher level with the classic answer. It depends. But, you know, the worst place you can start right now is probably to go to ucp.dev, which is the full documentation. You know, this is really a topic where you don't want to boil the ocean, so to say. It will already the reason I say that is because that is designed for every use case that could happen and every implementation and all this kind of stuff. It's the biggest and kind of the most unfenced, or you you, if you look at it, it might not be clear to you what and this is relevant to me and what is not. So that's what's so I think challenging about that, or why I wouldn't necessarily start there. My recommended place to start right now, I mean, you might want to go and have a look at Shopify, they have some documentation here, but I actually recommend starting with Google's documentation. You might be getting a little confused. You're like, wait, Google has documentation, but UCP has documentation, but isn't it Google UCP? And this is where you really have to untangle these things a bit. Again, UCP is the total framework. It's this whole structure that I just described to you of all the capabilities and every use case that is possible. Google has their own implementation of UCP, which is in like Google AI mode and Gemini and more places. It'll be coming to more places. And go, it's also manifest in Google Organic Search to an extent. So this is this is what Google's scope or implementation is. And I would say start there because it gives you some boundaries and it is right now the biggest opportunity in terms of UCP. Because we're so early here. This is another thing about impatience that comes up. Um this will be big in the next years. It's going to take time. Uh that it will depend on more implementations and use cases coming forward. It will depend on consumers adopting those implementations or use cases. This is not going to happen overnight. Uh and and the, you know, for the people telling you that you're missing out right now, there's a little bit of truth to that. Because I guess if you the things that you need to do to succeed in UCP and your other visibility and AI services, like it's all interconnected and it's all healthy and it's good to do. All of it is valuable to do. Um so there's it can't hurt you to start working on this, but it's also perhaps not as necessary right now as some people would say, or as this organizational AI mandate would imply. Um, you know, I see things jumping to the top of roadmaps. This happens in every client call that I'm in, just about these things are jumping straight to the top of the roadmap. And you need to not forget about the world that exists today and business as usual, and what are the optimizations you should have been doing last year or the year before as well. Like it just needs to be balanced. So sorry, I went a little off topic there. Um, but let's get into the implementation a little bit. Yeah. So I would start with I would start with Google because again, AI mode, it it they're the most advanced. Like the Agentic Commerce features in Chat GPT, they got rolled back. They're all on pause right now. Doesn't mean they're going to be paused forever. Um maybe they'll come back again. Let's see what happens. Um, but like what perplexed Or what other services are you even interested in right now? Amazon is its kind of its own thing. So right now, Google is basically the show. And that's why I would focus on that. To talk about the generalized infrastructure here of UCP and implementing it. There are a few, a couple of core steps you need to do on the infrastructure side. You have to publish something called a discovery profile. And I believe this is one thing that Shopify, for example, is pretty good at automating, but it still might not be perfectly perfectly plug-and-play. But basically, you have to host this discovery profile. And it does things like say which UCP versions do you support? And it does also exactly what we talked about earlier. Which capabilities do you have enabled? For example, catalog, cart, checkout. And this allows the AI, when it meets your business, to negotiate and see what you have in common. That's all done through the discovery profile. There'll also be your transport endpoints, like what we talked about, this REST API or MCP, whichever one, accepted payment handlers. This is all there. So the next thing to do here would be to choose and secure those transport bindings. And this is how the platforms and shopping agents talk to each other. So as I mentioned, it's all supported. A REST API is probably the best choice for a lot of developers who want to go in this direction because they're probably already familiar with REST API. It's not new. MCP is new. And yeah, there's maybe pros and cons. Again, I'm not a developer, but I suspect that they'll that REST API will have a lot of gravity because of its it's it's it's already so dominant. And by the way, this seems to be also what Google prefers. If you go in Google's documentation, they want you to work with REST API. So another reason. If you go in Shopify's documentation, they're focused on MCP. And it's like, great, I love when mom and dad are fighting. You guys develop UCP together. And but it's, you know, maybe that's the beauty of it as well. Because again, this universal thing, it I guess it doesn't really matter because this the system is it's all it it's all supported. Anyway. Then you need to configure your payment handlers. So this is specifying the payment methods that you accept, um, like which cards or wallets or payment processors. Um if you are accepting raw credit card data, uh, I mean, yeah, then you you probably know about this anyway, but there's like these 12-step frameworks that you need to comply with. Um, it's called PCI DSS compliance. I don't, I don't, I don't know what that is exactly, but that's the 12-step framework that you need to do. And uh probably you're delegating this to a payment provider, though, um, like Stripe, PayPal, whoever. So um that is at a generalized level with the with the infrastructure. And that's there, I guess the other big topic that I didn't discuss right there is to do with identity linking and OAuth and stuff like this. And and uh the reason I don't want to talk about identity linking is because I'm based in Europe, and I think this is gonna be a big sticking point based on, you know, what's going on over here with GDPR and privacy regulation and all that kind of stuff. And I think there's gonna be a lot of extremely interesting news headlines to read in a while. So I'm not commenting on that. That's for like a legal team. Uh I'm I'm not a developer and I'm definitely not a lawyer. Okay. I I recognize my my boundaries. So then there's implementing capabilities. Uh and the the big three for you to kind of worry about, I think, would be catalog, checkout, and order. There's also carts, but Google is building universal cart, even the catalog part, like this is again why I say start with Google. Catalog, what is this? It's um these functions about searching your catalog, getting products which allow the AI agents to discover and fetch things like your pricing and their real-time product availability. Um that's that is pretty much handled by Google Merchant Center. Google Merchant Center has that stuff in there for you. And this is a huge advantage that Google has from a market standpoint, because they have, I don't know how many tens of millions of merchants or however many there are in that in Merchant Center already, whereas OpenAI has to start from scratch and build up their merchant supply. But it's also, yeah, it it makes life a lot easier. Uh then there's checkout, and there is some work to do here because and again, this can this will depend partly on your e-commerce platform and what they're gonna do for you. In the longer term, I think more and more of this stuff will become plug and play, as it should. Um, it shouldn't be rocket science to do this. And in I don't know, I don't want to put a time horizon on it, but in the intermediate term, it won't be rocket science anymore. Um but the the core job of checkout is there are these uh create checkout, update checkout, complete checkout fields. You can imagine that's that's just what an a like it for the AI to be able to do this, they need to know what's going on. And so this needs to be continually updated during the session. Um, and this can be things like requires escalation or flags like incomplete, ready to complete. So this is all in the documentation. And one of the reasons that the documentation is so long is that uh they will duplicate this for every transport, for example. So the content becomes very duplicative because they have to provide a slightly different documentation depending on what you're doing, since they're all supported. But again, with Google, you just have to focus on the REST API documentation because that's what they're looking for from you. Yeah, then on order, it this is basically supporting webhooks and so that you know the status, the order status can be retrieved or understood. Like is it is it shipped, is it in transit, is it delivered, what these kind of updates so that an AI platform is able to provide that. Um and as I mentioned, my biggest tip is to start with Google. Um they they really just to I'm just gonna read through their bullet points what they want here. Uh they need you to prepare your merchant center account, which is your shippings, returns, and product feed. So that's not rocket science, I guess. Uh they want you to set up your business with Google Pay until antitrust regulators come in. Um but you can, yeah, there's other payment uh options are supported here, but yes. Um then you need to publish your UCP profile. That's what I talked about before. That's also pretty okay, I think. Then you need to complete the native checkout integration, which is also what I just mentioned, these three core rest endpoints for session, creation, update, and completion. Then you need to sync the order status, and that's the last thing that I checked talked about there. So really, Google has one of the not to say that it's that it's easy, the team's gonna have to learn how to do this. There can be challenges. I'm not trying to trivialize it. But if you go check out Google's documentation compared to what you might hear online, like it's somewhere in the middle because no, it's not as simple as just activating a single field in your merchant center, but it's also not as complicated as reading through 300 pages of documentation. So that's the message I want to leave you with. This is doable, but you know what? I still have a little bit of time to keep recording. And

Google Merchant Center: native commerce attributes explained

SPEAKER_00 31:21

if you're interested and you want to keep listening, let's keep going further, okay? Let's talk about native commerce attributes in Google Merchant Center. So, and and this would be where the false claim comes from that all you need to do to go live with Google UCP and be there for universal card and native checkout is to populate the native commerce attribute. Yes, you do need to do that, but it's not the only thing, sadly. Um so the the native commerce attribute basically is a per product attribute in your feed that you need you need to populate with a yes or no value. It's actually a zero or one value, but this this determines if the if that product is going to be allowed to have native checkout. And um not all of your products are eligible for native checkout, perhaps. So that's one thing you have to check. Um and then there might be strategic considerations as well, like because not everyone's perfectly happy about AI or like these surfaces. Basically, Google is becoming a marketplace here. It's really a change in the relationship that we've had with Google, where they were a traffic acquisition source. Um, we got to have all the first party data on our websites, and we got to own the customer relationship. And now they get all the fun first-party data, and we feel like we're just order takers. This is a potentially a risk. So you can decide on that kind of a basis. You know, maybe there's think of this, maybe there's some products you would list on Amazon, but not others. That starts to be a little bit the relationship with Google here, potentially. Um, but as I mentioned, not all products are eligible. So there's a, you know, you can read the comprehensive list, but it's pretty common sense. It's stuff like if you have custom products, if you have age-restricted products, if you have subscription products, none of this is supported by UCP yet. It might be in the future, but UCP is not playing the age verification game. Their checkout is too simple right now for subscriptions and stuff like that. So there are some eligibility things you need to think about. But otherwise, if you feel like it, you can opt in your whole product feed and and see what comes back as this comes to life in more markets, by the way. So, yeah, then there is a consumer notice attribute that you may need to populate. And this would be things like if you, if there are, if there are safety or legal declarations that you make in your checkout on your website, those also need to be in the checkout inside of AI Mode or Gemini or wherever. Um, and so this is just a place to populate that. Uh, and then there is a merchant item ID, which is a little boring but not unimportant. If you have a uh a different item ID in your checkout than what is in your feed, that's a that's a mismatch and that's confusing. So uh the merchant item ID is a unified ID that you provide as a supplement to that. Speaking of the word supplement, all of these should be delivered via your supplemental feed. Google is is recommending that right now. Just a couple other notes. Again, to be eligible, your products need to be in stock with complete shipping and tax setups. And um you'll need a return attribute. That's not a new attribute, but your return attribute or return policy label at the merchant center level. One or both of these need to be filled out. That's what you need to do to for your products. Like if you have set up your website, which we've gone through in a high level of detail, but I hope you understand it a bit better. And if your feed is prepared in the following way, um, and if native checkout is available in your market, then your products can start appearing for native checkout. That's the next thing is about optimizing all of this and what happens next. And so I want to start, I want to tease out a theme here because I think I mentioned it earlier, but UCP is also just useful infrastructure. And in some ways, it's bigger than uh the agentic stuff or the AI-assisted stuff. Because right now, there are already buy buttons being populated in Google organic results on the Google search engine result page, that and it has nothing at all to do with AI, but it's infrastructure that can be used. And so this can power other experiences besides just the AI stuff. So, because you you might be an AI skeptic, consumers will never do this. This is never going to actually be that big. You could be totally right, but it doesn't matter because the infrastructure will also support existing experiences. And so, in that regard, you might remember buy on Google. This achieves a very similar result to buy on Google. And buy on Google had nothing to do with AI. Chat GPT didn't exist back then when they were rolling that out and so on. AI mode didn't exist back then. Um, so this is something that's much broader. And also, as I mentioned before, that is the bare minimum to be eligible. But you haven't done anything at that point to optimize your discoverability. And so this is the next horizon here. And actually, for some of us, like in Europe, it's the first horizon because native checkout isn't here yet, but we can already start working on our discoverability in AI services. So that's where it's complicated to wrap your head around because like UCP is bigger than Google and it's even bigger than shopping. And then inside of that, there's AI mode and Gemini and stuff. Um, but UCP is also overlapping with what we already know. And then there's like what I'm about to talk about, some of the feed optimizations that you can make, which support what happens in UCP or like in AI mode, it supports also your visibility in search. And it's just there are kind of, I don't know, I'd have to like Venn diagram at one time or build some kind of a diagram for it. But I, you know, I get funny questions like when is UCP coming to Europe? I'm like, UCP is already here. You know, Zolando is building stuff with UCP, they're building their own implementations or experiences or use cases with that. The question people are trying to ask is when will native checkout come to AI mode in Google? That's what they're actually asking. And they say, when is UCP coming here? And I don't blame them, but these are like different but overlapping things. I hope that makes a little sense. So on to maybe our last uh topic

Conversational feed attributes available globally right now

SPEAKER_00 38:46

for today. Looking at the time, I just want to talk a little bit about conversational attributes. We've talked about them before on this show, but here we are with me now. Maybe you're new to the podcast. Uh let's just get into it a little bit, okay? Um, there are now six of these conversational attributes available globally. So that means even here in Europe, where I am, um, you don't have to wait for all that. You can start improving this stuff now if you want. And these are things like the whole point of this, there are these new ad formats that are coming to shopping, and not even just to like native AI ads inside of AI mode, but there are new shopping formats that will be coming to the classic Google SERP. And there are other things that Google will be doing, like just writing new titles for you. And so even if, again, if you don't believe in all the AI stuff or you think it's going to take forever to get here, um, these things can just help you have better Google shopping titles that are highly relevant to the query that has been searched, for example. So the the first six are QA, document link, related products, item group titles, variant options, and popularity rank. And the first thing I want to say about all those is that five of the six came from OpenAI's feed spec. The only one that, or maybe, and maybe I'm wrong, document link. I'd have to check. Maybe that came from OpenAI's feed spec as well. I'm not sure, but uh so what Google is doing right now is just closing any gaps with what OpenAI has tried to offer or could offer or stuff like that. Uh the OpenAI is activating their feed again, not for organic product discovery in Chat GPT, but for the product listing ads that they're starting to build and sell. Um but Google doesn't want to allow any daylight between OpenAI's feeds back and theirs or Meta's feeds back and theirs. Um and by the way, I think OpenAI did a good job writing their feed specifications. Uh but just to highlight a couple of my favorites here, okay? Uh question, question and answer, you can add up to 30 FAQs. If you have FAQ data, then this is great. That's an asset that you can use. If you don't have FAQ data, this could be the wrong place to start, of course, because what do you want to do? How do you want to, how do you do you just want to yeah, that's a big, a big ask. Um, but document link even kind of gets privilege over FAQs. It's Google's preferred preferred source here. There seems to be an implicit hierarchy between these. I'm trying to map them out. Sometimes Google likes redundancy between information, sometimes they don't. And they also seem to have preferred sources. So document link, imagine you have a product detail page, and there are links on there to a spec sheet, instruction manual, something like that. Google's just gonna read that. Their AI is gonna read that. You can provide that to them. Um, and I think a reason this is a preferred source from for them is because it comes straight from the manufacturer. There's very little room for error or loss of information there. Um, because something that has been kind of translated from the manufacturer's manual to your FAQ, something might get lost along the way or get wrong. So I believe that's why this is their golden standard of verified, detailed information. And if you have these, of course, it's not relevant for all categories. Like, do you have spec sheets on your I don't know, like, but for electronics, for example, it's a great, great source. Um and then I ah, yeah, I won't call it related product too. I love this. You can specify things like part of a set. Are there required parts? Are things frequently bought together? Is there a substitute? Are there alternate brands? I love that. I mean, yeah, there's a data challenge here to deliver all of that stuff. This helps the AI support your average order value. This helps do things like upselling and cross-selling, it helps ensure a good customer experience to make sure that if they bought some like part A and they needed part B with it, that they got part B. So I'm a big fan of that one too. And then the lastly, yeah, I'm gonna give a shout out to Popularity Rank as well. It's an interesting one. It's basically you can provide the percent uh percentage rank uh of like your yeah, your sales. Sales, for example. So you provide your own bestseller data. Let's see where Google goes with this. But they can write copy like the number one bestseller or in the whatever kind of copy like that. And we know from like that's a label on Amazon that drives a lot of volume, I think. And so I'm optimistic about that as well. One more, nah, yeah, I'm gonna keep you a little longer. Sorry, it's gonna be a long episode, but there's just so much to cover, you know? And I want to do it justice uh because I think there's a lot of shit content about this stuff or an absence of it out there. And I'm I'm doing my part, I'm trying to do my part. You can yell at me and say I did a bad job, but I'm trying. So uh a couple of attributes that have been around for years, but are finding newfound life. These are product highlight and product detail. And um again, speaking of Amazon, this was something that Google introduced where I think they wanted some of their some of the experiences that they offer with uh the ads and free listings and stuff like that. They wanted to better rival Amazon's experience. You know, people like those skimmable bullet points on the product detail page or Amazon, for example. So the product highlight is a skimmable list of benefits, basically four to six bullet points. That's where you're selling your product. Product detail is where you're telling about your product. And so that's more like spec oriented. But, you know, we just mentioned there's the document link. This can be a source. And Google in the past, like in when they launched it in 2019 or 2020, they had they imagined that it's very spec-oriented. You have a camera with this lens and this blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, but now they are kind of inviting you to submit what they call a wide variety of product facts. So if there's a flavor or an occasion, uh they they want, they're really opening that up as a place for you to add details that can be reflected in the ad copy or in AI talking organically about your product. This is all going to be important there. Last thing that I want to talk about, I talked a couple episodes, so I won't recover this, but a hidden feature of Google Ads, go look up that episode

UCP analytics & key takeaways

SPEAKER_00 46:35

about the new share of voice metric that they're rolling out in Merchant Center to help you understand how visible you are in AI surfaces like Gemini. But what I have neglected to mention, there's something also coming to Merchant Center called UCP Analytics, which is a bit what it sounds like. It's probably not what you would love to get, because as I said, this is now Google's fun first-party data instead of your fun first party data, but they're going to give you some metrics in there. Um, the number of clicks to buy, that's the number of times shoppers clicked on the UCP buy button. Purchases, the total number of successful transactions completed, purchase rate. This is basically one divided by the other. It's the percentage of clicks to buy that resulted in a successful purchase. So purchase rate is your conversion rate for native checkout. Going to be a good one to watch. Average order value. Maybe you can see if that goes up when you add um you know related products and things like that. Cancellations, how many got canceled or refunded? Account linking, this is basically your customer match rate. We talked earlier shortly about identity linking, but it's an important concept because identity linking will power things like um people getting their member pricing inside of AI mode and not just on your website. So account linking, they're gonna have like the six the um how many times they tried to link and the success rate and stuff like that. So that is to me comparable to your customer match rate and advertising. Um, and your top-selling UCP products. So a ranked list of the products driving the most sales through your integration. Um is it everything we could possibly want? No, maybe there's more coming, but I think it's important because you know, I haven't been perfectly satisfied with this thing where it's like, oh, you remain the merchant of record. I mean, yeah, no shit. I have to do all the customer service. Thanks. Like, you go, like, um, yeah. Um, so give me something back, and this is a first step in that direction. Um, but let's just recap it because I'm out of time and it's been a long episode. I hope you made it through, and I hope that UCP and some of the things around it are a little more clear to you. Because as I said, I think there's a lot of urgency here and not a lot of understanding, and that's a very uncomfortable situation for everyone. Um so again, my key uh takeaways here don't boil the ocean, start with Google. It's just the biggest opportunity, it only makes sense. And they'll give you, they'll tell you exactly what you need to do and focus on so you're not distracted by everything else that could be. That's step one of the journey. Step two is improving your feed so that you can improve your discoverability, not just for UCP-powered experiences, but in general. It's just something you should do anyway. So, hope that makes sense. Had a fun time talking this through with you. And um, yeah, next week we'll be back in studio with Chris, everything back on normal. So looking forward to that. Thanks again. This has been another episode of Growing E-Commerce, brought to you as always by Smarter E-Commerce, also known as SMEC. You can learn more by visiting Smarter-e-commerce.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, or if you think I got it totally wrong, um, and you're angry at me, then you know, drop a comment. We love to hear from you. Give us a review, but only if it's a good one. Thanks. We'll see you next time.