OpenAI killed Instant Checkout because scraping the web for real-time product data simply didn't work. Stock levels, shipping costs, delivery timing were stale or wrong. The concept didn't fail. The method did.
Shopify's Universal Commerce Protocol, co-developed with Google, proposes the alternative: structure the environment so agents can read it natively. Merchants declare capabilities through a standardized endpoint. Agents negotiate from there.
The interesting tension is whether UCP is genuinely open infrastructure or a new distribution chokepoint dressed in protocol language. Shopify's Agentic Plan now lets any brand, on any platform, syndicate products through Shopify Catalog to AI surfaces. That's a commission relationship with merchants who never chose Shopify as their store. One company's answer to AI-platform gatekeeping, offered by a would-be gatekeeper of its own.