Ecommerce
Agents are already buying. The question is whether they can buy from you.
If you run your own storefront rather than sitting on a platform, all of this is yours to get right, and yours to see.
What agents are doing here
Someone asks an assistant to find a product under a budget and order it. The assistant reads what shops publish about themselves, compares, picks one, and completes the purchase. Google launched a basket doing exactly this in May 2026 with Nike, Sephora, Target, Walmart and others taking part.
Which of these actually apply to you
There are two standards and they do not both matter to every kind of site.
UCP
Applies to youThis is what UCP was built for. Your profile tells an agent what you sell, which capabilities you support such as cart and checkout, and which payment handlers you accept, before it loads a single page. Without one you are relying on an agent working your site out by reading it.
What UCP isWebMCP
Applies to youCatalogue search, stock for a variant, add to basket. These are exactly the operations agents struggle to drive through a designed interface, and exactly the ones worth declaring as tools.
What WebMCP isWhere it usually goes wrong
None of these produce an error. Each is a working site doing something an agent cannot follow.
Variant selectors that are not really controls
Size and colour pickers built from styled divs look fine and are invisible as controls to something reading structure. An agent cannot choose a size it cannot see.
Prices that arrive late
A price rendered by script after load, or assembled from several elements, is a price an agent may read wrongly or not at all.
Checkout that assumes a person
A newsletter modal over the buy button, a cookie banner intercepting clicks, a basket that expires in ten minutes. Each is one click for a customer and a wall for software.
Profiles on the wrong host
If your apex redirects to www and the profile only answers on one of them, half of all agents find nothing. Agents do not follow redirects here.
What to do about it
- 1 Check whether you publish a UCP profile at all, and whether it answers on every host a customer might use.
- 2 Make every product control a real, labelled control. The work that helps screen readers helps agents.
- 3 Keep payment authentication with the human. Agents should be able to get to checkout, not through it.
- 4 Watch for refused agents. A blocked agent is a customer who never arrived and leaves no trace.
See where your site stands
One address, no account. You get a grade, what is worth fixing, and how to fix it.
Run a different kind of site? See the other sectors.