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Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋
Welcome to Issue #190 of Loop WP!
Last week, we returned to our regular format to discuss why WooCommerce has significant work to do in 2026 to remain relevant and build on the major improvements of 2025.
This week, we explore Google’s UCP announcement and its implications for e-commerce and WooCommerce.
Let’s go! 👇
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Google Announces Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)
You can read the full announcement post on the Google Blog, but in summary:
"New Tech and Tools for Retailers" discusses AI's role in agentic shopping and retail growth.
The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is a new open standard for agentic commerce across platforms.
Business Agent lets shoppers chat with brands directly on Search, like a virtual sales associate.
New Merchant Centre data attributes help retailers get discovered in conversational commerce.
Direct Offers in Google Ads let retailers present exclusive discounts to shoppers ready to buy.
What does UCP mean for e-Commerce?
The industry has already been weighing in on this, and one of the best summaries comes from Aleyda Solis:
“The shift to agentic commerce represents an expansion of ecommerce SEO’s scope, not its replacement. Traditional fundamentals, like quality content, accurate product data, strong brand authority, remain essential. But they now serve dual purposes: guiding human users and enabling AI agents to transact on those users’ behalf.
The brands that understand this shift -and prepare for it now- will show up where decisions are made, not just where clicks used to be.”
💡 You can read the full article with seven key points over on Aleyda’s SEO FOMO website.
Search Engine Journal (SEJ) also has a great complementary article on this. For me, the key highlight from this article is:
“[UCP]…widens some boundaries applied by ACP by tackling a broader problem, providing any AI surface (like Search AI Mode or Gemini) a common language to discover merchants, understand their capabilities, and orchestrate full journeys from discovery through order management, as well as engagement beyond a purchase (also made seamless using Google Pay). This is also done by integrating with other existing standards, including APIs, Agent2Agent (A2A), and the Model Context Protocol (MCP).”
🚨 There is a table towards the bottom of the SEJ article comparing ACP and UCP in terms of:
Primary Focus
Journey Coverage
Driver
It’s in the “driver” that Joost de Valk notes the omission of WooCommerce’s mention as a platform in Google’s announcement.
🧠 Joost has written an article about the absence of WooCommerce as a named launch partner, and he makes several points.
I am not saying I agree with all of these, but this is what stands out for me from Joost’s article:
This omission exposes a dangerous structural flaw in our [WordPress] community.
WooCommerce isn’t just a plugin; it is an economy.
If WooCommerce slides into irrelevance because it can’t “speak” to Google’s new AI agents, their [companies/economy] revenue streams dry up.
🚨 Joost goes on to say:
“This falls squarely on Automattic’s shoulders. As the steward of the brand and the “owner” of WooCommerce, they are the only entity with the perceived authority to represent this massive ecosystem in high-level enterprise negotiations. If they aren’t in the room, we aren’t in the room.”
💡I said in last week’s newsletter that I think WooCommerce has a lot of work to do this year to remain competitive and stay relevant, and I would tend to agree with Joost on this point:
“If you are on Shopify, your products will soon be natively understandable by Google’s AI agents. A user asks Gemini for “a good running shoe,” and the AI can theoretically find it, vet it, and even initiate the checkout without the user ever wrestling with a clunky website.
If you are on WooCommerce, right now, it looks like you are stuck in the slow lane, waiting for a plugin developer to build a bridge to this new world.”
What are your thoughts, {{first_name|friend}}? Please reply and let me know.
That’s it for this week. 👋
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Weekly WordPress News & Tips
This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:
Warning - Agentic AI is insecure, unreliable, and a surveillance nightmare. (Coywolf)
Category SEO Changes - Product Permalink Changes Coming in WooCommerce 10.5. (WooCommerce)
Acquisition - WP Engine Acquires Big Bite, Bringing Newsroom Expertise In-House. (The Repository)
Staging is a wasteful lie - The case for the mono-environment. (Tom Phillips)
🚨 New Plugin Alert! - Synced Pattern Popups helps you create popups using the WordPress editor you already know, not yet another builder. (Matt Cromwell)
Tailwind - A Cautionary Tale For Anyone Relying on an Open Source Project. (Jonathan Desrosiers)
Accelerate - Block-Native A/B Testing for WordPress. (Kinsta & Noel Tock)
😎 Triaging Bugs - Launch WooCommerce Playground Sites with a Single Keystroke. (James Kemp)
Useful GA4? - Try the Google Analytics MCP server. (Google Analytics)
Another AI Checkout - PayPal Powers Microsoft’s Launch of Copilot Checkout. (PayPal)
Developer Advisories - Variation prices caching improvements in WooCommerce 10.5. (WooCommerce)
January 2026 - What’s new for developers? (WordPress Dev Blog)
🎉 Speaker Announcement - Checkout Summit announces its first batch of speakers. (Rodolfo Melogli)
Already in Alpha - WordPress 7.0 Planning Continues With Call for Release Squad Volunteers. (The Repository)
hidden=until-found - Details disclosure element can now auto-expand using the browser’s find on page feature. (Coywolf)
If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.
👋 Until next time,
Illustration for the web version of this newsletter sourced from Google Blog. Used for editorial and explanatory purposes.