Shopping is starting to happen through conversations with AI assistants as well as through search boxes and storefronts. Anima Group builds and operates e-commerce platforms, so how those assistants connect to shops matters directly to our work. We are committing to the Universal Commerce Protocol as the open standard we will build towards across our platforms.

What the Universal Commerce Protocol is

The Universal Commerce Protocol, usually shortened to UCP, is an open standard for agentic commerce. It gives platforms, AI agents and businesses a shared way to work together from discovery through to checkout and after the purchase, without a custom integration for every pairing. It was announced in January 2026 and has been developed with industry partners including Google and Shopify. The specification is public and published under the Apache 2.0 licence.

The protocol defines building blocks for catalogue search and lookup, carts, checkout, identity linking and orders. It is designed to work alongside other open agent standards, including the Model Context Protocol and Agent2Agent.

Why an open standard matters to us

We go where the opportunity is greatest, and we want consumers to get what they need at speed, at scale and without friction. A closed integration with one assistant would solve that for one assistant. An open standard means the same work can serve many of them.

It also keeps the relationship in the right place. Google's merchant guidance for UCP is clear that the merchant remains the merchant of record and keeps its customer data, relationships and post-purchase experience. We think that is the right shape for agentic commerce: assistants can help people shop, while the business that sells to them stays accountable for the sale.

What we are committing to

• Building towards UCP on our platforms, starting with Homewizz, our global marketplace, ahead of and after its beta launch in January 2027.

• Keeping product information accurate and structured, so an agent can represent what we sell correctly.

• Making prices, delivery and returns as clear to an agent as they are to a person on the page.

• Asking for a customer's consent before an agent acts on their account, and making that consent easy to withdraw.

• Following the standard in the open rather than building private workarounds.

Where we are today

This is a commitment, not an announcement that the work is finished. UCP support is not live on our platforms yet, and we will say so plainly when that changes. Agentic commerce is young, and the standards around it are still moving. We would rather start building on the open path now than retrofit it later.