Tag: protocol wars
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My Agent Tried 6 Stores. 4 Failed at Checkout.
Real-world agentic commerce today: agents hallucinate products, fail on CAPTCHA, loop on checkout, and give up. Will’s honest field report on the gap betwe
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Six Protocols Walk Into a Bar
UCP, ACP, AP2, A2A, MCP, Retail-MCP — six standards fighting to govern agentic commerce. Will cuts through the noise: what each one does, which overlap, wh
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Headless Commerce Was the Warmup
Headless decoupled the storefront from the backend. UCP decouples the transaction from the storefront entirely. Every architectural decision in the headles
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Google Calls It Open. I Call It a Channel.
UCP moves competition upstream toward platforms while merchants carry operational complexity. Will’s skeptic take on whether ‘open’ ever means what it says
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The Protocol War Is Already Over — The Distribution Won
The Siri/Gemini integration means the AI agent in your iPhone is essentially guaranteed to use UCP. The protocol that wins isn’t the best one, it’s the one
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Amazon Blocked the Agents and Lost 18% of Its Traffic
Amazon removed 600M product listings from AI results and ChatGPT referral traffic fell 18%. The lesson: you can wall-garden yourself against agentic commer
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UCP vs. ACP: I Don’t Care Which Protocol Wins, and Neither Should You
Protocol tribalism between UCP and ACP is a developer sport. The contractor doesn’t care if the homeowner found them on Google or ChatGPT. Stop following t
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The Hidden Tax in Agentic Commerce
Google, Shopify, AP2, Stripe — every node in the UCP stack monetizes the handshake. Will breaks down who’s collecting rent on each transaction and what the
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My Agent vs. Your Agent: Who Wins the Negotiation?
When both buyer and seller have AI agents, two algorithms optimize against each other. Will’s take on agent-vs-agent negotiation, pricing, and whether the
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The UCP Skeptic’s Case
Will steelmans the critics: when transactions happen inside Google’s environment, merchants lose UX, merchandising, and post-purchase engagement. Products