eek, Google announced the expansion of its Universal Commerce Protocol – described as a shared language for the internet of shopping – to Australia, making it the first market to go live in the APAC region. The UCP acts as a secure bridge between AI agents and retailers, enabling checkout and payment to happen directly within Gemini and Google Search. Joining as foundational partners are some of Australia’s most prominent retail names including The Iconic, Kogan Group, Bunnings, Adore Beauty and Petbarn. The announcement marks more than a technical integration. It signals a structural shift in how retailers must think about discovery, acquisition and the meaning of customer ownership in an era of agentic commerce. From keywords to conversations At the heart of the UCP’s significance is a behavioural shift that has been quietly accelerating. The way Australians search for products is no longer purely transactional – it’s increasingly conversational and contextual, demanding a retail response that keyword-optimised product listings were never built to serve. Adam Cox, The Iconic’s chief technology and product officer, told Inside Retail that only a year ago, customers still relied on traditional keyword searches like ‘formal dress’ or ‘running shoes’. “Increasingly, they are searching in a more human and contextual way, using prompts such as ‘find me outfits for a winter wedding that can arrive by Sunday’ or ‘compare the best running shoes for long-distance road runs’,” he added. That shift – from noun to sentence, from category to intent – demands a fundamentally different approach to how retailers structure their product data, their discovery surfaces and their conversion architecture. UCP is Google’s answer to that challenge, and The Iconic’s involvement as a foundational partner reflects a deliberate strategic bet on where the industry is heading. The mechanics of a new channel For The Iconic, participation in UCP involves connecting a curated selection of its product catalogue – initially drawn from its own labels, AERE, Atmos&Here and Dazie – to Google’s commerce standard. From there, customers can discover and purchase products directly within conversational AI environments, with account-linking functionality enabling single-item checkout through Google Pay. Critically, The Iconic remains the retailer of record throughout. “While search, discovery and checkout can happen through Google, The Iconic continues to own the customer relationship, fulfilment, delivery experience, customer service, returns, and loyalty program,” Cox explained. That distinction matters enormously in a landscape where retailers are understandably wary of ceding ground to platform intermediaries. The UCP model appears designed to thread that needle – extending reach without surrendering the customer experience, or the data that underpins long-term loyalty strategy. The execution question The deliberate, controlled nature of The Iconic’s launch reflects a hard-won lesson from two decades of e-commerce: the gap between a compelling technology integration and a seamless customer experience is where brands are made or broken. “The key implementation challenge has been ensuring accuracy, consistency and reliability across the full journey,” Cox said. “In fashion, product data is highly dynamic, particularly around size, availability, pricing and delivery promise – so any inconsistency between what a customer sees in Google and what The Iconic can fulfil has the potential to create friction.” It is a characteristically considered approach from one of Australia’s most operationally sophisticated retailers, and one that speaks to the broader complexity of bringing fashion inventory into an AI-native commerce layer. A price-led play Where The Iconic’s integration is rooted in brand experience and loyalty, Kogan’s participation illuminates a different dimension of UCP’s potential: the price-comparison battleground. Karl Winther, Kogan’s chief marketing officer, framed the protocol not as a departure from the company’s existing strategy, but as a natural evolution of it. “Kogan has always followed customer behaviour rather than trying to dictate it – our model has been built on meeting demand efficiently. UCP is consistent with that logic: customers are increasingly starting their research inside AI-driven shopping experiences,” Winther told Inside Retail. Winther is equally clear-eyed about the relationship between discovery and ownership. “At Kogan we don’t see a binary between ‘owning’ the customer and showing up where they’re searching,” he said. “The relationship we value most is the one built through our loyalty program of Kogan FIRST, repeat purchase and the breadth of offer – and those are reinforced, not eroded, when a customer can find, compare and choose us at the moment of intent.” Looking at the bigger picture What the UCP launch makes undeniable is that the architecture of online retail is being renegotiated. For Cox and The Iconic, the framing is not disruption but participation. “The broader point is that all e-commerce businesses will need to adapt to rising expectations for more contextual, conversational and personalised discovery,” he said. The retailers who move first may not win by virtue of timing alone, as Cox acknowledged, “early adoption alone is not the competitive advantage.” But the ones who use that headstart to genuinely learn how customers behave in agentic environments, and build accordingly, stand to define the next era of Australian retail. Further reading: Why retailers must rethink their Meta and Google ad strategies in 2025