Google has launched a shopping agent, and the deadline for e-commerce has really arrived! 

Last night, Google CEO personally announced the General Business Agreement (Universal Commerce Protocol, UCP) on X. I immediately posted an article saying: "E-commerce is really going to scare the competition this time! " Due to time constraints, I was unable to provide a detailed explanation in this article; now I have added an analysis to show you what kind of devastating blow e-commerce will face if Shopping Agent becomes popular, and how the consumption patterns of all humanity over the past 30 years will be reshuffled.

The profit core of mainstream e-commerce is based on "seizing user attention" and "information asymmetry", essentially a "traffic vending machine" and "attention harvester".

Advertising fees (main revenue): The longer the user stays around (Time spent) through algorithms, the more advertisements (competition rankings, banner ads) they see.

Impulse Buying: Recommendation algorithms ("You may also like them") use human weaknesses to induce irrational desire to buy.

Price discrimination and information asymmetry: Using complex coupons, full reduction rules, and points systems, allowing price insensitive people to pay more while sticking to price sensitive people.

Platform tax (crawling): Transaction handling fees and logistics service fees are charged to merchants.

Death of the front-end interface (UI/UX): APP becomes API

Users no longer open Taobao or Amazon's app, but instead use Shopping Agent (such as Gemini). The interface design, short audio streaming, and community functions that the e-commerce platform takes pride in have all become meaningless. The platform has degenerated from "mall" to "repositories" and "databases," and its core moat, User Stickiness, will no longer exist.

Customer service and after-sales automation game

When there is a need for returns and exchanges, it will be the user's AI Agent who will negotiate with the merchant's AI customer service. AI Agent is familiar with all consumer protection laws and platform rules, and is not tired or bothered. It can also conduct thousands of rounds of negotiations for the rights of 1 HKD. The compliance cost for businesses will increase significantly because it is difficult to "foster" consumers anymore.

The emergence of AI Shopping Agent represents the return of e-commerce from "psychological warfare" to the essence of "supply and demand matching". This is devastating for platforms that rely on advertising fees; but for businesses with extreme cost-effectiveness and strong supply chains, it is a huge opportunity to remove intermediate costs.

The future platform base may still be the network, but all merchants will be forced to communicate with AI using the UCP interface. So I said, the death date of traditional e-commerce has really arrived. Looking back now