🚨FLASH🚨 Microsoft DUMPS ACP for UCP. ⭐️PLUS: Live Example of first UCP Loyalty Checkout from Target 🎯
Time for ACP to order some pints of ice cream 🍨 and fire up the Taylor Swift tunes! 😭😭😭😭
In what appears to be a stunning reversal in our corner of the Agentic Commerce World, Microsoft casually dropped a blog post for Microsoft Merchant Center (MMC) that talks about their UCP support and announces Target.
This leaves ACP hanging by a thread with only ChatGPT supporting it (the datafeed piece) and META appears to be leaning ACP.
Let’s dig in!
Background
Here’s a brief history of Microsoft CoPilot’s short-lift relationship with ACP:
January 8, 2026 - CoPilot Checkout was announced and based on ACP.
January 22, 2026 - In a Retailgentic exclusive, we discovered CoPilot Checkout live in the wild and demonstrated a live purchase from Anthropologie.
The Breakup Details
Here we are today a short 104 days and the breakup came in a blog post! Note: for comparison to Hollywood drama, this is longer than Kim Kardashian was married to Kris Mumphries which came in at 72 days.
The post is here and some of the details:
The top of the post has a good hook (note we’re not going to get to UCP for a while)
This is pretty good framing of the three eras of the web. About 40% down the page you see this (insert record scratch sound): (highlighting is our editorial addition)
What? Back in January, CoPilot was 100% aligned with ACP and here we see UCP. But the language isn’t exclusive “introducing support” could mean they support both?
New CoPilot Loyalty Experience
A bit further down is when we start to get an inkling on the ‘why’:
New CoPilot Agentic Commerce Ad Format: “Offer Highlights”
In this ad format, the merchant, based on deep context can surface/highlight something about the product in a sponsored listing in context. In this example they provide, the user is looking for a laptop in NYC and BestBuy has an “Offer Highlight” ad promoting in-store local availability and free Geek Squad Protection (red square and green arrow our addition):
Best Buy was announced as an early customer for this new ad unit.
Later in the article we’ll explore where ACP went, but let’s jump into the cool new thing here - Target’s loyalty link. As a reminder, this UCP feature (along with multi-cartwas just announced by Google March 19th (details here) and Google/Gemini is not live with the feature ye
CoPilot/Target’s UCP Loyalty Connection
Here’s how it works:
I Research→Find a Target product→
When you hit Buy, the usual checkout pops up but with an important twist!
When you click that→
This is a great customer experience, very clean and clear to the user. Plus as an avid Target Circle member, I like to see I’ll get ‘credit’ for these purchases.
Once you accept that, you are back at the checkout and your account with email (which is handy for those of us with a lot of emails).
That’s a really good implementation and it will be interesting to see what Google does.
Where’s Multi-cart?
The other big UCP innovation announced was multi-cart and it’s somewhat a bummer we also didn’t get our first UCP multi-cart ‘live in the wild’. We’ll now have a race between CoPilot and Gemini to cross the multi-cart winner’s line.
Where’s ACP?
To verify if this is CoPilot supporting ACP AND UCP or they have made a swap we checked out the Agentic Commerce landing page here.
On this page, they have some updated datapoints that are interesting and good to see Agentic Commerce so front and center. About half way down in the “Improve product visibility in Copilot”
You will see here in the higher-level docs, there’s no mention of UCP. Then I checked the MMC help area, here’s the results of the search for ACP:
Summary
What started out as a kind of boring blog post revealed:
Microsoft CoPilot has abandoned ACP for UCP
CoPilot’s new UCP checkout supports loyalty linking (identity)
There’s an interesting new Agentic Commerce Ad Unit we’ll be watching: “Offer Highlights”