Quick answer: As of June 11, 2026, Harris Boat Works is a live Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) merchant, verified end-to-end with Shopify’s official ucp-cli. AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude can now discover us, search live Mercury inventory, and build a real CAD quote...
Quick answer: As of June 11, 2026, Harris Boat Works is a live Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) merchant, verified end-to-end with Shopify’s official ucp-cli. AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude can now discover us, search live Mercury inventory, and build a real CAD quote with HST estimate and trade-in context. The dealer completes every sale with the buyer in person at Gores Landing. Payment is never collected over UCP. To our knowledge, we’re the first marine dealer doing this. Discovery profile: /.well-known/ucp.
If you’ve asked ChatGPT to help you shop in the last six months, you’ve probably noticed it can do a lot more than it used to. It can compare products, fetch live inventory, and (at a handful of merchants) actually hand you off to checkout. That last part is what changed in April 2026, when a group of the largest retailers on the planet published an open standard for it.
We turned that standard on at Harris Boat Works today.
What UCP is, in plain language
The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is the standard that lets your AI assistant talk to a merchant’s store the same way a browser talks to a website. Same shape, same rules, same vocabulary, no matter who built the assistant or who runs the store.
It’s co-developed by Google, Shopify, Etsy, Target, and Walmart, with Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Salesforce, and Stripe on the Tech Council. That’s most of the consumer internet at one table. The point of UCP is simple: stop building one custom integration per assistant. Publish a discovery profile, declare what your store supports, and let any UCP-aware agent shop the same way.
UCP defines two things merchants care about:
- A discovery profile, served at
/.well-known/ucp, that tells the world what your store supports.
- A set of capabilities (catalog search, checkout, fulfillment) with shared schemas, so the assistant doesn’t have to guess.
What we shipped
A few things, all of them live as of June 11, 2026:
- A UCP discovery profile at https://www.mercuryrepower.ca/.well-known/ucp, spec version 2026-04-08.
- Checkout in quote mode (
dev.ucp.shopping.checkout) and fulfillment (dev.ucp.shopping.fulfillment) capabilities, served at our ucp-checkout endpoint over both REST and MCP transports.
- Verified end-to-end with Shopify’s official
ucp-cli, the same command-line tool Shopify uses to certify their own merchants. You can reproduce it in one line:
npx -y @shopify/ucp-cli discover www.mercuryrepower.ca
To our knowledge, we’re the first marine dealer in North America with a live UCP profile. Hedged claim, on purpose: standards adoption moves fast, and we’d rather be honest than first-in-spirit.
What an AI assistant can actually do here
If you’re using a UCP-aware assistant (and that list grows weekly), here’s what works today:
- Find a motor. "Show me Mercury 90 HP four-strokes in stock at Harris Boat Works under $13,000 CAD." The assistant pulls live inventory from our catalog and returns real listings with our CAD prices.
- Build a real quote. "Build a quote for a 90 ELPT FourStroke installed on a 2015 Lund Pro-V, trading in a 75 HP Mercury from 2010." You get an itemized quote: motor, controls, propeller, install, trade-in credit, HST estimate, and our financing tier (see the Ontario rates and monthly payment guide for the underlying numbers).
- Get handed back to the dealer. Every checkout session returns a
continue_url that drops you into our live quote flow with everything pre-filled, so you can review, save, or call us at (905) 342-2153.
- Register the quote. If you let your assistant share your name and email, the quote is registered with the dealership and a human at HBW can follow up. Optional. Skipping it still gets you a working quote.
For the full agent surface (REST APIs, MCP tools, discovery URLs, deep-link templates), see /agents. For the underlying CAD price list, see /pricing-reference.
What it deliberately will NOT do
This is the part most agentic-commerce articles skip, so it’s the part we want to be loudest about.
- No completed sale through UCP.
complete_checkout returns a quote and a handoff URL. It never places an order.
- No payment collection. We don’t take a card through the AI. Quote mode is spec-sanctioned for exactly this case.
- No shipping. No delivery. No courier release. Pickup only at Gores Landing, Ontario, by the buyer in person with valid government photo ID. Same policy as the rest of the site.
- No final price without a human. The dealer confirms the out-the-door price on every deal, every time. The AI quote is a starting line, not a finish line.
If you’d expect those guardrails from a 1947 family marina, you’d be right. UCP just lets us write them down in a format every assistant on the planet can read.
Why a 1947 family marina cares about this
Two reasons.
The first is moat. Most of what AI-assisted shopping rewards is what good dealers already do: real prices on the page, clear inventory, honest stock counts, no hidden fees, no "call for price" runaround. We’ve been doing that for a while; UCP just makes it machine-readable. The dealer who hides his price list from humans is going to hide it from agents too, and the agents will notice.
The second is fairness. The same standard that runs at Target and Walmart now runs at a family marina on Rice Lake. No special access, no enterprise contract, no $50,000-a-year platform. The barrier to being legible to a billion-dollar AI assistant is publishing a JSON file. That’s a future we like.
There is zero hype in any of this. The page you’re reading is honest about what changed (one JSON file, two capabilities, two transports) and honest about what didn’t (you still pick up the motor in person; we still confirm the price; we still don’t ship anywhere).
Try it
If you build with assistants, the discovery URL is the place to start: https://www.mercuryrepower.ca/.well-known/ucp. If you’re a buyer, the easiest path is still to open the quote builder and click through. Both lead to the same dealer at the same shop.
Phone: (905) 342-2153
Email: info@harrisboatworks.ca
Address: 5369 Harris Boat Works Rd, Gores Landing, ON
Family-owned on Rice Lake since 1947.
