Google’s Universal Cart allows a proactive, intelligent checkout for Google, Youtube and Gmail users
When Shopify unveiled its new Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) earlier this year in partnership with Google, it marked the introduction of what is referred to as agentic commerce, a new era of e-commerce in which AI shapes how online shoppers discover, engage with, and purchase products.
At this year’s Google I/O—the company’s annual developer conference— that vision took a more concrete form with the introduction of Google’s Universal Cart. Together with other announcements including Google’s evolving payments infrastructure, Gemini updates and security protocols, its lays the groundwork for the most embedded and seamless automated shopping experience available to this date.
While Google faces growing competition from AI agents such as ChatGPT across search and shopping journeys, it is leaning on its existing scale and infrastructure to defend its lead in this evolving space. In a post, Vidhya Srinivasan, vice-president of ads and commerce, highlighted Google’s reach and potential. “People shop across Google more than a billion times a day, powered by advanced AI and the Shopping Graph—the world’s most comprehensive catalog of over 60 billion product listings.” Her view is that “as technology advances, shopping has the opportunity to become even more powerful, intelligent and fun.”
Google’s Universal Cart: An Integrated, Proactive Shopping Cart
Universal Cart is an intelligent shopping cart that acts as an agentic hub for shopping on Google. It works across merchants and services, which means consumers can add items from different merchants to their cart, all while browsing Google, using Gemini, watching YouTube and being on Gmail.
With the integration of agentic AI, Google’s universal cart is powering a completely new type of shopping where checkout is no longer a last-step process; it is an evolving, adaptive and highly personalized experience that happens in the background, moving with shoppers.
When shoppers add an item to their cart, it works in the background to find deals, refresh inventory availability, flags potential incompatibilities with other items in the cart, and automatically adds discounts for loyalty card members. With this in the background, Google not only simplifies the checkout process, it goes a step further by doing smart shopping on our behalf, scanning for promotions and merchant offers and ultimately offering the best prices available.
When they’re done shopping, users can pay with Google Pay or transfer items to the merchant’s site to complete the purchase. Rolling out across Search and the Gemini app in the U.S. this summer, these features will be available across leading retailers including Nike, Sephora, Target, Ulta Beauty, Walmart, Wayfair and Shopify merchants such as Fenty and Steve Madden.
Offering What OpenAI Couldn’t: Trust And Privacy
With this release, Google is showing its intention to own the shopping journey end-to-end, and is in a better position to do that than most AI players such as OpenAI, which abandoned native checkout in ChatGPT earlier this year, likely after realizing the payments part of the shopping journey is a far more complex infrastructure play than it realized. It could have also been too early from a consumer behavior perspective, as users access the tool for research but buy elsewhere. Google is in a much better position to own the checkout journey as it is already playing in the space, but is now aiming to make checkout even more personalized, relevant and proactive for Google users.
Trust and safety regarding credit card and customer information were major concerns for shoppers using AI chats. Indeed, a study led by Bain showed that only 24% of users would be comfortable using AI chats to make a purchase. This is concern that affects Google significantly less, both thanks to its existing reputation and to the creation of the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2). This was built to help agents make secure payments on shoppers’ behalf, with boundaries and accountability to give them peace of mind when it comes to user privacy and data safety.
What Google’s Universal Cart ultimately signals is a clear shift from a static, intent-based shopping experience to a continuous, proactive and AI-powered commerce ecosystem that evolves alongside consumers’ behavior and digital journeys. While many AI players are still experimenting with shopping and checkout, Google already owns much of the ecosystem required to make agentic commerce work at scale, from search and payments to merchant integrations and consumer trust. Agentic commerce is no longer a concept, but a very concrete infrastructure that will likely influence and reshape the way consumers shop online in the years to come.