Google’s AI cart for checkout is live ahead of holiday shopping

Google is coming for holiday shopping with an AI-powered Universal Cart and a shopping guide.

Google’s AI-powered Universal Cart, which lets shoppers put products from multiple brands and retailers in one cart and buy using a single checkout, rolled out in the US last week on Google Search and Gemini, Google’s AI assistant, ahead of the busiest shopping season of the year.

The cart builds on Google’s launch of its Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) for agentic commerce. The Universal Cart is built on the Google Wallet so it can compare credit card perks and enable users to choose between payment methods, the company said. Plus, it can notify users about price drops and out-of-stock items.

Google said the new cart also saves a user’s shopping activity across Google surfaces. The cart can check out with Google Pay or directly from a merchant’s site. Items from brands like Nike, Sephora, Target, Ulta Beauty, Walmart, Wayfair, and some Shopify sellers can be purchased via this new tool.

For now, shoppers will be able to add products to their cart from any product listing they see in Google Search or while chatting with Gemini, and the cart will later let users buy items while watching YouTube videos or reading emails in Gmail.

The thinking behind the cart is that shopping rarely happens in a single sitting, Suresh Ganapathy, senior director of product at Google, told Retail Brew in May.

“You shop across multiple sessions, sometimes multiple days, sometimes on your phone or your laptop, and a lot of the time you have to go back to where you started,” Ganapathy said. “You may miss some of the products that you liked, you didn’t save them properly, you didn’t write them up in a spreadsheet, and so that’s what we’re trying to solve with the Universal Cart.”

Tip sheet: Last week, Google also published its first-ever “When to Buy” guide, which lets people shop based on last year’s promotional patterns, search trends, and discount data across US merchants on Google.

The guide includes recommendations like:

• Shop for skin care during Black Friday weekend, which offers “the widest selection of brands on sale.”
• Shop fragrances in the two weeks after Black Friday for the best deals and selection, and wait until mid-December for handbags to balance discount deals with inventory.
• Buy travel accessories in November, and luggage and suitcases in December when these items get their steepest markdowns.

“[Google] is increasingly helping consumers research, compare, and purchase products before they ever reach a retailer’s website,” Carl Hewitt, Group CEO and co-founder at UK-based digital marketing Hewitt Matthews Group, said in an email. “From Google’s perspective, I think this is as much about defending its position/monopoly as it is about improving the shopping experience.”

“With ChatGPT and other AI platforms increasingly entering the shopping journey,” Hewitt added, “Google faces a real threat to its longstanding place between consumers and retailers.”