Google’s Universal Cart will soon be available to Walmart, Target shoppers — getting their buy-in may be the hard part

When the cart launches, shoppers will be able to add products to their cart from any product listing they see in Google Search, or while chatting with Gemini, watching YouTube or reading emails in Gmail. Shoppers can check out with Google Pay or transfer their items to the merchant’s website to finish their purchase. Universal Cart will launch in Google Search and Gemini in the U.S. this summer and in YouTube and Gmail at a later date.

“Today, most people are shopping across multiple devices and retailers, all over the course of several days,” Suresh Ganapathy, senior director of consumer shopping product at Google, said in an email. “Once they find what they want to buy, it can be another few steps of research to make sure they’re getting a good deal. By working across merchants as well as across Google services, the Universal Cart will give shoppers a way to manage that type of disjointed shopping in one agentic hub.”

Google, like ChatGPT, Claude and OpenAI before it, believes that more and more consumers are going to want to use AI to help with their shopping. But many shoppers still prefer to check out through a retailer’s own website, as OpenAI’s discontinuation of ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout shows.

It remains to be seen whether shoppers will adopt this new AI-powered cart on a large enough scale for Google to continue investing in the long term. Some e-commerce and tech executives warned that the Universal Cart could also conflict with retailers’ own investments in their in-house platforms.

There’s nothing a retailer needs to do for shoppers to be able to add its products to the Universal Cart, Ganapathy said. If they want a more seamless checkout experience on Google, they can integrate with the Universal Commerce Protocol. That is an open standard for AI shopping that Google developed earlier this year. It is free and open for any retailer to use.

In a news release, Google listed Nike, Sephora, Target, Ulta Beauty, Walmart, Wayfair and Shopify merchants Fenty and Steve Madden as retailers that will support these checkout features. Merchants can either enable checkout within the cart or give shoppers the option to transfer products to a pre-loaded cart on their own site. Some have opted to support both methods, according to Ganapathy.

Google is reaching into commerce only so far; Ganapathy said that the tech company is “a matchmaker, not a marketplace.” The merchant remains the seller of record, even if the checkout takes place within the Universal Cart.

“In the age of agentic commerce, people will want to shop anywhere — and when they choose to do so on Google, we want to make it as easy as possible,” Ganapathy said. “We’re laying the building blocks of agentic AI that help merchants create a cohesive shopping journey no matter where their customers are, all powered by the tools they already trust.”

Google has no plans to take a cut of the purchase, Ganapathy added. “Right now we’re focused on ensuring a helpful and positive user and retailer experience.”

Anthony Ferry, co-founder and CEO of e-commerce analytics platform Wayvia, said he believes Universal Cart could reduce traffic to retailers’ own websites. He said this risk could grow if this evolves into shopping experiences that can handle an entire transaction automatically, where a customer will tell a personal assistant from a tech company or Google that they need milk or toilet paper, and it goes out and gets it for them.

In response, he believes retailers “are going to start investing in those things that build shopper loyalty,” such as loyalty programs, he said. “The retailers really have to come up with a compelling value proposition of why you need to come to my site and why you need to transact on my site, as opposed to allowing Google to finish that up.”

Matt Howland, president and chief product and engineering officer for Cordial, a company that automates email, SMS and mobile-app messages for retailers and brands, believes Universal Cart will limit retailers’ ability to merchandise to customers on a personalized level. That may make it difficult for Google to sustain its relationships. “You can get launch partners in AI incredibly easy. … Getting the follow-on partners is always hard,” he said.

Universal Cart does support retailer loyalty programs, as well as merchant offers and credit card perks, as it was built on Google Wallet.

Ferry said Google has a better chance than other AI companies of achieving wide adoption for Universal Cart or other shopping features, as it has a lot more access to online shopping data, having been in the space for decades. Still, Universal Cart is already restricted in how large it may be able to grow, given that it is currently only accessible through services in the Google ecosystem.

Matt Maher, founder of M7 Innovations — a research and development firm that works with brands and executives to create customer experiences leveraging AI, voice technology, AR and VR — said he doesn’t believe customers will regularly check Google’s cart for deals or come back to it after a long period of time to complete a transaction. He said only Amazon, or maybe Walmart and Target, see that kind of behavior.

Jason Grunberg, chief marketing officer at Forter, a tech company focused on fraud prevention, said he sees Universal Cart as an experiment by Google, so it makes sense that it would be limited to its ecosystem. He questions whether consumers will use one that is exclusive to Google’s ecosystem and said Google may have to change that for it to achieve greater adoption.

Being a well-established tech giant rather than a newer player like OpenAI, Grunberg said, Google does have the upper hand on other AI platforms in terms of trust, in this and in potential future agentic AI applications that may buy products on customers’ behalf. That is both in whether merchants trust AI agents to own parts of the shopping experience and in shoppers trusting that, for instance, they’ll be able to make a return.

“That’s something we’re going to see play out: What are the organizations that have the permission from consumers to experiment in this regard?” Grunberg said. “That is most likely those names that they are very, very familiar with.”