Google launches Universal Cart in the US

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Lauren Forristal techcrunch.com

Google has launched Universal Cart in the US, a single shopping cart that gathers products from multiple retailers across Google Search and the Gemini app. First previewed at Google I/O in May, the cart keeps saved items between sessions and notifies shoppers when a price drops or an out-of-stock item becomes available again.

The cart surfaces promo codes during checkout and recommends payment methods with credit card perks taken into account. Google says the tool is meant to make online shopping easier to manage and to help shoppers stay on top of deals and availability across stores. It joins a growing suite of Google shopping features: conversational product discovery in Search's AI Mode, and a "Let Google Call" agent that phones nearby stores to check whether an item is in stock.

Purchases through Universal Cart run on Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, a standard the company introduced earlier this year and describes as open, built to let AI agents and retailers work together across the shopping journey, including checkout. The retailer ships the order and keeps the margin on it; the basket, the payment preferences and the purchase history sit with Google. The company spent two decades ranking retailers' products and selling them the traffic that reached their customers. It now holds those customers at the moment of payment.

The move is not Google's alone. Amazon, OpenAI and other rivals have added agentic commerce features, as the industry searches for ways to make chatbots useful beyond answering questions. When software agents begin placing orders on behalf of shoppers, the protocol connecting agent to retailer will decide where the transaction is recorded and who sees the data around it. Google wrote that protocol, named it open, and built the first cart on top of it.