No redirect. No checkout page. No decision.
At Google I/O, Google unveiled Universal Cart, a Gemini-powered hub that follows a consumer across Search, YouTube and Gmail, holds products from multiple merchants in one cart, tracks prices continuously and can execute checkout the moment conditions are met. Consumers can also check out themselves through Google Pay or transfer items to the merchant’s site and buy.
The full stack that Google announced includes:
- Universal Cart, an intelligent cross-surface cart built on Google Wallet that monitors deals, price drops and stock availability continuously. It’s launching across Search and the Gemini app in the United States this summer, and YouTube and Gmail will follow.
- Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) expansion to Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom, plus new verticals, including hotel booking and local food delivery.
- Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) rollout to Google products in the coming months, starting with Gemini Spark, a personal AI agent coming soon.
From Storefront to Infrastructure Layer
The Universal Cart is a consumer product. AP2 is a commercial architecture. The two products push the shopping journey from discovery to price monitoring to checkout inside Google’s surfaces rather than onto the retailer websites built to control it.
Despite Google’s repeated attempts to become a commerce destination, from Froogle in 2002 to Google Express to its current Shopping tab, the company has remained a listing service that sends consumers somewhere else to buy. The transaction, the customer relationship and the post-purchase experience have always happened in someone else’s ecosystem.
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Google can’t match Amazon’s fulfillment network or two decades of Prime subscribers. Instead, it borrows trust from retail partners through open protocols and positions itself as the orchestration layer above the transaction.
The problem it’s solving is real. Wizard Commerce CEO Melissa Bridgeford told PYMNTS this month that 91% of AI shopping interactions today deliver a chat experience with no way to transact. It’s an information dead end that leaves consumers stranded before the sale.
The Payment Layer as the New Battleground
The Google I/O announcements land inside a broader infrastructure contest that the payments industry is already tracking. PYMNTS Intelligence’s April Payments Innovation Tracker® Series found that 48% of consumers are at least somewhat interested in AI agents doing their grocery shopping or managing their subscriptions autonomously, and 44% would delegate gift buying to an agent.
As agentic AI systems move from passive advisors to active economic participants, the payment credential becomes a programmable instrument. Card networks, issuing banks and FinTech platforms are repositioning to define the frameworks through which AI can transact safely.
AP2 is Google’s entry into that contest. It creates a verifiable link between the user, merchant and payment processor, with spending guardrails set by the consumer upstream.
The Retailer Position
For merchants, the immediate terms look manageable. Regardless of how a consumer completes a purchase via Universal Cart, the brand stays the merchant of record. At launch, participating merchants include Nike, Sephora, Target, Ulta Beauty, Walmart, Wayfair and Shopify merchants such as Fenty and Steve Madden. Each keeps its customer relationship when someone checks out through Google Pay from a Universal Cart. The inventory belongs to the retailer.
That’s a roster that spans mass retail, specialty beauty, fashion and direct-to-consumer brands. It gives Universal Cart enough category coverage at launch to be useful across the most common consumer shopping decisions, from a pair of sneakers to a skincare routine to a living room sofa.
The consumer-facing interface, where attention gets shaped and intent gets formed, runs increasingly inside Google. A third of consumers who have tried AI for shopping discovery have fully replaced their prior methods. When that habituation consolidates around a single surface, who owns discovery becomes the more important question than who owns the transaction record.
The platform most associated with a consumer’s first reliable AI task holds a structural advantage in a fragmented market where the average active AI consumer already uses 2.69 distinct platforms.
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