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

AI Strategies // June 4, 2026 Google’s Universal Cart will soon be available to Walmart, Target shoppers — getting their buy-in may be the hard part By Mitchell Parton Google wants to build the go-to AI-powered shopping cart of the future. But whether shoppers will latch onto it is another question.

In May, during Google I/O, Google announced the Universal Cart, a shopping cart with AI features that works across merchants and services such as Google Search, Gemini, YouTube and Gmail. Once shoppers add a product to their cart, it tracks deals and price drops, gives information on price history and alerts users when an items is back in stock.

It will also warn shoppers if certain items in the cart are incompatible with the others and suggest alternatives. 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 persona