Google announced Thursday that Universal Cart, a tool that lets users collect and monitor products they find in search and the Gemini app, is now available to users in the United States. The company first previewed the tool at Google I/O in May.
The idea is to make it easier to manage your online shopping. Find one you like, save it to your cart, and move on. When you return later, your items and shopping progress will still be there, so you don’t have to look for the same item or start over. Universal Cart can be turned into a central hub for collecting products from multiple retailers and tracking their viewing and potential purchases.
Google says the cart also helps shoppers stay informed of sales and inventory availability. This tool can send you notifications when the price of a saved item drops or when an out-of-stock item becomes available again.
This tool is designed to provide more customized help during the shopping process. Google says it can take credit card offers into account when helping users choose a payment method, and it can also display related promotional codes.
Checkout is tied to the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard that Google introduced earlier this year. UCP is designed to allow AI agents and retailers to work together in different parts of the shopping journey, including checkout.
Google is already deeply invested in AI-powered shopping, and Universal Cart is its latest effort to make that experience more convenient. It incorporates features such as conversational product discovery in AI mode for search and Google’s “Let Google Call” tool, which uses an AI agent to contact nearby stores to see if a product is in stock.
Google isn’t the only company bringing AI to e-commerce. Amazon, OpenAI and other rivals are adding agent commerce capabilities as companies look for ways to make chatbots useful beyond answering questions.
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