Last week Google announced Universal Cart which enables consumers to use a single virtual cart to add items from different surfaces (all Google of course) with checkout individually processed by each retailer. My LinkedIn was instantly flooded with posts claiming how big a game-changer this was and how all retailers and brands are doomed with such a big innovation from Google etc.

My prediction is that this too like Google’s many past attempts at dominating shopping is likely to just be rails waiting for trains with passengers – it will not be successful until the rest of the Agentic Commerce consumer journey is addressed.

The reasons are many – but the best evidence that this by itself will not work is that OpenAI (and before that Perplexity) tried implementing Checkout directly from product listings and it failed. What OpenAI then did was address the reason it failed by moving checkout to ChatGPT apps. Google is destined to discover that soon.

The fatal assumptions being constantly made is that consumers as soon as they see an ad for a product or a listing that shows up in search or conversation will want to click and buy as quickly as possible – this was never true and still isn’t.

Consumer shopping follows 3 key steps – Discovery, Experience and then Purchase. Ads and product search/conversations in LLMs solve the first and UCP and ACP solve the last. The reasons consumers go to retailer and brand websites after discovering products is to learn more about the product and “experience it” via reviews from other users, learn about various models (if you’ve tried to buy a phone recently you know what I mean), colors, sizes, and even watch videos of people using it before deciding whether to buy.

“Experience” is moving rapidly into the LLM environment. Walmart, Instacart, Starbucks, Peloton, Lowes and over 500 other retailers and brands have deployed ChatGPT apps that essentially replicate website content but with two important differences:

  • The experience is conversational aka “zero-click” and not “search and click” that has become very cumbersome with thousands of similar SKUs on retailer sites. Consumers love conversational experiences.
  • The experience is rich with all of the styles, colors, PDP content, ratings, reviews and lifestyle content are now available at consumers fingertips via conversations e.g. “what sneaker works best in wet weather” which websites were not very good answering

Agentic checkout is important but these experiences whether via ChatGPT apps or other mechanisms like Google’s nascent “Business Agent” AI shopping assistant are key to providing consumers valuable information before they click on checkout.

This is what we at DaVinci Commerce are solving for — enabling brands and retailers to manage the entire end-to-end consumer journey on LLMs from Discovery to Experience to Purchase. UCP (including the recent update), and ACP are important “rails”, but we’re building the trains.