News & analysis
Google's Universal Cart Goes Live. No Travel Brands Named Yet.
Google launched Universal Cart in the US through Search and Gemini, letting shoppers combine items from multiple retailers into one cart, but the named merchants are all retail, not travel.
By Roomer Editorial · · 4 min read
What is Universal Cart?
Google's Universal Cart is now live in the United States across Search, AI Mode, and the Gemini app. Shoppers can add products from several different stores into a single cart and check out using Google Pay, or go to the retailer's site to finish the purchase there.
The cart also sends alerts when a saved item drops in price or comes back in stock. It runs on Google Wallet, which means it can suggest which card to use based on each card's perks, and it surfaces promo codes automatically.
Google first announced Universal Cart at I/O in May. The Senior Director of Product Management for Consumer Shopping, Suresh Ganapathy, confirmed the US launch in a blog post this week.
Which merchants are live, and how does checkout work?
Google names Nike, Sephora, Target, Ulta Beauty, Walmart, Wayfair, and a set of Shopify merchants as participants. The merchant stays the seller of record in every case.
There are two paths to purchase. "Native checkout" completes the sale through Google. "Cart Transfer" sends a pre-filled cart to the merchant's own site, where the shopper finishes the order.
The technical backbone is the Cart API inside Google's Universal Commerce Protocol. For now, that API only creates a cart and transfers it once. It does not sync, update, or delete cart contents afterward. Native checkout runs on a separate API entirely.
Merchants who qualify can turn on cart transfer or native checkout through the UCP integration hub in Merchant Center. Google says the hub is rolling out gradually in the US, with Australia and Canada scheduled for next year. Shopify's support documentation states that Direct Checkout is on by default for eligible US stores, though Google Analytics and custom pixels won't fire when a customer buys through that path.
No travel brand or OTA appears on Google's list of participating merchants.
What's missing from this week's launch post?
Google's May announcement described historical pricing data, warnings about products that don't work well together, and loyalty program details tied to Google Wallet. None of those show up in this week's launch post. That doesn't mean they're gone for good — Search Engine Journal notes they may still be part of the product, just not described in the new post.
Google also reframed the cart conceptually. In May, it was positioned as a step toward full agentic commerce, where Google's systems act on a shopper's behalf. The launch post splits that ambition in two: agentic features that act for the shopper, and tools, like the cart, that are meant to "give shoppers confidence and control." That's a narrower claim than May's pitch.
Merchant Center's UCP Analytics dashboard tracks buy-button clicks, purchases, and cart transfers, including average cart value at transfer. That reporting API is still in alpha. There's no metric yet for items shoppers simply save to a cart without buying.
Google has not said when YouTube or Gmail, both mentioned in May as future homes for this cart, will get the feature.
Roomer Editorial's take
This is a retail story right now, not a travel story. Nike and Target are in it. No hotel chain, OTA, or activity platform is named, and nothing in Google's materials suggests travel inventory is next in line.
That matters for how you read the hype. Universal Cart is Google building infrastructure to sit between shoppers and sellers, consolidating carts, suggesting payment methods, and tracking the funnel through its own dashboard. Even in retail, the cart transfer model is one-way: Google hands off the cart, then the merchant's checkout takes over, and Google's analytics may or may not see what happens next depending on the platform.
If something like this eventually touches travel bookings, the same pattern will likely apply: Google becomes the interface, the operator becomes the seller of record, and the operator's own tracking gets patchier the more steps happen inside Google's cart rather than on the operator's own site.
That's exactly the argument for keeping your own booking surface now, while this is still a retail product and not a travel one. A creator building hotel and tour content has a choice about where the actual booking happens. On your own site, you keep 100% of the commission and the booking stays on a page you control, not inside a third party's cart with partial visibility. Roomer lets you build that site from your videos, publish bookable pages, upload video directly, and route bookings through Vio, Stay22, GetYourGuide, Viator, or Klook.
None of that depends on whether Google ever adds travel merchants to Universal Cart. But if it does, creators who already own a direct booking path will have less to lose than those who've built their audience entirely inside someone else's checkout flow.
Roomer Editorial's view: don't wait for a platform decision to protect your margin. Set up your own booking page for your top three destinations now, even if the volume is small, so you have a working comparison point once more of these cart systems show up. Track which bookings come from your own site versus any third-party checkout you're already using, and revisit that split every quarter rather than assuming it stays fixed.
Action: If you're posting hotel or tour content anywhere, check whether the booking link sends viewers to your own page or straight into a platform's cart. The difference is who gets the commission and who owns the data on that sale.
Source: Search Engine Journal — Google's Universal Cart Is Live: How Carts Get To Your Store
