It's Chloë’s Weekly Update

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UCP and Universal Cart… should you be worried?

Hello {{first_name | there}},

Just when you thought it had all gone quiet on the AI Shopping front… Google enters the arena…

Read their update here
Listen to my chat about UCP here

Quick answer = don’t get worried, but you do need to know what’s going on, and start doing some things… see below.

What’s going on?

Last week Google announced that they’ve built the thing it was obvious they were going to build as soon as they launched UCP last year.

UCP = Universal Commerce Protocol - essentially a way to make all eCommerce product data available to AI. (I am massively oversimplifying it!)

When they announced, we all thought… are they finally going to turn their mass of product data into a marketplace???

Universal Cart isn’t quite that… but it’s getting there.

❝

“Universal Cart is an intelligent shopping cart and your new hub for shopping on Google. It works across merchants and across services, so you can add things to your cart while you’re browsing Search, chatting with Gemini, watching YouTube or even reading your Gmail.

“The moment you add a product to your cart, it gets to work in the background — finding deals and price drops, giving you insights on price history and alerting you when an item is back in stock. It all runs on our Gemini models, so your cart gets even smarter as the models improve.”

Google’s “Introducing the Universal Cart and more ways to help you shop” blog

Interesting side note… the url for the blog post isn’t “universal-cart” it’s “google-shopping-cart”…

Is it just a cart or also a checkout?

Not sure, I haven’t been able to have a go yet as it’s rolling out in the US this summer, and who knows when it will come to the UK.

But from the blog it seems like the functionality is about

80% cart (build your shopping list, get advice on what’s in it)
and 20% checkout.

It hints that you’ll be able to buy it all in one go, but also makes it clear that the consumer can click to each retailer to checkout.

How worried should you be?

I wouldn’t be losing any sleep over it.

But it’s a sign of what’s coming, and I’ll be watching the feedback and how it develops during the US roll out with interest.

It’s clear the tech giants want to find a way to implement shopping within AI, but the form that eventually takes we’re a long long way from knowing.

What should you do right now?

Improve your product data. And yes, you’re going to hear that endlessly for at least the next 12 months.
Get your product data into UCP format.
Listen to our latest Keep Optimising episode, where I’m talking about zero party data and UCP and how you can leverage that in multiple marketing channels with regular guest Yiqi Wu

Interesting stuff right?

Keep Optimising!

Chloe

Podcast Host, Author, and now... Chief Success Strategist @ Emetko Media

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