Google is hungry — for every morsel of your shopping data

Earlier this year, Google teased a new universal shopping cart that leveraged the power of Gemini to track deals on products you find on the internet and assemble them into one easy place to buy online. After months of waiting, the feature is finally rolling out to users in the United States. Here’s why you may or may not want to use it.

Approximately 87% of Americans buy products online, according to Statista. If you shop at multiple stores, though, it can be hard to juggle different accounts or keep track of price changes on the items you want. To help, Google has a new shopping tool that can watch out for price changes for you.

Google openly admits to collecting user data throughout many of its apps, including Google Shopping.

Universal Cart combines the shopping experience found in Google Shopping, Google Search, AI Mode, and Gemini into one unified system. That means any product you add from one of these disparate Google services will now show up in the same cart for checkout.

According to Google, Universal Cart tracks more than 60 billion products across the web, scanning for price changes so that it can send you notifications when items go on sale. This will be especially useful for tracking deals as we head into Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas.

Universal Cart can even analyze your credit cards saved in Google Wallet and determine if they include perks that can be used to get even better discounts on the items on your list.

While tracking deals and simplifying purchases across the Google Shopping ecosystem is the main appeal, what Google really wants you to do is to choose Universal Cart instead of navigating to each individual site to buy products. So far, it has partnered with Nike, Sephora, Target, Ulta Beauty, Walmart, Wayfair, and some undisclosed merchants on Shopify.

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This next part won’t come as a surprise, but Google openly admits to collecting user data throughout many of its apps, including Google Shopping. Sure, the Universal Cart seems like an easy solution to buying products from multiple supported stores at the same time, but it also feeds your buying habits directly to Google.

When you make purchases through Universal Cart, Google analyzes the data and monetizes it. The company may use your purchases to improve its products and to customize the ads you see online to your specific interests. So don’t be surprised if you start to see more advertisements for the products in your cart or from the online stores you visit.

For some, the trade-off for more ads may be worth the convenience of a centralized shopping cart where you throw everything into the same place and buy with a click. For others, Google’s watchful eye may be intrusive enough to drive you away. Regardless, it’s important to know exactly what Universal Cart will do with your data if you choose to trust it.

That said, if you’re a Google user and you want more personalized ads and results, you can set your shopping preferences manually. To adjust these settings, go to your Personalized Recommendations settings and select “Likes & Preferences,” followed by “Shopping preferences.” On this page, you can choose whom you like to shop for (a man, a woman, a child, or pets) and set your shopping interests to include apparel, skin care, tech gadgets, and more.

I tried to test Universal Cart myself, but it wasn’t available on my account yet. If you don’t have Universal Cart either, it will be rolling out to you before the holiday shopping season. For those who do have Universal Cart already, you can start to track and add items now. However, based on what we know about Google’s data collection habits, you may wish to just go to your favorite merchants’ websites — or even walk into a good old-fashioned brick-and-mortar store — instead.

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