Overview
- Google announced Wednesday that direct checkout powered by the Universal Commerce Protocol is live in Canada inside the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search with launch partners Lululemon, Shoppers Drug Mart, Simons and select Shopify merchants.
- When shoppers buy through the feature, payments use Google Pay and saved Google Wallet details and the individual retailer remains the seller of record, but the flow currently allows only one-item purchases at a time.
- Google says it will add features such as loyalty support in the coming months and deliver a simplified Merchant Center UCP integration next year so more retailers can enable direct checkout from their accounts.
- Policy experts and academics warn the change can concentrate transaction and behavior data with platform providers, and several major Canadian banks have started blocking third-party AI agents over security concerns, leaving attribution and privacy questions unresolved.
- The Canadian rollout builds on UCP deployments in the U.S. and Australia earlier this year and comes as Meta, Shopify and others expand agentic shopping, forcing retailers to improve product feeds and rethink how they keep customer relationships.