Week 22 - Google wants to shop for you while you sleep, plus Walmart and Target are crushing it

Max: Welcome to the Checkout Point, your quick dive into this week's e-commerce buzz with me, Alex, powered by Blicket. These 20 minutes pack the latest trends, news and insights. Let's navigate the digital marketplace together. Ready? Let's go! Rachel: Alright, welcome back to the Checkout Point. I'm Max, and Rachel, I gotta say, this week's lineup is genuinely one of the most interesting we've had. Speaker 3: I was thinking the same thing. Like a lot happened. Google dropped some pretty big shopping news at Google I/O. And I've had questions ever since. Rachel: Okay, so we're starting right there. Google just announced Universal Cart, and it's basically an AI-powered shopping hub that tracks prices across Search, YouTube, Gmail, and can buy stuff for you automatically when conditions Conditions are met. Speaker 3: Right, and I want to dig into what that actually means for merchants, because who controls what shows up, that's the real question. Rachel: That's wild, right? And that connects directly to our next segment, agentic commerce. There's a new study out saying ninety percent of brands have zero AI search mentions. Speaker 3: Zero. That number is... yeah, we'll break down what merchants can actually do about it. Rachel: And then we're talking Shopify. Thrive Capital just put in $100 million, Speaker 3: Wow. Rachel: analysts are pointing to $152 as a consensus price target, and merchant AI adoption is genuinely picking up steam. Speaker 3: The momentum is real. The margin pressure question is also real. I'll be keeping an eye on both. Rachel: She will. And then we close it out with Walmart and Target earnings. Walmart's e-commerce was up 26% in Q1. Speaker 3: 26% and Target had a strong quarter too. Especially in beauty. Two very different stories coming out of the same earnings week. Rachel: It paints a pretty interesting picture of where consumer spending is actually heading. Speaker 3: A lot to get into. And honestly, the Google stuff at the top, I think that one's going to get people talking. Rachel: Okay, let's get into it. Google's Universal Cart is up first, and you're not going to want to miss this one. Three easy ways to get your questions to us. Check the description for our web form, text us at 747-293-4612 or call the same number to leave a voice question. However you reach out, we can't wait to hear from you. Okay, so picture this. You're watching a YouTube review for a pair of headphones, you add them to your cart, you close the tab, three days later the price drops, and an AI just buys them for you. No redirect, no checkout page, no decision on your part. Speaker 3: Wait, that's not hypothetical anymore, is it? Rachel: That's the thing, Rachel. That's literally what Google just announced at Google I/O. PYMNTS described it exactly that way, a cart that shops while you sleep. Speaker 3: Which is either the most convenient thing I've ever heard or the most unsettling, depending on how you look at it. Rachel: Right; both, honestly. So Google unveiled something called Universal Cart, and it's Gemini-powered. It follows you across search, YouTube, Gmail, and participating merchants, holds products from multiple retailers in one cart, tracks prices continuously, and can execute checkout the moment your conditions are met. met. Speaker 3: So it's not just sitting there, it's actively monitoring. Rachel: Actively monitoring. And Aisha Malik over at TechCrunch put it well, Google is turning AI assistance from passive recommendation tools to active participants in commerce. Speaker 3: That framing really hits because there's a big difference between here are some options and I bought the thing. Rachel: Huge difference. And what's interesting is where this cart follows you. Not just Google properties: according to Brooke Osmundson at Search Engine Journal, it works across Search, Gemini, YouTube, Gmail, and participating merchants. Speaker 3: So theoretically, a customer's entire shopping journey is running through Google's infrastructure. That's a lot of surface area. Rachel: Yeah, and Samantha Manginos's piece at Mashable flagged something I think is easy to miss: there are agent restrictions baked into these new features. Google is putting parameters in so AI agents don't Don't, quote, go rogue. Speaker 3: Go rogue. I love that they had to say that out loud. Rachel: I mean, come on, the fact that they built guardrails into the launch tells you they're already thinking several steps ahead on this. Speaker 3: Or they're already nervous about it, which is interesting because Google is simultaneously building the agentic future and hedging against it in the same announcement. Rachel: Totally. And then there's the stuff from Google Marketing Live, which Barry Schwartz covered at Search Engine Roundtable. Google is bringing shopping ads into AI mode, launching something called Business Agent for Leads and expanding a direct offers pilot. Speaker 3: Okay, so what does that actually mean for a merchant? Rachel: So the business agent for leads is basically Google inserting itself between the merchant and the customer at the moment of intent. Customer expresses interest, Google's agent captures the lead. Speaker 3: Hmm, and direct offers? Rachel: Direct offers means merchants can surface like personalized deals inside AI mode. So a customer searches for an espresso machine, Gemini pulls up relevant products and writes a custom explanation on the spot, according to Barry Schwartz. That's the pitch. Speaker 3: Okay, here's the thing. I'm on both sides a little bit. For a shopper, that sounds genuinely useful. But for a brand, especially a smaller one, this raises a version of what you said a said a couple weeks back about AI agents controlling discovery. Rachel: Right. If the AI picks the winner, everyone else is invisible. And I keep coming back to that because it's not abstract anymore. Google is now the cart, the agent, the price tracker, and the checkout layer. Speaker 3: And the ad platform. Rachel: And the ad platform. So the question isn't whether this is happening, it's happening. The question is who controls what gets shown. Speaker 3: Which is what I can't shake. With a human shopper, at least you can compete on creative, on branding, on a really good product page, you know what I mean? But you can't sit down with an algorithm and make your case. Rachel: You really can't, and the PYMNTS piece made this concrete: a shopper watches a review, adds a product, the AI monitors price, executes the purchase. At no point does the consumer actively choose a store, the AI does. Speaker 3: So the moment of purchase is no longer a conscious decision. Rachel: For a lot of transactions, that's where this is going, and it changes the entire merchant playbook. Speaker 3: Okay, so this connects to something I want to get into because there's actually data now on how many brands are even visible to these AI systems when they're scanning options, and the numbers kind of shocking. Rachel: Yeah, the stat on this is wild. Let's just say, if you think your brand is showing up in AI... Max: To search, the odds are pretty strongly against you. Rachel: Like, staggeringly against you. Max: Right, so the question I want to sit with for a second: if the cart shops while you sleep, are your products even in the dream? Rachel: That's a dark way to put it. Max: But it's the right question, no? Because the visibility problem, it's not coming, it's already here, and there's a real checklist merchants should be running right now to even have a shot at showing up. Rachel: Yeah, and that's exactly where I want to go next, because the data on brand visibility in AI search is Which is genuinely alarming, and there are some concrete things you can do about it. Max: So here's the number that stopped me cold this week. According to a study covered by Michael Transon, 90% of brands have zero mentions in AI search results. Zero. Rachel: Wait, 90? Like, not a small gap, that's basically everyone. Max: Everyone. And this isn't a future problem. AI search is happening right now. People are already asking ChatGPT and Gemini what to buy, and 9 out of 10 brands just don't exist in those answers. Rachel: That's a rough place to be. Max: Yeah, and look, we just talked about Google's Universal Cart automatically executing purchases, so if you're not in the answer, you're definitely not in the cart. Rachel: Right, the visibility problem is upstream of everything else. Max: Exactly. So the question becomes, okay, what do merchants actually do about this? Rachel: And that's where I think the Bessemer Venture Partners piece by Christine Deakers gets really useful. She's writing about what she calls the delegated buyer. Max: Break that down for me. Rachel: So the framing is this. Sometimes your customer isn't a person anymore. They've handed purchasing off to an AI agent. The agent is the buyer. And that agent does not browse. It doesn't click around. It doesn't respond to a beautiful banner ad or a slick product photo. Max: It just scans structured data and makes a call. Rachel: Exactly. Criteria in, decision out, which means all the stuff brands have optimized for humans. Max: Hmm. Rachel: A lot of it just doesn't translate. Max: That's what I keep coming back to. We spent years building shopping experiences for eyeballs. Scroll-stopping imagery, lifestyle photography, emotional brand storytelling. Rachel: And the agent doesn't care. Max: Not even a little. Rachel: So what does it care about? Max: Okay, so this is where the PYMNTS agent commerce checklist comes in. And I found this genuinely useful, like concrete stuff. Rachel: Give me the hits. Max: Clean product data first. Structured catalog attributes. Clear titles. Accurate specs. Complete descriptions. If your data is messy, you get skipped. We've said this before, but it bears repeating because apparently most people haven't done it yet. Rachel: Apparently. Max: Then, and this is the one that Greg Kihlstrom over at MarTech is pushing on, your brand promise has to be provable. Rachel: Oh, I loved that piece, because here's the thing: humans choose brands emotionally, you can tell a story and win a customer. But an AI agent is going to evaluate your pricing, your delivery time, your return policy, your loyalty value, All of it has to be real and structured. Max: You can't just claim you're the sustainable option or the premium option. You have to have data that backs it up, which Rachel: And it has to be somewhere the agent can actually read it. Max: loops back to the catalog and the product feed. If your positioning lives only in your brand copy or your social media, An AI agent scanning your listing doesn't know any of that. Rachel: So merchants have two jobs now—optimize for people and optimize for the agents shopping on their behalf. Max: Two audiences, radically different needs, and you cannot ignore either one. Rachel: Hmm. You know what I find kind of wild? A lot of this isn't technically hard, like clean product data. That's fixable. Structured attributes, that's an ops problem, not a moonshot. Max: Right, and yet most brands still haven't done it. Rachel: Because it's not glamorous. Nobody's writing a press release about fixing their product feed. Max: No one's celebrating that at the all hands. Rachel: But it might be the highest ROI thing a merchant can do right now. Now, ahead of any fancy AI feature, just get your data house in order! Max: Secure it, clean it up, then build the cool stuff on top—same principle. Rachel: And the window to do that is shrinking, because once agent-driven purchasing is the norm, the brands that got structured earlier already in the recommendation set. Max: Everyone else is playing catch up, the early movers get indexed, late movers are fighting for visibility from the outside. Rachel: Yeah, and that ties into something we've been circling around. The platforms that merchants actually run on, whether they'll have the tools to help with all of this. Max: Which brings us to Shopify, because the AI investment story there is directly relevant to whether their merchants can actually compete in this new environment. Rachel: And the numbers coming out of their recent earnings are pretty telling. Max: So, platform layer. That's where Shopify fits into all of this. Rachel: Right. And there's a real news hook here. Thrive Capital, Josh Kushner's firm, just dropped $100 million into Shopify. Max: A hundred million? That's not a passive bet. Rachel: No, it's not. And timing matters. This lands right after an earnings call where Shopify leaned hard into AI as the core growth story. TipRanks flagged the earnings call specifically as signaling in Speaker 4: it. Rachel: fueling AI-fueled growth. Max: So like the investment narrative and the product narrative are basically pointing in the same direction. Rachel: Sort of: the analyst consensus, according to Ticker, has a street mean target of around $152, current price is sitting near $101, so there's upside priced in. Max: Wait, really? That's a meaningful gap. Rachel: It is, but here's the thing investors are actually wrestling with: the stock dropped fifteen percent after Q1 despite beating expectations; GMV crossed a hundred and one billion dollars for the second quarter straight. straight, revenue hit three point one seven billion. Max: Those are good numbers. Rachel: They're solid numbers, but the market spooked on AI cost fears like Shopify is spending to build this out and Wall Street is asking when that spending starts paying off at the margin level. Max: Which is a fair question. I mean, you can't just say AI and expect the market to ignore your cost structure. Rachel: Apparently not anymore. That trick only works for so long. Max: Okay, so flip it to the merchant side because for people People actually running stores on Shopify, the stock price is kind of relevant, right? Rachel: Totally. And Simply Wall Street had a piece noting that Sidekick, Shopify's AI assistant, is seeing rapid merchant uptake. It's handling more customer support tasks. Max: Which connects directly back to what we were just talking about. Clean data, automated workflows, agents doing repetitive work. Shopify is building that layer. Rachel: And there's a cross-border angle too. Brandfuel.ai launched an AI- driven content localization product specifically for Shopify merchants helps them tailor storefront content for international markets. Max: Markets. Rachel: Hmm. So like one product handling more of your support, another handling your global storefronts. Max: Right, and that's the merchant reality in 2026. AI isn't replacing the merchant, but it's compressing the work. A small team can punch way above its weight now. Rachel: So where does that leave us on Shopify overall? Because I want to be fair here. There are real questions. Max: Look, I'll play skeptic. The valuation is stretched. Trading near $101 with analysts targeting $152 sounds great until you realize the 52-week range goes from 94 all the way to 182. This stock moves. Rachel: So volatility is real. Max: Yeah, and margin pressure is real. But the AI adoption numbers for merchants, the Thrive Capital investment, the analyst consensus at 28 buys against one sell, that's not nothing. Rachel: I keep coming back to the platform question: whoever builds the best merchant tools for the agentic era, they win, and Shopify is clearly in that race. Max: Agreed. Whether the stock reflects that accurately is the part I can't tell you. Rachel: Honest answer, I respect it. Max: I try. Rachel: Okay, so speaking of companies where the numbers are speaking for themselves, Walmart and Target both just reported, and Rachel, the e-commerce figures are not subtle. Max: Yeah, we need to talk about this, because Walmart posting 26% e-commerce growth in a quarter where macro headlines have been rough, that's not what you'd expect. Rachel: And Target has its own story, a different playbook entirely. Max: Yeah, it's actually a really interesting contrast. Let's... Let's get into it. Rachel: Okay, shifting years completely, let's talk about some good old-fashioned retail wins. Max: Yes, no algorithms, no agentic frameworks, just numbers. Rachel: And these numbers are legitimately wild. So Walmart posted Q1 2026 revenue of $177.8 billion, up 7.3% year over year. That's from both MMR and IndexBox, but the number that stopped me? E-commerce sales up 26%. Max: Twenty-six. Rachel: Twenty-six in one quarter. Max: Wow. Rachel: That's not incremental growth. That's a full gear shift. Max: And it wasn't just one channel carrying the load. IndexBox noted U.S. e-commerce margins hitting 12%, which for a retailer Walmart size is actually impressive. Rachel: Right, right. And then Sam's Club express delivery, 65,000 orders in three weeks since launching. Max: Okay, $65,000 in three weeks? That's Sam's Club saying, uh, we're not sitting this one out. Rachel: Exactly. And then Target comes in the same week. Different story. Different playbook. Max: So Target's thing is interesting. Global Cosmetics News covered this: beauty sales are driving their Q1 story, not just holding steady, actually leading the charge, alongside digital growth. Rachel: Dani James wrote a piece calling their Q1 performance impressive and noted it beat expectations, though she flagged it's still early for the multi-year turn. Your Turnaround So, cautious optimism. Max: Which is the right read? Like one good quarter doesn't erase a rough stretch, but the direction is clearly pointing up. Rachel: And Jennifer Mattson over at Fortune kind of put the two side by side this week: Walmart and Target, same earnings window, both beating expectations, and she noted they paint two very different pictures. Max: Right, Walmart is winning on scale and speed. Target is winning on category and experience. They're not competing the same way. Rachel: Totally. And here's what I keep coming back to. When both of them beat in the same week, that tells you something about the consumer. Max: Yeah, Like the macro headlines are all doom and gloom. Tariffs, inflation anxiety, all of it. And then you look at actual spending behavior, and it's holding up. Rachel: More than holding up, honestly. 26% e-commerce growth at Walmart isn't people cautiously adding things to their carts. That's momentum. Max: I mean, cautious consumers don't do 26%. Fair point. Rachel: And both of these results are dropping right before Prime Day season, Like Walmart and Target just showed everyone that demand is real. That sets a pretty interesting tone heading into summer. Max: And it connects back to something we kept talking about earlier. Digital execution matters. Walmart didn't accidentally hit 26% e-commerce growth. That's years of infrastructure, fulfillment. Membership, Sam's Club delivery, all of it compounding. Rachel: Same with Target and beauty. They didn't stumble into category leadership. They built it. Max: So if there's a takeaway here, yeah, the AI stuff is the future, Rachel: Uh-huh. Max: but the retailers who are winning right now, they did the boring work first. Logistics, assortment, Checkout, memberships. Rachel: Boring work, big numbers. Max: Someone put that on a bumper sticker. Sure! Rachel: I'd buy it." But seriously, Walmart at one hundred and seventy seven point eight billion dollars in Q1, Target beating expectations, both showing digital as a growth driver. The consumer is spending, and the retailers with their digital house in order are the ones capturing it. Max: That's the real story this week. Not just that they won, but that both of them won-at the same time, doing it differently. That's what makes it interesting. Rachel: One hundred per cent. The playbook isn't one size fits all. It just requires actually having one. Okay, that's a wrap on this one. Rachel, what a week to be in e-commerce. Max: Seriously! Speaker 3: Mm-hmm. Max: Between Google building a cart that shops while you sleep and ninety percent of brands not even showing up in AI search results, it's a lot to sit with. Rachel: That stat still gets me, Zero mentions, Max: Yeah. Rachel: like the game is already being played and most brands haven't bought a ticket yet. Max: And I think that's the one thing I'd want listeners to walk away with: the buyer isn't always a person anymore. Sometimes it's an agent, and if you're not optimized for that agent, you're invisible. Rachel: If the cart shops while you sleep, are your products even in the dream? That's the question. Max: That is the question. Okay, on that note... Rachel: Huge thanks for spending time with us today. If you're getting value from the show, the best thing you can do is subscribe and drop us a review. It genuinely helps more people find us. Max: It really does. We'll be back next week with more. Until then, keep optimizing. Rachel: See you next week.