Week 41 - Google Enters the Checkout Wars: A Record $275 Billion Holiday Forecast, the Agentic Commerce Standards Fight, and WP Engine's Antitrust Twist

MaxWelcome to The Checkout Point, your quick dive into this week's ecommerce buzz with me, Alex, powered by BLIK. These 20 minutes pack the latest trends, news, and insights. Let's navigate the digital marketplace together. Ready? Let's go.

RachelOkay, okay. Before we even start, did you see the number for this holiday season?

Speaker 3Which number, Max? There's like four flying around.

RachelThe big one, the one that made me spit out my coffee this morning.

Speaker 3You're a simple man. Big numbers do things to you.

RachelThis is The Checkout Point. I'm Rachel, that's Max, and apparently he's already losing it in the first 30 seconds. Guilty. But seriously, wait till you hear this thing.

Speaker 3I've seen it. I'm still not over it.

RachelAnd here's the part that's gonna bug people. A huge chunk of it isn't even coming from people clicking around like normal.

Speaker 3Right. It's coming from somewhere else entirely.

RachelSomewhere weirder.

Speaker 3Ominous.

RachelSeriously, once I tell you where it's coming from, you're gonna get why I choked on my coffee.

Speaker 3Now I really wanna know.

RachelI mean, come on. Once you hear where the traffic's actually coming from, you're gonna ask the same question I did.

Speaker 3Which is?

RachelWho actually owns the checkout button anymore?

Speaker 3Yeah, that's not a small question.

RachelIt is not. And it gets messier before it gets clearer, trust me.

Speaker 3Okay, now you have to just tell me the number.

RachelPatience.

Speaker 3Fine, fine.

RachelOkay, okay, deep breath. It's a big number. It's got layers, and there's a twist buried in it that took me by surprise.

Speaker 3A twist? Now you're just teasing me on purpose.

RachelAlright, alright. Let's start with the forecast itself because it's the biggest one anyone's put out yet. Okay, so Adobe just dropped their Holiday forecast, and I need you to sit down for this one.

Speaker 3I'm sitting. Hit me.

RachelActually, hold on. Before I give you the top line figure, let me set the stage. This is Adobe's own numbers, not some analyst guessing from the sidelines.

Speaker 3Okay, so this is the horse's mouth. I like that.

RachelTwo hundred and seventy-five point one billion dollars. That's what they're projecting for US online holiday shopping this season.

Speaker 3Wait, that's a record?

RachelRecord. Up six point seven percent from last year.

Speaker 3Okay, six point seven doesn't sound crazy on its own. What's driving it?

RachelWell, hold that thought because the what's driving it answer is basically the whole segment.

Speaker 3Great. No pressure then.

RachelThat's Adobe's own release from September 28th, and Adweek picked it up the same day.

Speaker 3Right. I saw the Adweek piece too. They frame it as AI tools and buy now, pay later, basically propping up spending while people are still kind of squeezed.

RachelExactly. Value hunting, but still spending. And get this, October alone is expected to pull in ninety-five point eight billion just from online.

Speaker 3That's just one month.

RachelYeah. And remember, that's not the whole season. That's just people getting a head start before Halloween candy is even off shelves.

Speaker 3Which tells you shoppers aren't waiting for Black Friday deals to start spending.

RachelOne month. And Prime Day, that's October sixth and seventh this year, projected at nine point nine billion.

Speaker 3For two days?

RachelFor two days. Up nine point two percent year over year.

Speaker 3Okay, that's wild. What about Cyber Week?

RachelForty-seven point five billion.

Speaker 3Wait, wait. Forty-seven billion in like five days?

RachelFive days. I had to read that stat twice.

Speaker 3That's basically the entire GDP of a small country crammed into a long weekend of turkey leftovers and doorbusters.

RachelYeah. That's basically Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, basically carrying almost a tenth of the whole season.

Speaker 3I mean, come on. That math is nuts when you say it out loud.

RachelAnd that's before we even get to the part that made me do a double take.

Speaker 3Oh, here we go.

RachelRight? But here's the number that actually stopped me. AI-assisted traffic to US retail sites is projected to jump a hundred and thirty percent year over year this holiday season.

Speaker 3One hundred and thirty percent?

RachelNot like ten, not twenty, a hundred and thirty.

Speaker 3One hundred and thirty. Just so I'm tracking, that's not total traffic. That's specifically stuff Adobe is attributing to AI assistants and tools sending people to retail sites.

RachelRight. This isn't just traffic is up. This is traffic that showed up already primed because some chatbot told them exactly what to buy and where.

Speaker 3Where's that traffic even coming from, though? Like, is that chatbots sending people to sites?

RachelBasically, yeah. Tools like that recommending products and pushing people straight to checkout pages instead of a regular search result.

Speaker 3So it's not even really traffic in the old sense. It's more like referrals with intent already baked in.

RachelExactly. And that's a totally different animal to design a checkout flow around.

Speaker 3So people aren't browsing anymore. They're getting handed a link and told, "Go buy this."

RachelIt's less like window shopping and more like somebody handing you a shopping list already filled out.

Speaker 3Which is efficient for the shopper, sure, but it changes what a retailer even needs to optimize for.

RachelKinda, yeah. And that's genuinely a different shape of traffic than retailers are used to planning around.

Speaker 3So if a huge chunk of your holiday traffic is coming in through some AI assistant instead of your own site or app, who's actually running that checkout experience?

RachelIt's the question every retail exec I talk to is quietly panicking about right now.

Speaker 3Because normally you just say, well, whoever built the storefront owns the checkout. That assumption doesn't hold anymore.

RachelRight. Is it the retailer's page? Is it happening inside the chat window? Nobody's really settled that.

Speaker 3Because if I'm running a retention model and half my new traffic is arriving pre-qualified through a bot, I wanna know who owns that relationship afterward.

RachelYeah, and that's the uncomfortable bit, right? You might get the sale, but you don't necessarily get the customer.

Speaker 3Right. The assistant could just as easily send that same shopper to your competitor next time, and you'd never even know why.

RachelTotally. And normally I'd say we wait a quarter or two and see how it shakes out.

Speaker 3Because normally that's exactly how these things play out, right? Everybody waits, watches the data trickle in, adjusts slowly.

RachelYeah, slow and steady. Nobody panics. It's fine.

Speaker 3But?

RachelBut that question just got a very loud answer. Google's throwing its own thing into the mix.

Speaker 3Wait, hold on, back up. Very loud answer. How loud are we talking?

RachelLike, they didn't whisper it in a footnote. They put it on stage at their biggest retail event of the year.

Speaker 3Wait. Google's doing what now?

RachelOh, we're getting into it. It's a whole move. So Google didn't just show up to NRF 2026 with a keynote about search ads.

Speaker 3They didn't?

RachelNope. Sundar Pichai gets on stage and basically says, "Hey, we built our own checkout thing. It's called the Universal Commerce Protocol, UCP for short."

Speaker 3Okay, break that down for me. What does it actually let a retailer do?

RachelAccording to Google's own write-up of the remarks, retailers can offer checkout and personalized deals right inside Search and inside Gemini. Like, no leaving the app, no redirect. You just buy the thing where you already are.

Speaker 3Huh. So Search becomes a storefront.

RachelKind of, yeah. And get this, in the same remarks, he also talks about expanding Wing, their delivery drone thing.

Speaker 3Wait, drones in the middle of a checkout announcement?

RachelI know. It's a weird flex. Like, one breath, it's, "We're rebuilding the payment layer of the internet." Next breath, it's, "Also drones."

Speaker 3That's very Google. Throw everything at the wall at once.

RachelRight?

Speaker 3Honestly, the drone mention almost feels like a flex just to remind everybody Google's got fingers in every pie.

RachelRight. Also, we deliver packages by air as a footnote to we're rebuilding checkout.

Speaker 3Okay, but the drone thing, low priority for me. The protocol part, who's actually behind it?

RachelThis is where it gets real. PYMNTS reported the list of partners who built this thing with Google, and it's not small. Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, Walmart.

Speaker 3Hold on. Walmart and Target both signed on to the same Google-built thing?

RachelYep. And then on the payment side, you've got endorsements from Adyen, American Express, Mastercard, Stripe, and Visa.

Speaker 3Stripe endorsed it?

RachelStripe endorsed it.

Speaker 3Okay, that's the part that gets me. Stripe is the one running checkout with OpenAI, so they're building the rival rail and also signing off on Google's rail?

RachelThat's what it says.

Speaker 3That's not a company picking a side. That's a company hedging every side.

RachelWhich honestly, smart. If you're the plumbing, you don't care whose faucet turns on.

Speaker 3Sure. Smart for Stripe, sure. Frustrating if you're the one actually trying to build a roadmap around it.

RachelTotally fair. It's easy to hedge when you're the pipes and not the storefront.

Speaker 3Sure, but from a merchant seat, that's a different story. If I'm running checkout for a mid-sized retailer, I don't get the luxury of hedging. I have to pick what I build against.

RachelRight. And Google's own language here is interesting too. Their quote is that UCP, quote, "Establishes a common language for agents and systems to operate together," end quote.

Speaker 3A common language. Okay. Common according to who, though?

RachelThat's the question, right?

Speaker 3Because Amazon's got Rufus doing its own thing. OpenAI and Stripe have their agentic checkout, and now Google's saying, "No, no, we're the common language."

RachelThere isn't exactly a UN for checkout protocols.

Speaker 3There should be.

RachelSomebody pitch that.

Speaker 3Honestly, I don't think anyone's coming to referee this. It's just going to get sorted out by whoever wins adoption.

RachelWhich historically in tech takes years and leaves at least one format basically abandoned in a drawer somewhere.

Speaker 3But step back for a second. This actually reframes something we were just talking about. We were treating this like OpenAI and Stripe had this lane basically to themselves, like they were early, they'd get first mover advantage, done deal.

RachelRight. That was kind of the assumption.

Speaker 3And now you've got Target, Walmart, Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, plus five of the biggest payment networks on Earth all lined up behind a completely separate Google-built standard. That's not a scrappy challenger. It's half of American retail supply chain showing up on day one.

RachelIt's not nothing.

Speaker 3It's the retail equivalent of showing up to a fight with the entire supply chain standing behind you.

RachelAnd remember, none of these partners are small players who can be bullied into switching later. Once Walmart integrates something, it's there.

Speaker 3It's not nothing at all. And here's what gets me about the timing. This dropped at NRF, which is basically the Super Bowl for retail executives. Every buyer in that room just heard two different companies tell them, "Build on us."

RachelIn the same week, practically.

Speaker 3In the same week.

RachelSo if you're one of those retail execs sitting in that audience, you walk out of NRF thinking you had one homework assignment, learn the new checkout standard, and now you've got two.

Speaker 3Which honestly might be the most realistic outcome of all this. Nobody actually consolidates. Everybody just builds twice.

RachelTwice the integration work, twice the testing, twice the headache come Q4.

Speaker 3At least two.

RachelYeah. And honestly, probably more than two once you count whatever Amazon and everybody else is cooking. It's less learn the new standard checkout and more pick your fighter and maybe pick three.

Speaker 3And that's before you even factor in whatever homegrown thing Amazon eventually rolls out because you know they will.

RachelOh, 100%. Nobody builds the biggest storefront on Earth and just sits out a standards fight.

Speaker 3Which is exactly the mess we need to get into because picking one horse in this race might not even be an option anymore.

RachelOkay, so three standards. Three.

Speaker 3Not two. Three feels like a lot for something that used to just be type in your card number.

RachelWelcome to the future. Apparently, it comes with acronyms attached.

Speaker 3Yeah, I saw that breakdown too. You've got Stripe and OpenAI's version. That's ACP, built for checkout inside ChatGPT.

RachelRight, the one we've been talking about all year.

Speaker 3Then Google's got UCP, which we just walked through. That's the Gemini and AI mode play.

RachelAnd then there's a third one nobody's mentioned yet.

Speaker 3MCP, Anthropic's version.

RachelOf course, Anthropic has one too. Everybody's got one.

Speaker 3At some point, you have to wonder if everybody's got one is just gonna be the default state of tech forever.

RachelHonestly, probably. Every platform wants to own the rail once they realize commerce runs through it.

Speaker 3It's not really surprising, though. Every big model company wants its own rail into your store.

RachelSure, but from a merchant seat, that's exhausting. You're integrating three different plumbing systems for basically the same job.

Speaker 3And it's not like these three are in any way remotely similar under the hood, so it's not copy-paste work between them.

RachelRight. It's basically three separate engineering projects wearing the same trench coat.

Speaker 3Which is exactly the conclusion this analysis landed on. Most retailers are going to need to support at least two of these, not pick one and walk away.

RachelAt least two.

Speaker 3At least two.

RachelBecause you don't know yet which assistant your customer showed up from.

Speaker 3So if you're running a mid-size store, you're basically building for ChatGPT traffic and Gemini traffic at the same time.

RachelProbably, yeah, and maybe Claude traffic down the road if Anthropic pushes commerce harder.

Speaker 3It's wild that which chatbot the customer happened to open is now a variable in your engineering roadmap.

RachelIt genuinely is. Five years ago, that sentence wouldn't have meant anything to anybody.

Speaker 3That's a lot of dev time for something that used to just be, you know, a checkout page and a credit card form.

RachelWell, welcome to twenty twenty-six.

Speaker 3I mean, remember when the biggest technical decision a retailer made was picking a shopping cart plugin?

RachelSimpler times, genuinely. Fair.

Speaker 3Honestly, this is starting to remind me of the payment method sprawl retailers already deal with. You don't pick one wallet, you support, like, six.

RachelRight. Nobody standardized on one wallet either, and somehow the industry just learned to live with it.

Speaker 3Because the alternative is telling half your customers, "Sorry, we don't take your money," and no merchant wants that conversation.

RachelOh, speaking of payment method sprawl, did you catch the BLIK news this week?

Speaker 3I did. That's a good one, actually.

RachelBLIK just joined Stripe's Dynamic Payments, and now merchants in over thirty countries can automatically offer it to shoppers in Poland.

Speaker 3Automatically, which is the part I like. You're not building a separate integration for one market. Stripe just turns it on for you.

RachelThat's the dream, honestly. Flip a switch instead of writing new code every time a new local payment method shows up.

Speaker 3If only checkout standards worked that way instead of needing three separate integrations.

RachelRight. And buried in that same announcement, Stripe flagged agentic commerce as an area they're working on jointly with BLIK.

Speaker 3Which tells you this isn't just a regional payment story.

RachelExactly. It's the same land grab, just wearing a Polish flag this time instead of a search results page.

Speaker 3Everywhere you look this year, it's the same fight in a different outfit.

RachelNow it's the same fight showing up again. Every rail wants to be the one that plugs into the agent.

Speaker 3It really is starting to look like nobody wins this outright, not this year anyway.

RachelWhich is a weirdly honest place for an industry to land, actually. Usually everybody pretends there's a clear winner when there isn't.

Speaker 3Yeah. Nobody's writing a press release that says, "We're still figuring it out," but that's basically where we are.

RachelSo where does that leave a merchant listening right now trying to plan next quarter?

Speaker 3Build for more than one. Don't bet the roadmap on ACP or UCP winning outright because right now there's no evidence either one is gonna eat the other.

RachelSo basically insure yourself.

Speaker 3Pretty much. Support multiple rails, keep your checkout flexible, and let the traffic tell you which assistant your customers actually prefer.

RachelAnd honestly, that data will probably tell you more about your customers than any survey ever could.

Speaker 3Way more, because it's what they're actually doing, not what they say they do on a form.

RachelWhich, honestly, might just settle itself over the next year without anyone declaring a winner.

Speaker 3Could be. Or it drags on for years like every other standards fight in tech.

RachelTrue, true. All right, before we wrap this one up, we've got a handful of other stories from the week worth a quick lap around.

Speaker 3Yeah, a few smaller ones that are worth mentioning before we go.

RachelOkay, quick lap. Four stories. Let's go. First one's messy. WP Engine versus Automattic, the antitrust fight. Remember that?

Speaker 3Four stories. Let's see how fast we can actually get through these without going on a tangent.

RachelNo promises.

Speaker 3Oh, the whole Matt Mullenweg thing. That's still going?

RachelStill going. A judge just declined to toss WP Engine's antitrust claims against Automattic and Mullenweg himself.

Speaker 3So the lawsuit survives.

RachelMostly, yeah. But Automattic's not walking away empty-handed either. They got seven of the claims against them dismissed.

Speaker 3So both sides get to claim a win in their press release.

RachelHonestly, that's how most of these platform lawsuits go. Nobody gets a clean knockout. Everybody just limps into the next filing deadline.

Speaker 3Meanwhile, WP Engine customers are just sitting there hoping their hosting doesn't become collateral damage.

RachelBasically, nobody's popping champagne, but nobody's folding either.

Speaker 3Speaking of things nobody expected to still be dragging on, the UK just said it wants to take services back from outsourcing giants.

RachelWait, back? Like bring it in-house?

Speaker 3Yeah, actual in-house teams instead of a contractor's contractor's contractor running your pension system.

RachelWhich when you say it like that sounds like it should've been the plan from day one.

Speaker 3Yeah. Whitehall's setting up a new unit specifically to review critical contracts.

RachelWhy now, though?

Speaker 3The Capita Pensions mess. That apparently made the case for doing it themselves a lot easier to sell internally.

RachelHa. Nothing motivates a government department like watching someone else screw up pensions.

Speaker 3It really is the oldest story in government contracting. Outsource it, it goes fine for years, then one bad headline and suddenly insourcing is the responsible choice again.

RachelThe pendulum just swings back and forth forever, doesn't it?

Speaker 3Right? Nothing like a public failure to make in-house look cheap by comparison.

RachelOkay, moving to something actually cheerful for once. eMarketer just bought the research arm of RetailX.

Speaker 3Oh, I didn't see that.

RachelIt's one of those deals that doesn't make headlines outside the industry, but if you actually use these firms' data, it changes who you're calling for numbers next quarter.

Speaker 3Fewer independent voices in the room, more of it living under one roof.

RachelYeah, the whole thing. RetailX's research team, their tools, and their rankings all folding into eMarketer's retail and e-commerce coverage.

Speaker 3Consolidation in the data and insights world. Feels fitting for this episode, honestly.

RachelIt's funny, we spend half this episode talking about companies merging their tech stacks, and here's two research shops literally merging their spreadsheets.

Speaker 3Same instinct, though. Bigger footprint, fewer competitors telling a different story with different numbers.

RachelRight. Everybody's merging, everybody's picking teams. Even the people who tell us what's happening are merging with each other.

Speaker 3Very meta.

RachelLast one, and this one is the one that actually made me sit up. A localization benchmark just ran seven hundred seventy-four AI translation outputs, English to Chinese.

Speaker 3And?

RachelAnd human translators lost. Four out of six content types, the AI workflow beat them.

Speaker 3Four out of six. That's not close.

RachelYeah, and remember, this isn't some tiny sample either. This was hundreds of outputs they ran through.

Speaker 3Which makes it harder to wave away as a fluke.

RachelNot close at all. And the twist is, which model they used mattered more than how much a human polished it afterward.

Speaker 3So the editing pass isn't the lever people think it is.

RachelNope. Pick the right model, apparently, and the human touch-up barely moves the needle.

Speaker 3So the lesson for anybody running a localization team isn't hire less, it's pick your tools more carefully before you even bring in a human.

RachelRight. The model choice is doing most of the heavy lifting here, and the editing pass is just cleanup.

Speaker 3That's gonna make a lot of localization teams nervous.

RachelIt should. If you built a whole career on being the safety net after the machine does the first pass, that safety net's getting thinner.

Speaker 3Not gone, just thinner. There's still a place for the human, it's just a smaller room.

RachelI mean, come on, every one of these stories, whether it's lawsuits, government contracts, research firms merging, or a translation benchmark, it's the same thread: payments, platforms, research. Everybody's repositioning for a year that's gonna run on AI, whether they're ready or not.

Speaker 3It's kind of funny how none of these four stories are even about the same industry, and yet you can draw the same line through all of them.

RachelThat's usually the sign a trend is real, honestly, when it shows up in places that had nothing to do with each other.

Speaker 3Yeah, and honestly, that's the frame for the whole episode we just did. The forecast, Google's move, the standards fight, all of it is the same repositioning, just with bigger dollar signs attached.

RachelBigger dollar signs is right.

Speaker 3So let's actually put a bow on this thing.

RachelThat ship's kinda sailed.

Speaker 3Right. Build your integrations so you're not locked into a single vendor's plumbing. If Google's version stalls or Stripe's changes shape, you want your checkout still working.

RachelIt's basically insurance.

Speaker 3Exactly. And with the traffic numbers we saw this week, the checkout flow itself is turning into a bigger piece of your margin than people think. Test now, not in December.

RachelThat's fair. And honestly, it's cheaper to test the second checkout path now than to explain to your boss in January why the AI traffic bounced.

Speaker 3Exactly. A broken rail in December costs you way more than a few extra hours of dev time in October.

RachelOkay, that's the responsible answer. Mine's dimmer.

Speaker 3Go ahead.

RachelI just think it's funny that everybody's fighting over who gets to be the robot's favorite store. Like, the AI walks in and three different checkout systems are all waving their arms going, "Pick me, pick me."

Speaker 3That's basically what happened this week.

RachelIt really is. Anyway, that's it for us this week. Thanks so much for hanging out and listening.

Speaker 3If you liked the episode, follow the show wherever you're listening so you don't miss next week.

RachelWe'll be back with more numbers, more chaos, probably another new acronym nobody asked for.

Speaker 3Probably.

RachelTake care, everybody.

Speaker 3See you next week.