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5/20/2026

Agentic Shopping Is Worse For Everyone But Lazy Fucks

I am tortured in new and exciting ways by the latest developments in technology. Today, as a part of Google I/O, Google announced the "Universal Cart" and another push towards "agentic shopping", this time with backing from a large variety of retail partners. In this piece, I'll explore how shopping is another front of the culture war, AI continues to gild shit, and these developments push us towards new and awful futures. The above image was from The Verge's live coverage Google I/O, and was what sparked this piece.

E-Commerce Present-Past

I'm sure anyone reading this is already familiar, but for future readers confounded at what shopping in "the old days" must have been like, I'll attempt to summarize the landscape of shopping online as it existed in the present-past. The usual shopping experience looked like this:

The user on the internet sees a product (via ads, affiliate links, or other means) or searches for one (via Google or other search engines)

The user is directed to listing on a specific retailer, where they can add that item to their cart

The user is suggested products according to their consumer profile, and conflicts are flagged in specialized retailers

At checkout, the cart is processed through whatever platform is available, usually consisting of some combination of in-house, Paypal, Shop, and Link at this time

The retailer sends a confirmation to the user's email and may be tracked through the payment processor's app in the case of Paypal and Shop

Online-forward retailers often now have add-on details, products offered at a discount post-purchase to be added to your shipment before it's prepared. Medium to large stores may also offer a paid subscription, which offer discounted or free products, a la Amazon Prime (A suite of Amazon products and discounted shipping) or Savage X Fenty Membership (significant discounts on clothes and discounted shipping). Mystery bags/hauls/boxes are very big at this time as well, offering a random selection of a range of products at a discount, often to get rid of hard-to-move goods.

There are a lot of ways a consumer may see advertising on the way towards a purchase. As previously listed, there are things like sponsored search results and products, advertised similar products, and products recommended based on their consumer profile of the shopper. Additionally, there are things like brand integrations into content, sponsored media, product reviews, all of which surface the products via other media platforms to hopefully drive sales. Alongside these posts, a consumer might see an affiliate link or code, which tracks sales related to a particular campaign and may drive kickback to the affiliate. Finally, at the most abstract, we have things like SEO optimization to improve product ranking in search results (which can take the form of things like keyword stuffing, blog backlinking, or synthetic reviews and social media posts) and dark patterns which attempt to influence the consumer towards certain choices, implied bargains, and purchases they otherwise wouldn't have made. Dark patterns are a whole thing unto themself, for a cursory guide I recommend Deceptive Patterns.

All this has formed a consumer-hostile experience , yet somehow the current shopping experience is degrading as I type this. There's been a flood of cheap, lookalike products featuring shiny AI-generated promo shots with limited to no customer support onto all markets, including Amazon and Walmart. Fake retailers pop up overnight and disappear faster, scamming by either selling products that do not match their description or refusing to sell products at all. AI generation among other things makes it trivial to stand up a convincing enough looking marketplace to get a few sales. Finally, AI influencers and artificial accounts generate fake prestige and social proof for the utility of these products and are surfaced naturally like any other content onto social feeds. Social media sites like Reddit have been considered a stop gap for real reviews and personal experiences with products and recommendations, however they've been known to be blanketed in artificial accounts and paid-for social marketing. Financial struggles and aggressive marketing are pushing people to new retailers like Temu which are filled to the brim with fakes and dark patterns and exploitative design. Traditional retailers are implementing these dark patterns to keep up and appear trendy. People are less concerned with how a product works and more that it looks like it works. Welcome to the Slop Economy.

Shopping For The New Shopping Experience

"Agentic shopping" (meaning shopping driven through and by AI agents) is sold as an alternative to this shitshow of an experience online. In Google's vision of the future, which is by no means the only but likely to be the most popular given Google's traffic and its retail partners,...