Flash: Google Enters the Agentic Commerce Arena with Release of Buy for Me (Plus a Trip Report)!
Retailgentic was invited to Google's 'Tis the Season' event and we have all the details on these new features. We also update our Agentic Commerce Industry Trackers and end on a Retailgentic Predict
15 days to Black Friday and big Google news is dropping, let’s dig in!
Brief Google Shopping Backgrounder
It all started way back in 1996 when Larry and Sergey… just kidding, fast forward 29yrs ⏩⏩⏩ to 2025. Google Shopping (RIP Froogle) has a massive catalog of over 50B (billion!) global product listings. In that catalog over 2B updates are made hourly (adds/deletes/mods/price changes/inventory updates/etc).
Today 1B people/day go to Google for a product-based search.
The Google Shopping Graph has three unique components
Scale — broadest product coverage (50B)
Freshness — rapid data updates (2B/hr)
Cross-retailer scope — includes multiple merchants for each product (Canonicalized by Google)
Merchant participation is managed through the Merchant Center, enabling:
One-click product information updates
Feed-based integrations for real-time data accuracy
Back on June 20th, at Google I/O, Google previewed their Agentic Shopping checkout, called Buy for Me. We wrote about it in detail here.
What Is Google Announcing Today?
Since Google has three AI initiatives going on simultaneously (AI Overviews, Gemini and AI Mode), I’ll start by explicitly stating these are live NOW in AI Mode and some are in Gemini (I don’t think the Let Google Call is in Gemini yet) and they expect parity there soon.
Agentic Shopping: Agentic Checkout (Buy for Me)
What was previewed at Google I/O is now live. I saw some small UI improvements and it seemed significantly faster than the live demo. The feature is still tied to a price drop/price tracking trigger. We have more information on this aspect of Buy for Me later in the post.
The launch partners today are: Wayfair, Chewy and Quince and other Shopify Merchants (Quince is on Shopify FYI). The merchant must also take Google Pay and have a guest checkout. They did tell me they plan on expanding this as fast as possible from today forward. If you find anyone other than these three with Buy for Me enabled, let us know in the comments!
🆕 AI ‘Compare Products’ Functionality
In your AI mode product-related conversations you will have the ability to check 2-4 products and then have the Gemini AI engine run a comparison for you. This reminds me of the Amazon ‘Help me Decide’ beta feature we covered Oct 24 here. Google’s AI Mode implementation is significantly faster.
🆕Agentic Shopping: Let Google Call (Local Inventory Verification)
In addition to the previously announced Agentic Checkout, for local commerce, Google introduced “Let Google Call”. Here’s how it works
Google’s voice/telecom AI agent calls nearby stores to verify product availability and pricing.
Google-to-merchant conversations adapt to product context — e.g., brand, model, price range, or bundle preferences.
Demo example: Electric guitar inquiry under $300, Gibson brand, checking for deals.
The user receives a follow-up email summary within 30–60 minutes.
Powered by Duplex technology upgraded with Gemini models.
‘Tis the Season for Shopping with Google - Press Activation Event
Reading the above descriptions of new features, you’re probably saying: I wish you would show me examples! We’ll do even better, yesterday (November 12th) we were invited to a attend Google’s “Tis the Season' for Shopping with Google” sneak preview of all these features in NY. The big trend these days is instead of a auditorium talk style event, a more intimate ‘activation’ style event where you can have more 1:1 discussions and see the technology in various simulated real-world environments.
For this event there were 5 ‘stations’ that were:
Station 1: Shop Your Way
Here they talked about how commerce is moving to a conversation thanks to AI and showed the basics in AI Mode and Gemini. Then they took us right into a live demo of…
🆕 AI Mode Product Comparison
At this station, they demo’d the new compare products comparison in a live demo. Here they did a search that popped up two moisturizing products: CeraVe and Cetaphil:
You can see above the 2 blue boxes and then you say→
compare these products and it gives you a side by side comparison matrix like this→
After it has a bit of a conclusion that I wasn’t able to include, kind of like: If you aren’t worried about acne, or greasy residue try X otherwise try Y. Helping you think through the pros/cons.
Station 2: Shop Effortlessly
As the name implies this feature is all about how the new Agentic capabilities will save you time and money while you shop. Agentic Checkout: Buy for me.
Agentic Checkout: Buy for Me
This experience started with a search for a serving tray that was on Wayfair:
They set a price alert for $55.
The price alert was triggered! Note: I did ask and they said you can set the ‘Price alert’ slider at the current price, wait for the alert and then ‘buy for me by kind of skipping the price lower trigger’. I still wish they would just let me skip all that, but they did say that this is a new experience and they are really focusing on very specific experiences to make sure people have a great experience.
As in the Google I/O demo, but much faster, the agent (hidden from view) goes out to wayfair, and:
Initiates the purchase
Submits purchase
Confirms purchase
with this handy animated three check box user experience→
Note the details on taxing, etc.
🆕 Let Google Call
One of the coolest new features is Let Google Call. This use case was looking for a specific guitar with a specific price point. For local stores that:
Google doesn’t have inventory for
Are open
Haven’t been called for this recently
There are also limits on how many times a merchant will be called a day
Google has a VOIP voice agent call the business for you
Let Google Call - What the Local Merchant’s Side of the Call 📞
Here they had a phone for one of the faux merchants that rang and we got to hear the conversation which was very cool. It’s bi-directional and she tells the agent she needs more time, asks it complicated questions and it totally nails it (apologies for the quality fo the video, this happened fast, you can mostly hear it).
When the agent is done it will text/email and also you can watch it fill in the results as you watch as it ‘calls around’ for you. Talk about a time saver!
Station 3: Shop the Looks
This is the virtual try on feature that you’ve already seen, I skipped this one as I already know I can rock a fur coat 🤣
Station 4: <redacted>
Sorry, this cat is not out of the bag yet - stay tuned!
Station 5: Google’s Holiday 100
Google has crunched the data on their shopping data and surfaced their top 100 gift ideas based on trends in their data. You can find the list in an interactive catalog type site here. This display featured some of the items. Many of the other press attendees were in the fashion industry, so lots of questions around crescent clutches that I went over my head 👜.
Broader Industry Context: Updating our Tracker
We can now squarely move the ‘Google Tile’ on our ‘Agentic Commerce Players’ board to ‘Launched’. Apple, Anthropic, Meta and Grok! We are 👀 👀 at you, come on, let’s go!
5 Levels of Agentic Commerce Automation
We can also now update our Agentic Commerce Automation ‘5 Levels’ tracker’:
Heading rapidly into Black Friday and Cyber week we now have three players in the Arena, four sitting over at ‘Nothing yet’ and that brings us the conclusion…
Retailgentic Prediction:
The last time we updated the 5 level tracker, Gemini and Copilot where hanging out together on ‘2: Find’ and now, sadly, Microsoft Copilot is over there all alone ☹️. It’s no fun being alone, Microsoft it’s time, time to get in the arena:
We Predict by November 21, Microsoft/Copilot will announce their Agentic Commerce Checkout solution.
because if they don’t they will miss out on the bulk, if not all, of Holiday 25.