Google puts a Flipkart buy button inside Gemini for some users in India

The mechanism is a merchant-integration protocol, not a shopping chatbot. Google introduced a universal commerce protocol earlier this year, and a buy button inside an assistant is what that plumbing is for. The assistant stops being where you research a purchase and becomes where the transaction begins, with the retailer's checkout embedded rather than linked. Rival retailers still surface in results but without the direct purchase path — which is the commercially interesting asymmetry, and the one regulators looking at agentic commerce will eventually ask about.

Scope is deliberately small: select users, and a narrow set of smartphones, electronics and mobile accessories. That choice is telling. Those are high-consideration, high-ticket, well-structured catalogue items — exactly where a clean spec-and-price comparison inside an assistant converts, and where returns logistics are already solved.

Google's only on-record comment is a non-comment, saying it is always testing new features and experiences to help people discover and connect with businesses more easily, and giving no further detail. Flipkart did not respond. So this is a story with a behaviour observed first-hand by a reporter and no issuing-organisation document behind it at all — worth stating plainly rather than dressing a spokesperson line up as an announcement.

The context is that Google invested about $350 million in Flipkart in 2024, in a round led by Walmart, and that India is the world's second-largest internet market. A checkout button inside an assistant, in that market, in the run-up to the festive season, is a test of whether the assistant can take the transaction rather than the referral.

• Reported Google is testing a Buy button for Flipkart products inside Gemini and AI Mode in India, limited to select users and to smartphones, electronics and mobile accessories. TechCrunch
• Reported A broader rollout is planned for later in October, ahead of India's festive shopping season. TechCrunch
• Reported Google invested about $350 million in Flipkart in 2024, in a round led by Walmart. TechCrunch