ECOMMERCE STRATEGY BRIEF: Part Two
For most of the internet’s commercial life, there were two kinds of online real estate: the open web, where anyone could build and anyone could wander, and walled gardens, private kingdoms with their own rules and their own velvet ropes. That distinction shaped everything — how we browse, how brands advertise, how we buy, how data flows, and who profits. Now the distinction is dissolving. And the force dissolving it isn’t a scrappy startup or a regulatory decree. It’s Google.
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Two Internets: Open Web vs. Walled Garden
To understand where we’re going, it helps to remember where we started.
The open web is the internet as its architects imagined it: a decentralized network of interconnected pages, linked freely, accessible to anyone with a browser and a connection. No single company owns it. No login is required to enter it. Search engines index it. Publishers live and die on it. In its idealized form, the open web is a community space — messy, democratic, and ungoverned.
Walled gardens are something else entirely. The term describes platforms that offer rich functionality inside a closed ecosystem while making it deliberately difficult to take your data, your relationships, or your attention elsewhere. Facebook knew who your friends were. Amazon knew what you’d bought. Google knew what you’d searched. Each of these platforms built value by accumulating information about users that only existed inside their walls — and by making sure users had every reason to stay.
The distinction mattered because it was the organizing principle of the entire digital economy.
‘Advertisers learned to speak two languages: the open-web dialect of display advertising, programmatic buying, and SEO, and the walled-garden dialect of self-serve auction systems, proprietary targeting, and platform-specific creative formats.‘
Publishers on the open web competed for attention they could never quite own. Inside the gardens, platforms owned the attention completely and rented it back to whichever publisher could pay.
How the Gardens Were Built: What’s at stake
Let’s step back for a moment to revisit what is at stake. By 2027, the e-commerce market is expected to total over $7.9 trillion. Amazon accounts for 37.6% of e-commerce sales, the highest market share of all e-commerce companies. These figures ‘up the ante’ about what is to be gained or lost. These figures also demand we pay close attention what is happening to the underlying foundation of the commercial internet behind the press announcements and shiny stories of AI hyper efficiency.
The digital gold rush meant that the walled garden model didn’t emerge from a master plan and the open web didn’t decline in reach through audience attrition.
‘Instead, both the open web and walled gardens evolved, company by company, as each platform discovered that controlling the full user experience was more profitable than participating in a shared one.‘
Amazon built its garden around transactions. Starting as a bookseller and expanding outward, it created an ecosystem so complete — search, discovery, reviews, fulfillment, payment, loyalty — that for tens of millions of shoppers, “shopping online” and “shopping on Amazon” became synonymous. Some even believed that Google’s biggest competitor in Search was Amazon – yes Amazon. Merchants who wanted access to those shoppers had to play by Amazon’s rules, pay Amazon’s fees, and accept that Amazon could see every conversion signal while they saw almost none.
Meta’s garden was built around identity and social graph. By connecting people to their friends and families, Facebook and Instagram created a context that no open-web publisher could replicate. Advertisers could target based on declared interests, life events, and behavioral patterns accumulated over years. The trade-off for users was implicit and largely invisible: the platform was free to use, news was free to read, and connection was free to all – all in exchange for users being the “product.”
Google was a hybrid and therefore more complex. Google operated simultaneously as a walled garden — through Gmail, YouTube, Android, and the Chrome browser — and as the most important gateway to the open web. Search was Google’s paradox: an open-web tool that fed an advertising business dependent on knowing more about users than anyone else on the internet. The garden was everywhere, but the walls were transparent enough that most people didn’t notice them.
Together, these three platforms, (and perhaps TikTok emerging as a fourth), captured the overwhelming majority of digital advertising spend by the early 2020s. Publishers on the open web saw their ad revenue erode. Brands discovered that their organic reach had been slowly and quietly purchased from them. The conventional wisdom hardened: the open web was losing, and the walled gardens had won.
The Walls Begin to Blur
Amidst these foundational changes to the commercial internet, open or closed, we find the distinction between open web and walled gardens is anachronistic.
In April 2026, I spoke about the “Great Online Singularity” (https://trustwebtimes.com/the-great-online-singularity/) which argued that something more fundamental than garden-versus-web competition was underway. The very concept of a “destination” on the internet is dissolving — not because the walled gardens are weakening, but because something stronger and stranger is happening.
The AI agent is the reason. When an AI agent acts on a user’s behalf — book a flight, compare products, schedule a meeting — the experiential moat that walled gardens built around human attention becomes irrelevant. To an agent, a walled garden and an open website are not meaningfully different categories. Both are web destinations that expose information and actions.
This is the shift that changes the terrain. The walls were psychological corrals — designed to capture and hold human attention through reward loops. Once agents mediate the experience, the distinction between open and closed collapses functionally, even if it persists structurally. The gardens’ walls are still standing but for anyone navigating the web through an AI layer, the walls are coming tumbling down.
Yet even as we see a convergence of walled gardens and open web as a result of AI disruptive introduction, Google is busy creating a new web reality to subsume both walled garden and the open web in a bid to own the commercial layer of all online transactions. This is possibly Google’s biggest gamble in over 25 years.
Google’s Endgame: The Biggest Non-Walled, Walled Garden Ever Built (dare I say – Web 4.0)
If the blurring of open and closed was one structural shift, Google is engineering a second, more deliberate one — and it has the potential to dwarf everything that came before it. The irony is exquisite: the company that advocated for an internet available to all is now consolidating more power than any garden ever held.
The architecture is rolling out in three stages. Each step is significant on its own. Together, they describe a vision of online commerce so ambitious it barely gets noticed in the audaciousness of its intent.
Step 1 — The Universal Cart: Owning the Moment of Purchase
In May 2026, Google announced the Universal Cart — a cross-retailer shopping tool embedded across Google Search, Gemini, Gmail, and YouTube. The Universal Cart allows shoppers to browse products across multiple retailers and add them to a single, persistent cart — all without ever visiting those retailers’ individual websites. Once items are in the cart, Google’s AI goes to work: hunting for discounts, aggregating price history, flagging product incompatibilities, and notifying users when out-of-stock items become available again.
The launch roster includes heavyweights like Nike, Sephora, Target, Ulta Beauty, Walmart, Wayfair. These category-defining brands signal that Google isn’t testing a concept — it’s building infrastructure. Google is positioning itself as the universal layer between consumer intent and merchant fulfillment. Here is a deeper look at: Google’s Universal Cart: The Quiet E-Commerce Earthquake, Trust Web Times, June 8, 2026; https://trustwebtimes.com/googles-universal-cart-the-quiet-e-commerce-earthquake/)
Step 2 — Getting Rid of Search as We Know It
The Universal Cart sits on top of a deeper shift in how Google wants people to find things. The traditional search engine — type a query, receive ten blue links, visit a website — is being systematically replaced by AI ‘Overviews’ and Gemini-powered answers that resolve the user’s intent without requiring them to click anywhere.
This is search eating itself. For decades, Google’s business model depended on driving traffic within the open web — that traffic generated massive advertising revenue.
Now, increasingly, Google answers the question directly. The discovery journey starts and ends in Google. For many product queries, a user asking Gemini “what’s the best moisturizer under $40?” will receive a curated answer with purchasable options, all completable from inside the Google experience. Discovery, comparison, and purchase — the three legs of the shopping funnel — now happen inside Google. The brand’s website becomes optional.
Step 3 — The Universal Commerce Protocol: Connecting the Whole Web
Below the Universal Cart and above the search results sits the layer that makes all of it technically possible: the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). The UCP, introduced January 2026, is a standard for agentic commerce designed to allow AI agents and retail systems to communicate across the consumer’s commerce journey — ultimately enabling AI to make secure purchases on a user’s behalf.
This is the piece that makes Google’s move genuinely unprecedented. A walled garden is closed by definition — it works by excluding. The UCP is the opposite: an open standard that any retailer can connect to. It creates interoperability between Google’s AI systems and the entire merchant ecosystem. The result is a structure that has no real historical precedent. It isn’t Amazon, which owns the inventory and the relationship. It isn’t Facebook, which owns the attention. It is Google as the connective tissue — the protocol layer that links discovery, consideration, and transaction across the whole web. Open to everyone. Controlled by one company.
What This Means for Marketers and Online Retailers
For brands that have spent the last decade building direct-to-consumer strategies, this is not a routine platform update. It is a restructuring of the commercial internet.
The clearest casualty is the conversion funnel as brands have known it. Discovery, consideration, and purchase can now all happen inside Google’s ecosystem. The carefully optimized checkout flow, the upsell logic, the post-purchase email sequence — all of these depend on the customer arriving on the brand’s own terrain. Google’s Universal Cart reroutes a growing share of shoppers before they ever get there.
The risk is sharpest for pure eCommerce brands because Google is rerouting shoppers so eCommerce players are losing their first party data intelligence. For a brand that exists entirely online, every transaction that completes inside Google’s checkout flow is a transaction where you did not capture a first-party data signal, did not trigger a post-purchase flow, and did not build a reason for that customer to return directly to you next time.
Many companies running on Shopify or other eCommerce platforms must rethink their conversion strategies – pronto. The Google squeeze machine makes many of the intangibles that make a specific memorable, evaporate. Reporting from these eCommerce platforms just got more difficult too. As a new channel, brands have to learn how to learn what makes Google’s machinery turn the dial toward one brand versus another.
Affiliate marketers have an advantage in that, today, conversion often happens on the brand’s site so they are not as dependent on building this data intelligence. In fact, affiliate marketers are more important now to brands because it could be one of the brand inputs that helps Google present a specific brand to users. However, affiliate marketers are now in a new game too and they have a new competitor – Google – who are, in effect, becoming the biggest affiliate marketer on the planet.
The new battlefront for brands in this ecosystem is that Google’s system is explicitly designed to surface the best price across competing merchants. This is algorithmic price compression and commoditization at scale — an environment that works against the traditional and durable brand defenses where a product or brand experience genuinely resists substitution.
This emerging architecture will challenge many (maybe most) marketers and because of this – brand investment matters more, not less, when algorithms are handling the rational filters. Loyalty programs need to travel with the customer into Google (if possible). Product data — accurate, structured, machine-readable — becomes a competitive advantage in a world where AI agents are the primary shoppers.
What This Means for ‘Judy Consumer’
Most people don’t think about platform architecture. They think about whether the checkout was fast and whether the price was fair.
On those terms, Google’s Universal Cart looks like a genuine gift. Persistent carts that travel across Google’s huge ecosystem will hunt for discounts automatically. Checkout friction reduced to nearly nothing. The consumer experience is, by design, better.
However, what makes the consumer’s experience easier may not be what is in the consumer’s best interests.
When Google becomes the layer through which most shopping happens, consumer choice is increasingly mediated by an algorithm whose ranking criteria aren’t disclosed. Small brands with better products but lower ad spend may never appear. The diversity of the open-web retail ecosystem — the independent stores, the niche specialists, the direct-to-consumer innovators — depends on consumers being able to find them.
An AI that optimizes for price and availability may deliver efficient transactions while quietly narrowing the range of merchants that exist.
There is also a data question that most consumers haven’t confronted. Today’s surveillance capitalism requires individual behavioral tracking — harvesting clicks, dwell time, purchases, location, and inferred intent. When AI agents act on a person’s behalf, whether that means users gain meaningful privacy, or whether Google simply consolidates data collection rather than reducing it, will depend on design choices the company hasn’t made transparent.
However blurry my crystal ball may be, this is how I see it playing out for consumers.
In the short term, Judy Consumer gets a faster, cheaper, lower-friction shopping experience.
In the longer term, she gets a commercial internet where one company sits between her and almost everything she buys.
We cannot assume that Google’s interests will align with Judy Consumer.
In fact, history suggests the reverse will be true. Over time, Judy Consumer will be the loser in this new paradigm because Google will expose only those retailers and products and offers that, arguably, “paid” Google to be shown to Judy Consumer.
The wild card here is how AI agents will power Judy Consumer’s digital world. If personal AI agents are developed to advocate for Judy Consumer, then Google’s evolution can be beneficial to users. However, given current course and speed, Judy Consumer is likely to be further disempowered, losing even more agency going forward than she lost in either walled gardens or the open web.
The New Map
The story of walled gardens is usually told as a story of enclosure — the gradual privatization of online attention, the slow death of the commons. That story has real truth in it. But it was always incomplete, because it assumed the gardens would simply grow larger while the open web shrank.
What’s actually happening is stranger and more consequential. The gardens aren’t just growing — the distinction between garden and web is being dissolved from above, by a layer of AI infrastructure that renders the old geography meaningless. And the company building that infrastructure isn’t doing it by tearing down walls. It’s doing it by becoming the web’s commerce infrastructure layer – all by itself.
For consumers, for brands, and for anyone who has a stake in how the commercial internet evolves, this is the moment to pay attention — not to the walls, but to what’s being built between the walls and the open web – in the wild.
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Sources:
The Great Online Singularity, Trust Web Times, April 23, 2026; https://trustwebtimes.com/the-great-online-singularity/
Google’s Universal Cart: The Quiet E-Commerce Earthquake, Trust Web Times, June 8, 2026; https://trustwebtimes.com/googles-universal-cart-the-quiet-e-commerce-earthquake/
