Google tests Flipkart purchases through Gemini and AI Mode in India

Google has started testing a way for users in India to buy Flipkart products without leaving Gemini or AI Mode, the conversational mode of its search engine. According to TechCrunch, the test is limited: it covers a selection of products and a small group of users. The company plans a broader rollout later in October.

The choice of partner is no accident. Flipkart is one of India's largest marketplaces, and Walmart has controlled it since 2018, when the US retailer paid around 16 billion dollars for a majority stake. Google is not trialling in-assistant shopping with a small store. It is doing it with one of the players that moves the most volume in the country's ecommerce.

What happened

The idea is easy to describe. The user looks for a product in Gemini or AI Mode and can buy Flipkart items from within Google's own interface, without jumping to the store's website or app. The test came to light at the end of September and, based on what has been published, Google wants to expand it within weeks.

With the information available, several details remain open. We do not know which categories are included or how payment works in a market where UPI dominates digital transactions. Nor is it clear who takes on returns and customer support when the purchase starts in a chatbot. These are operational questions, but they are the ones that will decide whether this scales or stays a demo.

Why it matters

This is the latest move in a race that picked up pace last year. In September 2025 Google introduced the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open standard for AI agents to initiate payments with verifiable user authorisation. A few weeks later, OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT alongside the Agentic Commerce Protocol, developed with Stripe. Around the same time, Walmart announced that its customers would be able to shop from ChatGPT.

Walmart is therefore playing on both boards. Its US business has already announced a ChatGPT integration, and its Indian subsidiary is now the one Google is using for its test. Everything suggests that large retailers want to be present in every assistant where the user starts searching, rather than betting on a single one.

India is also a logical testing ground. It is one of the markets where Google has the most search users, and it was among the first countries outside the United States to get AI Mode, in mid-2025. Mobile product searches there run at huge volume, and removing friction between the question and the payment shows up quickly in the numbers.

Who it is useful for

For ecommerce teams, the lesson is practical. If product search shifts to conversational interfaces, catalogue data (prices, stock, variants, delivery times) has to be structured and up to date. An agent will not interpret a poorly laid out product page with the patience of a human shopper.

For those building agents, including teams working with Claude and MCP, the protocols are what matters. Google presented AP2 as an extension compatible with A2A and MCP. As a result, an agent that queries catalogues through MCP tools today could add payments with signed mandates without rebuilding its architecture. It remains to be seen how many merchants will open those capabilities to agents other than Google's or OpenAI's. The alternative is that each big platform ends up with its own closed circuit of partner stores.

For brands and agencies, the change affects measurement. If the purchase closes inside Gemini, part of the journey that is analysed today on the store's website disappears from view. Attribution models will have to adapt to a funnel that starts and ends in an assistant. Competition for visibility changes too: appearing among the options the assistant suggests counts for more than holding the top spot on a results page.

Our reading is cautious: a test with selected products in a single country is not yet a sales channel. But the fact that Google chose a partner the size of Flipkart suggests it is no longer validating the idea, but the operations.