Back in February, in a post about Google Payments (later named Checkout) and Unified/Universal Shopping Carts, I wrote:

I was hoping to hear a plan for rolling out the eBay express platform to SDC, allowing a user to add a sweater from Macy’s, hat from Nordstrom, and shoes from Zappos to a unified cart for checkout. I purposely give the example of the apparel category because I think the category begs for innovation on the shopping comparison engines, but unification obviously works for the electronics category - think digital camera and accessories, computers and accessories, ipods and accessories and many other areas (anywhere there is an upsell opportunity).

Turns out I was 8-9 months early with that post.

In a bold move, Shopping.com will begin testing a universal shopping cart feature over the next couple months. The service allows shoppers to add products from multiple merchants to a single Shopping.com cart and purchase those products through Shopping.com. The payment system will be powered by PayPal. Merchants participating in the test will be charged on a revenue share basis as opposed to the standard cost per click model. Shopping.com/PayPal will process the transaction and send the necessary information (name, shipping address, quantity ordered, etc.) to the merchant for order fulfillment. There are two ways merchants can receive this information: via FTP and via the Merchant Account Center . The merchant will then send Shopping.com a status update when the order is processed and Shopping.com will relay an order confirmation to the buyer. Buyers can find out about their order status from their Cart account on Shopping.com. The buyer will receive one order number even if he buys from multiple retailers.

The test isn’t live right now, so don’t go looking.

Positives from the merchant perspective…
-Shopping.com’s universal shopping cart should increase conversion rate (Rob and his team argued that people get confused when they leave SDC and land on a totally different site with a different theme and multi-step checkout process)
-Merchants only pay on a CPA basis thus removing all risk from the marketing channel (merchants should now feel comfortable listing entire product databases)

Negatives from the merchant perspective…
-Ceding customer ownership to Shopping.com (Shopping.com controls all communication with the customer…merchants can’t access a customer’s email address or phone number)
-Merchants lose ability to upsell/cross-sell other products during the buying/checkout process which lowers the average order size

As a merchant, ‘ceding customer ownership to Shopping.com’ is my biggest concern. It remains my biggest concern with Google Checkout. In-house email lists are more valuable than any other marketing channel and Shopping.com could completely take away the ability for a merchant to re-market. The concerns Safa Rashtchy uncovered in talking with merchants about Checkout are now valid for Shopping.com.

BUT this is just a test. It’s way too early to understand merchant (or consumer) adoption…can’t wait to talk to the participating merchants.