“Chrome Cart” could soon let you shop and check out right from your browser’s new tab page

Google has recently been playing with your new tab page (NTP) and has been experimenting with things like a shopping module, recipe module, and more. Upon opening up a new tab in the browser, the idea is to present you with a box under your search bar and shortcuts that would pique your interest in Google Shopping items that you previously searched for and to remind you so that your chances of pulling the trigger on them and buying would increase.

A new set of flags and commits in Chrome point to something known as “Chrome Cart”. What exactly is Chrome Cart though? It looks as though it may be a full-fledged shopping cart experience baked right into your new tab page! My Pixelbook Go is running Chrome OS 89 in Canary at this time and upon enabling a few of these NTP Modules via chrome://flags – specifically ‘NTP Chrome Cart Module’, I was able to get the result you see below.

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One of the boxes says ‘Cart Bar’ while the other says ‘Cart Foo’ and each is accompanied by a picture. the Cart Bar features a Googley shopping cart icon while the Foo section has a few images of products. What is ‘Foo’ though, you may ask? Well, programmers generally use the word to denote a placeholder for a value that can change, depending on conditions or on information passed to the program. I don’t believe that what we’re seeing here is the final form that this module will take on. Instead, I think that this “Cart Bar” will consist of everything you’ve added to your cart and then of course a checkout button as well.

Whether or not you’ll be able to check out via the new tab page or if you’ll be redirected to Google Shopping remains to be seen, but I don’t think that it’s unreasonable to assume the former could be true given that Google owns Chrome and Chrome also houses your payment methods in Chrome Sync. Besides, giving a user one extra step to check out could increase cart abandonment rates.

Next, on the Chromium Repositories, we see two separate commits – one that allows you to dismiss the module entirely in case you’re not at all interested in utilizing it, and another that gives each item in your cart a three dots menu so that it can house options. Of course, it will likely allow you to manually remove each product from your cart among a few other things like maybe saving it to a wishlist in your Collections for later, so it’s clear that Google has enough interactivity planned for this module. This leads me to believe that at that point, why not let the user check out there as well, right? It’s speculative but reasonable, I think.

[ChromeCart] Enable dismissing the module

Chromium Repositories

[ChromeCart] Add a three-dot menu to single cart item This CL adds a three-dot menu to single cart item.

The menu button is shown when users hovering on the cart item, and the menu pops up when the button is clicked. Right now the menu is a empty menu with no action items.

Chromium Repositories

What do you think about an interactive new tab page? Are you likely to utilize it or will you be dismissing it entirely when and if it shows up? We’ll have to wait a while to see what Google does with Chrome Cart and if it even sees the light of day, but with such a universal name, do you think that they could possibly allow you to add products to your cart from across the web? Do you think that the Chrome Cart Bar would have a home near your extensions at the top of the browser? Let’s discuss!