Google Pay is testing a fashion and lifestyle discovery experience in India that turns the payments app into a shopping companion, complete with AI virtual try-on, visual search and personalised feeds. Announced in a Google blog post on Monday, the pilot adds a new “Discover” tab at the bottom of the app for a limited group of users, in what is the company’s most visible attempt yet to move Google Pay beyond transactions.
The Discover feed curates apparel and lifestyle products based on a user’s preferences and activity, drawing on Google’s Shopping Graph, which indexes more than 60 billion products, alongside YouTube videos, visual search and generative AI. The standout feature is virtual try-on: shoppers can select eligible garments and see how they look and drape on their own photo before deciding to buy, with daily outfit suggestions planned for a future update.
Visual search completes the toolkit. Users can snap or upload a photo of an outfit they like and find visually similar items online — a feature that has proved popular in Google’s main search and shopping experiences and now arrives inside the app where hundreds of millions of Indians already pay. Purchases themselves do not happen inside Google Pay: tapping a listing sends the shopper to the retailer’s website to complete the transaction.
Access to the pilot is deliberately narrow for now. Users need the latest version of Google Pay, a personal Google Account, and Web and App Activity and Search Personalisation switched on — and even then, the Discover tab may not appear, since the rollout is limited to a small test group. Google has not announced a date for wider availability, saying the pilot is aimed at gathering feedback.
The move reflects a broader shift in how big consumer apps compete. Payments apps in India already jostle to add services — from bill payments to investments — that keep users inside the app between transactions. Adding fashion discovery is a bolder step: it pits Google Pay against dedicated shopping apps and social commerce, betting that convenience and personalisation can win attention even without a checkout of its own.
There are questions to answer. Virtual try-on raises obvious privacy considerations around uploading personal photos, and Google says images used for try-on generation remain private — a claim users and regulators will test. The quality of recommendations, and whether the feed feels helpful rather than intrusive inside a payments app, will decide whether the pilot expands.
For now, the Discover tab is a small experiment in a very large app. But if it works, it points to a future in which the app Indians open to pay also becomes the app they open to decide what to wear.
