"This is the biggest @ShopifyDevs opportunity right now." @igrigorik, Distinguished Engineer at Shopify, shared more about the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and what's coming next during DotDev. The major moments: - UCP is a free, public, global catalogue API. Only Google, Amazon, and a few others have solved discovery at internet scale, and almost none expose it publicly. Shopify spent $100M+ over two years and made it free. "This is a picks-and-shovels moment. There's gold in that mountain." - Built with Google, launched in January. Decades of Shopify scale compressed, plus partners like Target. By April, Meta, Salesforce, Amazon, and Stripe had joined. - How UCP works. A merchant declares what it supports like cards, checkout, subscriptions, split payments, gift cards. A client or agent says "I don't speak gift cards yet, but I understand subscriptions." They negotiate the overlap and transact. - Completely open participation. A merchant can invent "fancy subscriptions" tomorrow, and any agent that speaks it can transact. It turns commerce into a market negotiation. - Modelling all of commerce is absurdly hard. It's the world's longest-running trade and always evolving, so you can't write a static spec. UCP is built around capability negotiation instead. UCP aggregates across all merchants and normalizes the permutations (one seller's size 10 is another's 9.5; blue is someone's turquoise) into coherent availability, prices, and latency. Thanks for coming on the show Ilya! We'd love to have you back. Ecomm Cowboy is live every M-F at 12P CT.