Shopify announced that the Universal Commerce Protocol with Shopify Catalog is now open to every developer, allowing any mobile app, content platform, or AI agent to access its catalog of millions of merchants and billions of products through a single protocol.
Shopify first introduced the Universal Commerce Protocol back in January, releasing documentation alongside its Agentic plan, which lets merchants on any platform plug into Shopify's agentic commerce connections. At the time, though, the protocol was a controlled rollout limited to major partners like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, with everyone else on a waitlist. Now it's open to all developers, and the SDKs and APIs have been publicly released.
Shopify President Harley Finkelstein wrote:
“One protocol. Millions of merchants. Billions of products. That means a solo developer has the same commerce layer as the largest tech companies on the planet. And every new experience a developer builds? That's a win for merchants too. More places for people to discover and buy their products. Nothing to set up. If they're on Shopify, they’re already in.”
For years, there were rumors that Shopify would build its own marketplace to compete against Amazon, and Shop App was predicted to be its starting point. But that didn't happen. Shopify never built a marketplace. It's instead turning the entire Internet into its marketplace.
The combination of Universal Commerce Protocol with Shopify Catalog empowers any developer to build the next great product discovery portal, while enabling merchants to be a part of it. I'm genuinely excited about this. What are you going to build?
