Ilya Grigorik

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Ilya Grigorik

Ilya Grigorik

@igrigorik

Distinguished Engineer, @Shopify. On a mission to make commerce better for everyone.

Portland, OR Katılım Kasım 2007
337 Takip Edilen70.5K Takipçiler
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Ilya Grigorik
Ilya Grigorik@igrigorik·
@tobi and I sat down to talk UCP and the art of protocol design. A couple of themes worth expanding on... The hard part of good protocol design isn't the spec. It's the deep understanding of the problem you're solving and the humility to approach it at the right level. Commerce is infinitely complex and always evolving; it's hubris to pretend anyone can 'spec commerce'. But wait — isn't UCP trying to do exactly that? No, UCP doesn't 'spec commerce'. It models the rules of the bazaar that make commerce possible. The job of UCP is to build the boring parts: the small core of common and composable primitives, and the discovery and negotiation mechanisms that everything else runs on. Done right, this lets commerce thrive in the open, with merchants, agents, and buyers deciding what is advertised, supported, and adopted, not by fiat from a protocol committee. This is UCP. 👇🏻🧵
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Ilya Grigorik
Ilya Grigorik@igrigorik·
Fun chat. I stand by my claim: Shopify's Global Catalog is *the* gold rush opportunity of 2026. It's open, it's free, and it's agent ready to power discovery-to-checkout. Docs @ shopify.dev/docs/agents/ca… Demos: x.com/vlaurenlee/sta… UCP deep-dive: x.com/igrigorik/stat…
Ecomm Cowboy@ecommcowboy

"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.

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Ilya Grigorik
Ilya Grigorik@igrigorik·
@Gravnetic A universal way to order dog food, from anywhere. Maybe I should have started with that... 😅
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Jake Hawkes
Jake Hawkes@Gravnetic·
@igrigorik I don’t want to say wtf, but that explanation was mid-tier dev…not golden retriever, ha ha!!!
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Ilya Grigorik
Ilya Grigorik@igrigorik·
@athahar Yep! This: #sponsored-products-with-catalog-api" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">shopify.com/ca/editions/sp…
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athahar
athahar@athahar·
@igrigorik Is there an opportunity to get affiliate income for those for refer the products from the global catalog. Like you said,it’s literally a goldmine, with amazing ideas - if there incentives for developers to earn, you volume can grow 10x
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Jason Braun 👾
Jason Braun 👾@jasonbraun·
@igrigorik Thanks for the UCP origin story talk - one of the best sessions at DotDev. I'd built frunkandtrunk.com on the Global Catalog a couple weeks before (an EV-accessory finder, all live lookups), so hearing the why behind the design was really helpful!
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Ilya Grigorik
Ilya Grigorik@igrigorik·
@jasonbraun Oh that's a nifty site! As a Tesla owner... I may have just spent solid 20m hunting & found a few nifty things — ty!
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Eligijus
Eligijus@elygiux·
@igrigorik Can we use the Catalog API for our app to show competing products and their data for our clients? Are there any TOS that I could read to understand what's doable and what's against TOS?
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Ilya Grigorik
Ilya Grigorik@igrigorik·
@hunkybill Of course, nobody expects it to terraform the internet overnight. For many devs that I've talked to, just wrapping their head around the fact that there is an open global product search as an API is a 🤯 moment, which then starts the gears churning.
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Dave Lazar
Dave Lazar@hunkybill·
@igrigorik Agreed. My point is, Shopify execs screaming that this is the best innovation since sliced bread, has not moved the needle as much as perhaps it could, but this merely my anecdotal observation. Perhaps IRL the cash registers are quietly cha-chinging. Stats will tell all soon!
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Ilya Grigorik
Ilya Grigorik@igrigorik·
@hunkybill Because "build it and they will come" is poor execution strategy. You also have to tell and sell the world on what you built, why it's awesome, and why they should pay attention *now* and ahead of million other things.
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Dave Lazar
Dave Lazar@hunkybill·
@igrigorik It probably is a good thing. But why the hard-sell. If it so good, and a gold rush exists, then naturally, the people that it serves, the merchants, will crow plenty about how good it is. So far, all I ever hear comes directly from Shopify HQ. No one else. Seems weird.
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Ilya Grigorik retweetledi
Mani Fazeli
Mani Fazeli@mcfazeli·
This one's going to be a banger‼️Tag teaming on UCP's origin story with the one and only @igrigorik... Can't wait to see you all at @Shopify DotDev next week.
Mani Fazeli tweet media
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Alex ElChehimi
Alex ElChehimi@alex_chehimi·
Another day, another demo with the Shopify Catalog API Search real vinyl in stock at real record shops, drop the needle on a 3D turntable to hear it (using Apple Music previews), then buy the pressing from one or multiple shops. Check it out: record.gallery
Harley Finkelstein@harleyf

Look at what people are already building on @Shopify Catalog API: → gamers.town → bricks.stormdevs.com → essembl.com None of them are stores. They're apps. A whole new kind of entrepreneur is showing up. Tell me what you're building!

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Ilya Grigorik
Ilya Grigorik@igrigorik·
@a_jfedor Grok does now! 😂 I confirm validity of that claim.
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Jeff Fedor
Jeff Fedor@a_jfedor·
@igrigorik I'm just happen it doesn't have details of me being frozen into my car
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Vanessa Lee
Vanessa Lee@vlaurenlee·
A bit hidden but in this edition: we had some fun playing with the Catalog API to show how creative the future of shopping apps can be. Now imagine these with Shop powered personalization and paid placement. Shows you what is possible with Catalog API now that it covers billions of products across millions of merchants.
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Keşfet

@undrvalue @Gravnetic @athahar @maringerov @tobi @dhh @jasonbraun @elygiux