Shopify's tenth Edition, explained by its VP.
"Shopping is in our blood. It's the one thing that we care about the most, more than anyone else. And so if anyone's gonna do that work, why not us?"
Shopify VP of Product Vanessa Lee returns to break down the Fall '26 Edition, Shopify's tenth, which Shopify calls the Exponential Edition. The theme is network effects: features only Shopify can build because millions of merchants share one platform.
Vanessa covers Shopify Protect writing chargeback evidence with AI, Shop Promise opening to far more stores, and Shop MCP and shop.md, which turn any AI agent into a personal shopper. Then the surprise: Shopify's catalog is expanding to products that are not on Shopify. Plus a $50 bet on how fast shoppers adopt AI agents.
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What you'll learn:
Guest: Vanessa Lee, VP of Product, Shopify.
Shopify Fall '26 Edition: shopify.com/editions/fall2026
shop.md, turn any agent into a personal shopper: shop.md
shop.dev, Shop MCP for agentic commerce: shop.dev
Vanessa Lee on X: x.com/vlaurenlee
Vanessa Lee on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/vlaurenlee
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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.
Kurt • 00:00.000
This episode is brought to you in part by Swym. Here's the thing about wishlist apps. Most of them just sit there. A customer saves a product, and then nothing happens. Swym actually activates that data. When someone wishlists a product, you can trigger price drop or back-in-stock alerts and feed that intent directly into Klaviyo or your CRM. You're not guessing what people want because they've told you. Plus, customers can share wishlists for gifts and your team can view them to offer personalized service online or in-store. And unlike cart abandonment, wish list data is permission-based. These are people raising their hands saying, hey, I want this, just not right now. Swym's been around for over a decade. It powers 45,000 stores and installs in about five minutes. You could try it for free today at getswym.com slash Kurt. That's G-E-T-S-W-Y-M dot com slash Kurt.
Vanessa • 01:11.732
I love doing these with you, Kurt.
Kurt • 01:13.832
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. We have today Vanessa Lee, VP of Shopify. Oh my gosh. Who better to explain what's new at Shopify? Because it's fall and that means we've got fall edition is here, 2026 editions when Shopify tells us what they've been up to and what's coming down the pipe on features across the whole platform. Typically on the show, we do a lot of focus on online store, right? Just that's where I live is in the online store mostly, but there's all kinds of other channels in Shopify. And Vanessa, man, what's going on? There's always a theme to these Editions. What is what's the theme this time?
Vanessa • 01:51.110
We call it the Exponential Edition, a fun little play on like X exponential X for 10. But more so the important thing is that it kind of was the first edition where I wanted to showcase. the features that we build because of our scale. I mean, we talk about SaaS software and that definitely is where we started as a company, but it is so far from where we are today. Like we have been working with merchants and making sure that they show up best in all facets of their business and every merchant that joins Shopify, our goal is always that they are better off because of the millions of other merchants that are on Shopify. And so we
Kurt • 02:28.856
That
Vanessa • 02:29.256
always
Kurt • 02:29.306
network
Vanessa • 02:29.456
ask
Kurt • 02:29.556
effect
Vanessa • 02:29.656
ourselves, yes, network effect. And exponential was a bit of like the compounding. If you think about like things that are exponential, they're like compounding factors, right? So things that are compounding, meaning the more you have, the better it is. And so that's kind of where we came from was like, how do we package up and tell the story that to be honest has been happening for a while, but this one truly celebrates, oh, this is the. effect of the network of Shopify and the products that we can build uniquely because of all of the merchants that are on the platform. So.
Kurt • 03:03.252
Is it? Well, we got businesses of all size on Shopify. Does
Vanessa • 03:06.652
Yes.
Kurt • 03:07.002
it apply to everybody?
Vanessa • 03:08.802
Yeah, I want to say yes. So if you think about all of the network effects that have traditionally been on Shopify, things like shop pay, right? When we have network effects that involve buyers or even ones that involve kind of intelligence that we can have to help you optimize your back office, they do actually serve everyone. Now, there's some products that will kind of go into things like autopilot that will benefit, let's say, earlier merchants more because it's placing ads and helping them cross the chasm from like, you know, no sales or early sales to more sales. But I'd say in general, all of the network effects that we've been working on have kind of benefited everyone on the platform. And that's kind of our goal is like, you know, whether you're big or small, you get you get some sort of benefit from being on the platform and sharing in the. a collective group that is Shopify merchants.
Kurt • 03:57.380
I just love that over time that has been such a recurring theme. You know, 10 years ago, the first features like we started to see that early in Shopify with the ecosystem around Shopify that was like the size of it is really, you know, what was was helping push it forward in part. And then as features started to leverage those things, you know, network effects like, you know, Shopify helps everybody because if I bought on one store. or and i can now when i go into the other everything autofill
Vanessa • 04:24.172
accelerated
Kurt • 04:24.272
that's
Vanessa • 04:24.572
checkout
Kurt • 04:24.822
amazing accelerated checkout one of my favorite things any of those products those features that have those network effects always delight me um just a great use of of shopify the platform and what you've built here
Vanessa • 04:37.522
yeah it actually started like really early on like actually Toby had started working on our API the admin API like almost when we just started Shopify I think it was like very early very early like 2010 or something like last time i asked him and even if you think about developers like developers are a network effect as well right the more developers on shopify the better the product gets thanks to everyone's collective efforts building on the platform the more merchants come to shopify the more merchants there are the better it is for developers right so we also had that network effect going for us but we also had it with large channel partners early on so like we'd be able to go to full folks like Snap when Snap was like really starting to grow and even kind of just advocate for our merchants early on and you see us doing it again now with the advent of all of these agentic partners like we can sit at the table with some of the folks at the you know who are building agent consumer products and kind of talk about like well what would a really good shopping experience be and that gives us leverage that I think would be really hard for for any individual merchant to be able to have those types of relationships with partners but we can do it because we represent millions of merchants right and so that's also a bit it's not really a network effect in in the traditional sense but it is definitely leverage that you get because you have so many merchants on the platform that we try and make sure we harness and then actually use to benefit everyone
Kurt • 06:00.548
What I love about it, that approach, is when someone, when Shopify. You know, Shopify leadership notices a technology that's, you know, coming up. You could either choose to say, all right, how are we going to handle this? Keep an eye on it. Keep an eye on it. Ignore it. Let's see what it does. Or get in front of it and help define it. And that has happened a few times, but most recently is happening with Egentic and through universal commerce protocol.
Vanessa • 06:29.076
yeah i mean there's there's a lot like going even even back in the day i remember us being like we're the first ones on 3d models you know on shopify
Kurt • 06:35.726
Oh,
Vanessa • 06:36.026
you
Kurt • 06:36.176
yeah.
Vanessa • 06:36.276
could have a 3d model you can still to this day have a 3d model embedded inside of your pdp and the platform will support it we're also the you know very
Kurt • 06:44.876
I
Vanessa • 06:45.026
early
Kurt • 06:45.076
can just drag and drop it into product media, can't I?
Vanessa • 06:47.726
yep you can and and it actually runs through a pipeline to optimize we actually like do a pretty good job of 3d we maybe don't talk about it as much And admittedly, it's hard to kind of get a 3D model of all of your products. Sometimes that's not for everyone, but it's there, right? We support it. And you even see this recently with Snap, like all of that work kind of came to fruition when, you know, Evan kind of demoed our catalog API and was able to filter for products that had 3D models and all of those could integrate directly into specs, right? And you could get an AR VR representation of the product. and that was really cool so like all of these kind of build on each other but of course with AI I mean I mean everyone knows like AI is such a fundamental shift to software and how we interface with it that of course it would then have a really big impact on how we do our work, we try and build products for merchants, but then also trying to make sure that we understand where consumers will go with AI so that we can make sure our merchants are there as well. So like all AI has definitely, you know, put that in overdrive, even though we've kind of always done it.
Kurt • 07:51.668
yeah absolutely yeah i think i think ai putting everything into overdrive is relatively true it
Vanessa • 07:57.118
Yeah, that's the trend of 2026 for sure.
Kurt • 07:59.768
for sure and you know what i went from you know i have been using ai for years at this point but i was skeptical in or reserved in where i'm going to implement it in my work in personal stuff i'm like damn the torpedoes let's see what i could break in my house As of September, we have built a fully adjuncted pipeline for Shopify development. It works phenomenally well, in part because Shopify support for it is extremely good. Great documentation goes a long way when you're trying to explain it to a robot. It loves to read docs.
Vanessa • 08:32.884
It loves to read docs. And even then, I think we're constantly trying to make sure that we do a better and better job of it. Like we just released, you know, even for if you're starting a new store, I think for partners like you guys who are working with merchants, the admin API is pretty, pretty well documented. AI can actually use, you know, our AI toolkit pretty easily, which is good. We're looking like how do we even make this. that's even easier for people to get started with especially if they're building new stores so that's that's always something that's percolating in our minds it's one of those things that I think anyone who's working on Shopify's platform it's like we want to open up all avenues for you to build on Shopify right we want to open up the avenue of like okay I want to I don't want to use psychic for my workflow I want to use codecs great what how are we already have a connector in that okay well I'll know actually like like I want to build my own pipeline and I just I just need the APIs and I'll pick my own models and I'll build my own gateway or choose my own gateway go for it right so I think we're always trying to figure out and making sure that all all paths are open whether it's sidekick whether it's through sidekick and something we built or like through your own you know your own tokens that you've purchased from somewhere else
Kurt • 09:44.820
that's yeah i mean that's the best that like that accessibility that openness to hey you work the way you want we will support you that
Vanessa • 09:52.470
100%.
Kurt • 09:52.820
is quite impactful you know when you look at what people are able to do now but all right let's talk about editions always a ton of features announced you know stuff that like hey here's things we promised you we've delivered on here's stuff that's coming up your surprises Pick your favorite, Vanessa. Which is your favorite child, Vanessa?
Vanessa • 10:11.342
that's a really that's a hard one to pick a favorite um one that is kind of also back officey that doesn't get enough love is Shopify Protect
Kurt • 10:20.992
Oh, oh, Shopify Protect near and dear to me because a lot of like my store setup and our like retainers is people being like, hey, we have like help us. combat either credit card fraud or just the the credit card fraud testing bots aren't those fun right what do we do with this stuff
Vanessa • 10:41.556
Yeah, yeah, those are those are a never ending battle for sure. Shopify Protect actually already exists for all shop pay today, right? So if you're using Shopify, we already had Shopify Protect, but we decided to extend it, right? So now it's not just Shopify shop pay orders, it's actually all orders. And one of the things that's really great because we do see chargeback disputes being a huge hassle for merchants. So we decided, okay, what can we do to help make that better for people so they weren't just getting charge rack requests and having to write all of these essentially like provide dispute evidence over and over again. So now we automatically create dispute evidence and we actually made sure that we had AI train and understand all of the rules and kind of optimize the evidence. for each of the issuers and the card networks so it has a better chance of succeeding on behalf of the merchant than if they were to go in and do it themselves actually like the latest stat that we got was like 40 percent more product not received that that category of disputes are one if you use Shopify Protect right
Kurt • 11:56.446
It's in it. it is so hard to win a dispute as the merchant like it just feels stacked against you so like a tool like this to help me with it because it's also not fun to fill those packets out
Vanessa • 12:05.722
No.
Kurt • 12:05.872
um but
Vanessa • 12:06.972
You have better things to do.
Kurt • 12:08.272
yeah but like to yeah to be able to have something that handles that and do a better job for me oh man an ai that can replace a task that i hate and that cost me money potentially the best this is what i want ai to do for me
Vanessa • 12:21.396
Yeah. And so like that, that one is a really cool feature. It also kind of does it does two other things. So it makes sure that, you know, if we are looking at if you are if you are a larger merchant and you want to have a little bit more control over kind of Shopify Protect and which ones kind of get which orders are going to be automatically, you know, given a little bit more like 3DS or like a little bit more. or, you know, scrutiny, you can do that through a rule builder. So you can set some guardrails and say, if an order is over $1,000, maybe for me, that's really anomalous. I, and I'm seeing a lot of those orders come in fraudulently, I can then set up a rule and say like, hey, if it's $1,000 or more, I want to throw up a 3DS challenge, you know, so that you can do some of that stuff as well. So it's proactive, so you can kind of fight fraud even before it happens. to happen so I think Shopify protects kind of growing and then kind of utilizing our scales like a really nice feature for merchants and that's super practical yeah
Kurt • 13:19.756
Oh, that's really good. I got to play with Shopify Protect. Are these features available now?
Vanessa • 13:25.556
they are they are now if they're not available today to everyone they are definitely rolling out in the next couple weeks for Shopify Protect and the retail customer matching is already available
Kurt • 13:34.506
Okay, so for sure. you know anyone i know who i got a couple people i know who use retail and be like hey you got to try this uh take a look at this and
Vanessa • 13:41.626
And let us know how you feel. Yeah, let us know what it does for you.
Kurt • 13:45.748
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Vanessa • 14:46.036
yeah yeah yeah go give it a try i'll
Kurt • 14:48.136
All right, we'll play with that. That one sounds good.
Vanessa • 14:51.286
pick two more i'll pick two more before we go into like well we can also do a rapid fire because there's so many things um but the other one is promise so shot promise a name that a lot of people will recognize over the years if you've been following Shopify, right? But one of the things that we took a look at with ShopPromise is underlying both actually Protect and ShopPromise was this delivery model, like us being able to predict how when a package is going to reach a customer. We've been doing this for a while. We do this with the shop app. Inside the shop app, you'll be able to see like, hey. Hey, when is Shopify predicting this item to get there? And we have some data because we understand when items are getting fulfilled, because we have that information from the merchant's kind of activity on the store. So with Shopify Protect, now we're finally able to say, okay, well, it's not just a hard and fast rule of like five days, you know, delivery is a requirement, you know, 80% of the time across all verticals. That's not really possible. Like I'm not going to deliver. a ginormous you know table or a piece of furniture and the same way I'm going to deliver let's say a sweater right like delivery is moving physical goods turns out it's actually not super consider like depends on how big
Kurt • 16:04.026
Tell
Vanessa • 16:04.276
it is
Kurt • 16:04.476
me about it
Vanessa • 16:04.826
yeah yeah we live in the physical world of like hey delivery is has challenges and so we used the knowledge that we had in some of the and some of the models that we had to build a better prediction model and say okay we're going to increase eligible eligibility for Shop Promise by 11 times [Correction: 20x]. Right. And so we're going to increase the amount of people who can say, OK, well, I can now get a Shop Promise badge on my store and we're keeping the same guarantee for consumers. So this is essentially Shopify kind of underwriting you as a as a store for merchants, especially who are getting started, who are newer. Right. It's like, well, how do I make sure that, you know, how does Shopify kind of share some of its brand equity that is built through shop and shop pay? And with these merchants who are just getting started, especially ones that we have data on and know are really reliable, good quality merchants. And so Shop Promise was one of those things where, okay, if we know that you are actually fulfilling reliably, you are not fraudulent, you are a good merchant who's trying to grow, we have all of those signals to say, okay, we're going to underwrite you and say, we will put a Shop Promise badge on your site. And when consumers go there, they'll know that, okay, well. if they don't if I don't get this item by next Friday right I will be able to get five dollars of shop cash and so like that type of kind of sharing of our brand based on intelligence that we can gather that only really we can gather is also like a bit of a unique advantage that only we can do so that that's another feature that's exciting Probably the other one that I really like before we get into Agentic, which I feel like will be its own chapter,
Kurt • 17:43.340
Yeah
Vanessa • 17:43.490
is Shop. Like don't sleep on shop. So shop.com is has gotten a bit of a revamp. We kind of took over that domain. I want to say now maybe a month ago, maybe three, three to four weeks ago. And now it's going to see some rapid development. So first now we have a if you go visit shop.com, it'll be more personalized to you. The cards are already kind of reflective of what you see in the shop app and then you're also able to kind of manage your shop account through shop.com and then I can only promise that I think that that will continue to get better and better and better there's another piece that kind of is a super good utility if you create a cart as a consumer on shop.com that cart like let's say I create it created on shop.com I created the cart on like you know let's say aloe yoga I go to aloe yoga's doc like actual site it should follow me there right and vice versa so we want to make sure as much as possible across the merchant base you can keep track of all of your carts in one place if that can happen then you're going to have a better experience as a consumer remembering like oh yeah I didn't check out with that Right. And so that's one thing that shop.com, just like shop.app, the application will help you handle. And so that's a good exciting place. I think shop.com will be one that'll kind of rapidly get better and better over the next little while. And it's a nice destination for consumers to land on.
Kurt • 19:11.826
Yeah, shop channel is, I think, better than people realize. I mean, like the people lean into it and use it. It works well for the stores we see it in. but then like it just doesn't get the the excitement that one would hope it gets oftentimes i find with shopify features if they're too easy to use they don't people don't talk about them i
Vanessa • 19:33.432
Yeah.
Kurt • 19:33.782
suspect shop as a sales channel might be one of those things because it's like it's easy to set it and forget it
Vanessa • 19:40.244
Yeah, you know, what's funny is we made it even easier to set it and forget it this time because we did pull more of your details from your online store so that at least your shop.com profile as a merchant is more reflective of what your site looks and how it feels and the content on it. And so I think that ideally what we want is we actually want the first time you interact with or are aware of the shop.com site to be when you get. get start getting orders through it and you're just delighted you're like oh whoa I didn't realize that
Kurt • 20:10.040
Yeah,
Vanessa • 20:10.240
this sales
Kurt • 20:10.490
surprise
Vanessa • 20:10.640
channel
Kurt • 20:10.740
orders.
Vanessa • 20:10.890
was surprise
Kurt • 20:11.340
Yes.
Vanessa • 20:11.690
orders like oh that's great right so that's kind of our job to do is like kind of remove the friction make sure that merchants are getting really you know good order flow through shop.com and that they're seeing like really good customer LTV through it so that's that's been that's one that that is great shall we talk about agentic
Kurt • 20:29.790
Oh my gosh, hit me with it.
Vanessa • 20:32.212
Well, I want to start with you. I mean, you've been on this agentic journey with us for a while, Kurt. What do you see?
Kurt • 20:39.162
Okay. my feeling now is 100 the models are smart enough to do most of the work you
Vanessa • 20:45.854
Mm
Kurt • 20:45.954
know like
Vanessa • 20:46.104
-hmm.
Kurt • 20:46.154
from soul gpb soul opus 55 just phenomenally smart models if development got frozen here we would still be able to do incredible things with this for the next 10 years so i think if someone's like wow i used gpb two years ago and it was dumb all right this isn't the same ai anymore like that's i think thing one and once i once i was ready that like models are smart enough okay great then it became how do you connect everything together and that with shopify unbelievably easy right they just give us you know you illustrate it's like however you want to do it we will support you figure out how you want to do it and go And so then once connecting everything, man, I was able to go end to end and build a workflow that can do theme development, QA, solve problems, you know, support, support merchants, and we've got it in production with stores doing mid eight figures and it's quite incredible and this was in the last eight weeks yes
Vanessa • 22:03.334
Yeah, I think once you once you start to kind of see I mean, there was a bit of a mourning for sure.
Kurt • 22:09.584
oh yeah yes
Vanessa • 22:11.716
I mean, and that's natural, like as, as a, you know, as originally C++ developer, then JavaScript developer, for sure, like, you know, you, you mourn the amount of time and energy that you put in to feel like your code was really superior than others, and you ascribed your personal worth to your ability to solve, like bugs, to be able to create elegant code, like so much of our identity. we're tied to that. But I think we're at this point now where you can finally just appreciate the kind of the efficiency gains and what you can create through using AI. And I think for us, we've just seen that in spades. Like we have teams that just, you know, not only is it taking all of the tasks off a triage board for us and creating PRs for us, we also have it doing kind of self QA and creating issues for us. use for itself. Now, feature development is always still something that requires imagination and requires more human in the loop. So I wouldn't say all innovation is dead, very much far from that. But I still think like even in that like ideation period, we can all move a little bit faster because we can kind of see things immediately and then be able to say like, OK, that's not the right thing. Let's let's pivot. And so I think the speed of development will just increase and hopefully feel like a lot more human for us who, you know, have been in the software industry for a long time, have dealt with, you know, specs and then turning that into code or mocks and turning it into code. Like. like the the the distance to the rails now is very basically nothing right and so like you're able to iterate super fast and then there's also the agentic side of like how it's changing consumer behavior too like we're starting to see some really interesting applications when it comes to consumer products products like instinct muse i mean
Kurt • 24:03.164
instinct muse yeah i use muse i've seen is very popular i that one i i have not used yet uh grok bot was right before muse popular uh or at least i heard about it on x i guess that's i'm
Vanessa • 24:16.382
going You
Kurt • 24:16.532
to
Vanessa • 24:16.582
didn't
Kurt • 24:16.632
the source there
Vanessa • 24:17.082
try it yet? You weren't a grok bot user?
Kurt • 24:18.432
try and then the one that i got into because that was like while i was really deep in this doing this agentic workflow and i'm like no i want to use my ai workflows whatever
Vanessa • 24:27.082
Yeah, yeah, that's normal.
Kurt • 24:28.332
but then i you know then i got introduced to instinct and like and that was the one for me that that stuck as far as like personal you know consumer agent that's out there and i let in the last two months i let it make thousands of dollars in purchases all right it ordered some wrong parts for me that i returned but
Vanessa • 24:47.084
Oh no!
Kurt • 24:47.384
yeah i was like hey order brake pads for my tesla oh that was confusing for it but other than that it was fine
Vanessa • 24:55.780
OK, but I mean, yeah, instinct and music. I mean, there's been there's been a lot. There's like now these like two cohorts of types of agents, right, for consumers. There's like kind of like for builders, for people who want to like do productivity things,
Kurt • 25:08.630
Yep.
Vanessa • 25:08.730
in which case I still think Anthropic is doing a phenomenal job. Opening Eyes doing a phenomenal job. And then we do have the consumer, the new age consumer kind of. I want to say like truly personal agents, right? So like that have really great memory that have really deep integrations into like into your life, especially with Muse. It has, you know, all the data from from your previous, you know, anything you've given meta at this point. And so both are really exciting. And I think we're starting to see where. um kind of the last time we chatted kind of like the gold rush we talked about like the gold rush of of development i think we're going to start to see that soon like instinct i mean muse i mean a lot of us have been waiting for a long time for muse and meta did a phenomenal job with muse um but instant came kind of out of the blue it was a small team and they just kind of got going and you know they they're now providing some really good you know use cases and providing really elegant experience as well and I think that we're finally starting to see some folks go into the consumer space that are not just the really big frontier lab companies which is nice because now we can play a little bit now we can figure out like okay and one of the things that we did was we decided we actually had all these tools in the in the in the background we had we had catalog we've been We've been, you know, we've been loud about Catalog, we've been working on Catalog for a long time. We had been working on UCP and checkout and carts. We had even been working on shop pay and being able to, you know, I don't know if anyone followed our early forlays into open claw, but we actually shipped the ability for you to set a budget in shop pay that your agent could spend. So you could be like, I'm going to play with this thing. I'm going to give it a hundred bucks a month and see what it does. Right. Right. And so we kind of built those things and that infrastructure, but we never packaged it up super well. And so this time we decided, OK, well, let's create a new MCP server. We're going to call it the shop MCP. And in the shop MCP, we're going to have all these tools and we kind of smoothed over a lot of rough edges when it came to putting these tools together to create like one whole shopping journey start to end. We also created the shop pay essentially wallet where you could use shop pay to pay for anything. So if I integrate shop pay as an agent, now I can use it to pay for tickets to a show. I could basically use it just as a wallet, right? So that was also something that we enabled. So if you're building any agent now, you can come to shop MCP and then you could. You could build end to end like it gives you all the shop related tools and consumer facing tools that we have built over the while over the last two years and kind of puts it in your hands, everything from catalog all the way to like the post even post purchase and able to get your order data as a. as a consumer so we kind of put that together and then we said oh that's not enough let's put let's put something together that shows this off and that is where shop scale comes in or what we call shop.md Have
Kurt • 28:16.332
called
Vanessa • 28:16.432
you played the
Kurt • 28:16.732
.md
Vanessa • 28:16.782
Shotgun MD?
Kurt • 28:17.332
uh all right i heard about it i have not looked at it
Vanessa • 28:20.782
yet Okay.
Kurt • 28:21.032
and then further for .md markdown it's a text file also
Vanessa • 28:25.032
Yeah, it's also the Maldovian, you know, URL that they like.
Kurt • 28:30.282
true
Vanessa • 28:30.482
Yeah, so but yeah, it's like a skill file and it's a little bit of like a cheeky nod to, yeah, skill files in general, right? And skills just like becoming the predominant way that you can. you can teach your agents how to do things and so we created shop.md that took all of the all of the tools that are in shop.dev and kind of put it together in the way that we thought was optimal right this is the skill that you would basically be able to tell any agent and say like hey go and install the shopping skill at shop.md and then it actually has a little prompt if you visit shop.md to give to your agent and then from there you can also customize it because we said everyone is different in the way they like to shop shop you can go and build your own personalized shop skill you can say like i like to buy i don't know kurt you like to buy you have a tesla you like to buy tesla accessories what else do you like to buy what are some like weird buying habits
Kurt • 29:19.400
Oh man,
Vanessa • 29:19.900
of
Kurt • 29:20.250
I
Vanessa • 29:20.400
Kurt oh
Kurt • 29:20.900
collect vintage tech. Recently I bought camcorders and I have so many old
Vanessa • 29:26.650
my god I love it
Kurt • 29:27.400
Super Nintendos and stuff.
Vanessa • 29:28.550
oh I love that uh I mean it let me know if you see a Game Boy Color purple
Kurt • 29:33.600
Oh, I have some handhelds. I do not have a Game Boy Color yet.
Vanessa • 29:38.050
oh
Kurt • 29:38.100
Those are a good one.
Vanessa • 29:38.550
man if you find a Game Boy Color send it to me especially the purple translucent one but
Kurt • 29:44.888
That's a good one.
Vanessa • 29:45.638
yeah you can tell you can tell the shop to md you can set up your own shopping scale and say like i am a fanatic for uh vintage electronics uh i have some i always look for like i don't know i'm a big fan of nintendo products whatever you specify like write a sentence about like this vintage electronic shopping habit you have you can give that skill that personalized skill not to your agent and it'll be able to kind of change the way that you shop right so that was also like a fun thing that we did on top of all the infrastructure on shop.dev which is kind of what we're calling the the shop mcp and And it's just like a fun tool to kind of light up people's imagination on what you can do with some of these things and how much in control you really are as a consumer.
Kurt • 30:32.754
So if I go, all right, so like I just have to be someone who has a use an AI product like Clotter ChatGPT pick,
Vanessa • 30:38.954
Yep.
Kurt • 30:39.054
you
Vanessa • 30:39.304
Yep.
Kurt • 30:39.654
know, and then visit the website shop.md and
Vanessa • 30:42.304
Even if you use an open source like Harness, like Hermes or, you know, OpenClaw, you can use it there too.
Kurt • 30:50.372
And so if I just click copy prompt on this website, shop.mvd, I can give that to my agent of choice, my chatbot of choice and let it run with it. I misunderstood. I have not attempted this prompt yet. And like over the summer, I tried to do like a personal shopper skill with Claude. It was fine. It wasn't amazing, but it was fine. And I'm going to blow that up and try this instead today. This episode's brought to you by Promo Party. Full disclosure, that's my app. We made it. So here's a Black Friday tip. Skip the 20% off. I know you're thinking about just doing 20% off again. Offer a free gift instead. Free gift when customers spend about double whatever your average order value is. So we checked 300,000 holiday orders. One store ran spend 50, get a free gift, three years straight. Their usual order? About 50 bucks. Their gift orders? Around 100. Every year. Promo Party does exactly this. You set the threshold, pick the gift, and then it drops into the cart automatically. A progress bar shows every shopper how close they are so they keep adding to increase that cart size. Bigger orders without slashing prices or leaking discount codes. Search Promo Party in the Shopify App Store. Install it free. free and have your black friday gift running this week love talking i'm like even from before a chat i already have i'm up to like five things i'm going to research after this call yeah forget the interview this is very beneficial for me i'm having a good time
Vanessa • 32:21.562
Yeah. And I mean, the last one we'll kind of talk about is is the catalog expansion, which is something that is still very early. So when you go try that skill. The one thing that we wanted to do is like, okay, well, how do we make sure that it has the catalog that Kurt would want? How do we know how many vintage electronics that exist on Shopify? Now, we do have millions of stores on Shopify and we have billions of products in the catalog, but that isn't enough for every shopping habit in the world. And so we did also announce for the first time this edition that we are expanding the catalog to also include products that are not in Shopify, products that are off Shopify as well.
Kurt • 33:03.002
Oh, wow. How does that work?
Vanessa • 33:04.452
Yeah, so we, we. we managed to I mean the internet is open that's like a great thing about the internet and so it make sure in the surface is that it surfaces the products that are not on Shopify we have partners that help us do this and then we kind of clean and make sure the data is in the same format as kind of Shopify's taxonomy and Shopify's products we put it in the same ranking algorithm so when you're searching for let's say vintage Game Boy color in purple It can find products that are on Shopify and off and you receive it. all in one in one API so that's something that's really early now it's in beta and it there has a lot of there's a lot of things that we have to work on to make that really good but it was important to us to make sure that developers had one place to integrate I think that was like really difficult for developers when we talk to them they're like okay cool so like Shopify still has millions of product millions of merchants and billions of products but like what about x like this shop like this is a really big merchant that I care about or even a small merchant that's not on Shopify I want to be able to find their products as well And I was like, yeah, you're kind of we can't really help you there. We wanted to stretch to think about how do we help developers have one integration for shopping? Because to be honest, most people are building agents, they're building so many different use cases, they just don't have time to be like, okay, well, let me integrate 10, 20 different retailers. They just want one single place to turn on shopping. And so that was really important to us to kind of start to build the infrastructure for and start to kind of iterate and add more products.
Kurt • 34:42.210
That catalog expansion is probably the most surprising thing I've heard today. I
Vanessa • 34:46.510
Yeah.
Kurt • 34:46.860
truly didn't see it coming. And then as soon as I heard it, asked myself the question, why would you do this? And then I knew the answer was, well, because if you want people to implement this agent, you needed a much more compelling option. selling offer if you go hey this is universal right
Vanessa • 35:03.080
Oh,
Kurt • 35:03.330
like this
Vanessa • 35:03.630
yeah.
Kurt • 35:03.780
is everything now ai but like two shopify's standard oh okay i'm definitely gonna like this becomes a very attractive way to build a shopping agent whether that is for myself with just copying and pasting a prompt which i'm doing after we go off this call that's what i'm trying i'm going to try it uh and i have no doubt it'll work uh and then or like hey i want to build something more complex starting with this
Vanessa • 35:28.644
Yeah, I mean, it's still early days. So, I mean, don't expect that it's going to be perfect yet. But it was important that we start to let developers know that we are going to do this. Like that is the path we've chosen so far. And it is also one of those things that's like, wow, there's a lot of stuff that we do to clean the data that I think people don't. really appreciate to make sure that it's going to rank better and that it's optimized for search even the UPI clustering and doing this at the scale of the internet is not going to be easy but we're definitely one of those ones that like hey shopping is in our blood it's the one thing that we care about the most more than anyone else and so if anyone's going to do that work why not us
Kurt • 36:09.086
You know, when you told me that you had managed this with just the Shopify catalog itself. health i've thought that seems incredibly difficult you know to be able to search through that much and then have instant responses or essentially instant responses from it now
Vanessa • 36:23.096
Yeah,
Kurt • 36:23.446
that's
Vanessa • 36:23.496
180
Kurt • 36:23.696
yeah
Vanessa • 36:23.796
milliseconds is our SLO.
Kurt • 36:26.146
that's effectively instant um that's the blink of an eye and then you know to go beyond that and expand it even further all right clearly uh you've got you know the secret sauce on on quick search here it's impressive
Vanessa • 36:39.812
Yeah, I also think that like these agents are so incredible at knowing you. But one of the things that we really want to work with the whole industry on is figuring out how do we make sure that they do it fast, right? And browsers are so incredible. But if you've used some of these agents before, they had to trade off breadth. for speed it has the internet at its fingertips so it can definitely find that game boy color from some like reseller that's halfway around the world but it doesn't do it fast and
Kurt • 37:15.230
No.
Vanessa • 37:15.630
i think that's one of the things that if you're going to build something that's amazing for consumers i mean we've all played with agents we've all played i mean we just started before we started this chat we talked about opus and how incredible it is because it fits the right balance of like speed and and intelligence this um but speed is actually important it turns out especially for consumers like they don't want to wait around forever the amount of times that I have heard any of my friends around me who use any of these products and say like okay well I just asked it to buy something for me so I guess I will wait 15 minutes for it
Kurt • 37:45.378
Yeah,
Vanessa • 37:45.428
to do I'll check the
Kurt • 37:45.828
on thing it later.
Vanessa • 37:46.128
yeah I'll check on it later but like I guess I also could have bought this in like four taps because
Kurt • 37:51.528
Yes.
Vanessa • 37:51.728
you know we've spent almost close to two decades making sure it's quick and easy to do to do a checkout right and so you know it's been it's been a bit of a one of our you know gifts to the internet is to make sure that that understanding of consumer behavior and shopping shows up in these agentic channels like the importance of speed the importance of convenience especially for consumers even just like how satisfying it is for them to like click the order button and see the finalization screen themselves like I think that's overlooked often. This is actually really, really gratifying. Like agents can help you find something that you wouldn't have been able to find by yourself. But then when it comes to like finalizing the order, half the time you just want to, I just want to like. Can I just shop pay and finish this order? Right. It's just like so easy and I just want to see the thank you screen so I know it's on its way. It's like the proverbial like sliding the bag across the table if you are like buying something at a store. It's just you don't feel good unless you walk away with the bag, you know. And so we're trying to work with, you know, provide the infrastructure that gives agents all of these tools in the way that we know consumers want.
Kurt • 39:03.268
I, what do we think, what do we, do we have, all right, this is, I mean, this is guesses, what, in your crystal ball, what do we think adoption is like, what, I can't figure out what the timeline on consumer adoption might be, that's now the thing I'm stuck on.
Vanessa • 39:22.368
Hmm. for
Kurt • 39:23.524
and
Vanessa • 39:23.824
agents
Kurt • 39:23.974
you know no one yeah for like i if you're a knowledge worker in an office at this point like you're you're using ai it just it is the reality but for customers you know just average people normies to go out and use agents to make purchases it is easy it is accessible we are there but it only just happened so like I, my timeline, I'm like maybe two years, but you know, maybe it's really exciting in six months. I don't know.
Vanessa • 39:54.142
I mean, like, let's talk again next edition. I'll bet you 50 bucks. I think it's going to become way more commonplace if we can solve some of these problems, if we can make it fast. Right. If we can solve the checkout problem so that checkout is has that gratification moment. So you feel like you finalize the purchase and you feel you know exactly what you're getting, right? You get that satisfaction and the discovery doesn't take, you know, forever. I think we have a potential in the next six months to see a pretty radical shift in consumers. Consumers are already using, you know, sort of with ChatGPT and, you know, back like almost what. what two and a half three years ago what is time at this scale but
Kurt • 40:33.900
It's
Vanessa • 40:34.150
like I
Kurt • 40:34.400
yes,
Vanessa • 40:34.500
Kurt • 40:34.600
it's hard to remember two
Vanessa • 40:36.550
and a
Kurt • 40:36.800
or
Vanessa • 40:36.850
half three years
Kurt • 40:37.100
years
Vanessa • 40:37.350
ago
Kurt • 40:37.400
ago
Vanessa • 40:37.550
maybe three maybe just like getting to three right and I think that now we're at this place where people are very curious about using AI right and I think that that will that will only increase but the challenges that face us in the in the commerce space really are like can it find you and do the right products um and can it can you can it help you check out because i always say there's two modes of shopping there's always like there's window shopping and then there's kind of efficiency shopping like i know what i want i need the tesla brakes to your point was it brakes brake
Kurt • 41:12.674
It was brake
Vanessa • 41:13.274
pads
Kurt • 41:13.324
pads,
Vanessa • 41:13.524
brake
Kurt • 41:13.624
yeah.
Vanessa • 41:13.724
pads right i need this specific brake pad i know exactly what i want just help me find it help me find the best delivery time help me find the lowest cost help me find a reputable retailer and in which case you're like good i just i want you i want to get that done as fast as possible and then there's the window shopping side and last time we talked we kind of a ship talked a little bit about like some of the fun like consumer experiences that are not just chat based even though they're even if they're using AI a lot of them right like they're they're UI it's like oh I get to see like what are the coolest products that I'm able to to flip through that you know people that are like me have been buying right and and that's where you get the pleasure of shopping you truly like aren't trying to do anything efficient you're just trying to You know, discover new things and discover
Kurt • 41:59.864
discover that's the key
Vanessa • 42:00.714
new
Kurt • 42:00.864
word things. sometimes
Vanessa • 42:01.464
Yeah.
Kurt • 42:01.864
it's most of the time it's a job to be done i'm like i need a replacement part right something to that effect I have to fulfill something with a purchase, but when it's like, all right, I'm is this is this mystery item out there? I have no idea. Let's go browse. Yeah, that novelty, that discovery, that's fun.
Vanessa • 42:19.524
That's fun. That's fun because it hits something very deep and human in all of us, which is we like to be able to, you know. kind of be part of a tribe and and when you buy things that are you know in that category of window shopping most of the time if you kind of do some psychoanalysis it's like oh I'm trying to like find things that make me feel more like me that I'm like buying things that make me feel more like you know even the vintage electronics like um you know kind of you know not obsession I don't want to say obsession uh a what would you say a fanatic kurt you're a fanatic more
Kurt • 42:55.566
For sure, yeah. It's more than a hobby or interest. It's
Vanessa • 42:59.816
more than
Kurt • 43:00.216
both a
Vanessa • 43:00.416
a yeah it's like
Kurt • 43:01.566
collection.
Vanessa • 43:01.616
yeah okay a collector of vintage electronics that's also you saying like i belong to a specific tribe of people and i want i want to
Kurt • 43:09.600
sure.
Vanessa • 43:09.650
want to be able to find new ones because if i can acquire it the next time my buddy comes over who's also a fanatic i can be like yo check this thing out that i have and it's just like there's something human very deeply human there that it's not just an efficiency play and so like i I think the rails that we've built have tried to fulfill both, whether you're building a new consumer experience that scratches that itch of window shopping, whether you're building a consumer experience where it's more like an instinct or muse where you're like, I'm just looking for this thing, go buy it for me, find me the best price. right like we want it we want to support both so um so yeah i think that we'll see a hopefully an evolution in the next six months but i'll bet you 50 bucks we'll see more than we see today all
Kurt • 43:53.568
I will take that bet and I hope I lose.
Vanessa • 43:56.768
right and then i'll and then and then maybe using that 50 bucks if you can procure me a game boy color i would love that
Kurt • 44:05.418
I will set my agent to it promptly. I have no doubt I can find that now for sure. So where, where do we go from here?
Vanessa • 44:17.780
What I love about these editions is I know they're overwhelming, but they really just are fun celebrations for us internally at Shopify. We ship so many things and it's nice to have a moment to look at the totality of it and say like, well, that is a lot. Right. I know it's overwhelming for a lot of merchants and a lot of folks who like, wow, what do I pay attention to? But like any other edition, we want to hear from all of you all like. like what what's resonating what's cool what's like puzzling um and it's a nice moment for the whole community who's kind of been part of Shopify's story right and continues to be part of Shopify's story to kind of partake and be be part of that celebration so it's something that we love you know at Shopify we love kind of hearing from everyone we love the fanfare around edition um we love taking time away to take a couple of days and be with you all and hear the feedback and so like just know we're all ears during this time and hit us up
Kurt • 45:17.394
What, all right, if someone wants to go learn more about this edition, where are they going?
Vanessa • 45:22.164
Kurt, you're awesome. Thank you for doing this. Other than the edition itself, we're all going to be talking about all of our favorite features like we normally do. So, but I mean, the edition page is really the holy grail. So go check it out. Let us know what you think. Hit us up on X. We'll also be sharing kind of like threads that are our favorite products. And then we'll see you guys. We'll see you guys there on X.
Kurt • 45:44.264
Vanessa Lee, Shopify. Thank you so much.
Vanessa • 45:46.714
Thank you so much, Kurt.