w/ Vanessa Lee, VP Product @ Shopify
VP of Product Vanessa Lee joins Kurt to break down the 2026 "Everywhere" edition and the years of quiet groundwork behind it: taxonomy, attributes, clustering, and a universal product identifier that now power a search catalog of billions of products. The payoff for merchants is strange and good. You're already enrolled in agentic commerce by default. One real store is doing $60K a month through it.
Inside this episode: why the catalog plus UCP makes every Shopify store callable by any AI app, how to use Agentic Storefronts to see exactly where you rank and what data to fix, and why Vanessa says not to sleep on Shopify retail in 2026.
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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 Elster • 00:00.001
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 wish lists a product, you could 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 wish lists for gifts and your team can view them to offer personalized service online or in store. And unlike card abandonment, wishlist 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 can try it for free today at getswim. com slash Kurt. That's G-E-T-S-W-Y-M. com slash Kurt. Shopify Editions, 2026 Spring Editions. That's where they drop all the new features, usually a lot of features, like a hundred features. So many that I often have time I have trouble keeping up with the level of of of software roadmap, the level of releases that Shopify does. So we need an expert, probably no one more expert at this than Vanessa Lee from Shopify, BP of Product, who's going to talk us through it. Vanessa, thank you so much for joining me.
Vanessa Lee • 01:40.939
Thank you for having me, Kurt. It's been a while since we've seen each other. I'm glad that we finally got to do this. We were saying that we haven't done it before.
Kurt Elster • 01:48.299
No, my yeah, no, the first time on this podcast. My absolute, of course, you know, pleasure to have anyone from Shopify because And I live, eat, sleep, Shopify. I spent 40 hours a week in that Shopify admin. So very excited to hear what's new. And then more importantly, kind of the, you know, why it matters. If I'm a merchant, where do I start? That's always my trouble. was like, man, there's so much here. Like, give me that next step. And so I think you're the you're the right person to help us with that. And I'm excited to reveal this is a series. In the coming weeks, we are going to hear from other product leaders at Shopify. We're going to go deeper on some of these talk on some of these topics that Vanessa introduces us to. So, okay, Vanessa, uh I've seen enough of these Shopify editions to know there's always a theme. What is this year's theme? Or this season's theme?
Vanessa Lee • 02:35.120
The season's theme is the everywhere. There's one theme that we've been talking about internally in terms of like RD and product investment for a long time, where we want to make sure that your you show up everywhere as a merchant. Right. And it's a reminder that although it is not new to Shopify, we have done this back in the day when even we did channels. Remember, we did like You know, we did channels back in 2015, 2016, like a long time ago. We helped you show up on Amazon, in Google, in Meta, recently TikTok, right? And so like we have always tried. to help merchants show up everywhere that their customers are. It is the lifeblood of helping people build businesses. And so this edition, we know that the next wave of channels people are anxious about is AI, AI-powered channels, right? Agentic commerce. And so we decided, okay, well, let's just let's make it all about that, because it has been the theme. Like how do we make sure that you show up everywhere that your customers are are shopping And so that was really the theme. It was a very simple, very literal. It's just like you show up everywhere that your customers are.
Kurt Elster • 03:39.260
My pushback, my gentle pushback on everywhere is is it how is this different from omni channel? Like six, seven years ago we would have been, you know, we would Omni Channel. Oh, absolutely. But you alluded to with like sales channels. Um so I agree with you. Like hey that's where we're at this is everywhere. It's you know this this full surface for merchants. But that like everywhere is a theme. How are we building on Omnichannel?
Vanessa Lee • 04:00.520
It you're right. As a community of people who have helped build brands. who have been building things to power brands. This is not unique. Like even Omnichannel is that like point of sale, having this like consistent view of a customer between uh, you know, in-person sales and then online sales, understanding, you know, their, you know, their shopping patterns between both. This is all about being everywhere and then having like the the right data to make sure you're showing up in the right way But I I don't think it's different. It's why it's why it's kind of a reminder. It's it's not in fact a new thing. I do think that we go through this nick new season and we're like, oh, there's a new set of channels. I'll pull on the part that I am excited about because we might as well jump right into it. Where I I do think that there is a fundamental shift with AI that is different than just the agentic commerce lens. Okay. Tell me that. And it's a bet. Yeah, so it's a bet. Maybe in a in a year from now, Kurt, we'll sit down and like, you know, let's make a bet on this. Like, let's put 50 bucks on the line. Um, I do think that as code is becoming democratized. that there is a new set of influencers that have yet to really be recognized as influencers. Which are people who are building bespoke software, right, for their niche community. I do think like as you know, as code is now as easy to generate as a word, um, that you're able to And give tools to people to create these like applets. I almost want to say applets, websites, that speak to their own niche audience. um really well. And that is a much harder problem than we've ever faced on how do we make sure that merchants are there as well. Right? For sure we're working with you know, really large partners, Google, OpenAI. We're working with uh Meta, Microsoft. These are the folks that we've been talking to for the last, I want to say 18 months at this point. And we are still very focused on that.
Kurt Elster • 06:02.800
You're alluding to uh UCP, Universal Commerce Program.
Vanessa Lee • 06:05.840
Uh UCP, exactly. So like we have been working on UCP, but even before UCP we were working on catalog with With OpenAI and building the muscle internally to be able to be the distributing infrastructure of products, right? But like looking at what we've built from working with these partners It was also really clear that these same Rails, the same search catalog API, the same UCP protocol, is also the same thing that could power the next wave. of applications that were that's generated by folks who are not as large as these partners. There actually isn't a shopping API out there at this moment. Like there's not one, there's not an API you can hit as a developer and be like, okay, I want to search for red shoes and I want to create an app that uh is like celebrates red and everything's red uh and maybe it's Chinese New Year, I don't know. And then like you're like, oh I wanna where can I get a shopping API? that gives me all red products and I can embed it deeply within my, you know, I'm just pulling some Chinese New Year, you know, app or website. You can't. Right? You can't. You have to build your own scraper. You have to figure out what that looks like. And the fact that we already had this this API and this infrastructure, we always wanted to enable all developers. to be able to use it. And so this is like the fun thing about everywhere as well. It's not just about being everywhere in those omnichannel places that we we know the large channels, um, but also how do we be everywhere in this next wave? of commerce that hasn't even been created yet because code is starting to become democratized. And so that's like it's like both ends of the spectrum. Really large and upcoming exciting channels, as well as uh kind of exposing the the infrastructure we've built in the catalog API and UCP and making it available for everyone else that haven't even really started building yet.
Kurt Elster • 07:56.020
This starts with catalog meta fields with category meta fields. How long when was that that I first started seeing these first first I get category and then category starts expanding where I pick a category And it even suggests it to me. And the categories start expand like the total list starts expanding. And then, you know, if I pick one it knows, like bag. People sell a lot of bags online. And it's like, all right, you know, gender, age, like it's color. It starts adding these other meta fields. All of that was scaffolding data input for this larger initiative, wasn't it?
Vanessa Lee • 08:28.280
Uh plainly, I'm pretty sure this was 2024 early.
Kurt Elster • 08:34.940
Okay.
Vanessa Lee • 08:35.580
But it was either 2023 or 2024. And you're right. Like we we built that and it would we I remember because I worked with with the team on this one very closely. But you're absolutely right. Tet starting to taxonomize products in a uniform way with a global taxonomy was the start of us taking all of the desperate products across all the shops because we absolutely had no idea what anything was So we had no ability to help anyone uh, you know, understand how their products could be structured. Uh we just like, you know, you you do you, like make your products how you want to make your products. You have You have attributes that are in the HTML in your product description. We didn't know that the color of the bag was auburn brown. I don't actually know That's a color. But um, you know, we didn't know that because we didn't we so that limited our ability in the future to be ever able to create a catalog like this because If we can't know that this is Auburn Brown that actually matches most closely to the standard brown taxonomy color, then we could never create a catalog where if you're able to say, hey, I give me all of the brown things. Right? I want to find brown bags. Well, we don't know that this is a brown bag because we didn't we didn't categorize we didn't taxonomy.
Kurt Elster • 09:46.980
Define it in a way that a machine can read it
Vanessa Lee • 09:50.160
Exactly.
Kurt Elster • 09:50.880
We did everything to optimize except tell Shopify, right? Like it all lived in the product catalog. And it's like, all right, well now we have it in structured data and I have it in like meta random meta fields I defined over here. And then slowly over time it got standardized. Once you had all that data standardized, now you can leverage it. Now you can do more interesting things with it. What are we doing with this this catalog data, Vanessa?
Vanessa Lee • 10:13.100
Yeah, so we I mean it's been now a couple years. We started investing in search infrastructure almost 18 months ago, I would say, truly. Um maybe a little bit more at this point And the team did a phenomenal job kind of building up this, not just uh understanding the data, which is the first step, but then also what is our ranker look like? How do we actually search, uh build a really opinionated commerce search that does a good job, right? And so We've been building kind of the search infrastructure and and rancor alongside just like cleaning up the data. So we did the taxonomy and the attributes, which was step one. Second step was clustering. So I remember like literally, I think we shipped Um pretty in the spring perhaps the the taxonomy feature that you're talking about, right, in the admin, where you you put in some data and we will help you taxonomyze, like this is a bag, these are the attributes of bags. And then I think that fall we started working on clustering. Right? So if you look at the spectrum of Shopify, we're we're large enough now. I remember when we were only 200,000. Now we're millions. Um of of of uh brands and there is actually a lot of the similar product being sold across shops, right? And the problem that that poses for search And you'll see this across, you know, major search um engines today, is if you have 10, let's say Viore is a great one because they ha they're so popular and they have so many resources.
Kurt Elster • 11:38.580
I'm wearing Viore socks right now.
Vanessa Lee • 11:40.000
Uh Viore socks. Okay, that's nice. I haven't bought their socks. I only have all their sweatpants. So like let's say like a really popular jogger, like their jogger. Uh I think it's Dream Knit jogger. Right. So uh their jogger is sold, let's say Breton hypothetically, with about 50 retailers on Shopify, right? They have a they have a wide retailer network. Um and a lot of them are on Shopify actually. If you search for Viore joggers, right? Something a little bit specific, but pretty vague, Viore and everyone else on the on the merchant side, even the customer, would want to see a variety of Viore joggers. Right. I want to see like all the options for joggers, because they actually have quite a few, not 10 of the same jogger just taking up the top 10 spots of the search results. And so in order to account for that, we have to start clustering. So that first result is maybe the dream knit jogger that I talked about, right The first one will have that, but when you click into it, it's it lists all of the what we call variants or offers from, let's say, Viore themselves. That's ranked first. And then there's a retailer that's close to me in Toronto. Uh that's right rank second, has all the prices. You're able to see like, okay, well these are all the uh basically the buying options for that jogger for that skew. Right. And so that is actually a very difficult, difficult, complex problem. And so we we enabled something in the catalog. You'll see it, and we released it last year called the Universal Product Identifier UPI. And so that means that that jogger, we had to build all of these systems to denote this is an individual SKU and all of these other 10 uh product listings on Shopify are actually part of that same SKU and we're going to cluster them together. And that's actually pretty difficult thing. So we did that.
Kurt Elster • 13:22.740
How do you know?
Vanessa Lee • 13:23.940
Oh, it's not a it's it's uh it's a le it's a an a very difficult ML problem, right? Um luckily we have a a great team who has kind of done this before. And so we build a ton of ML systems
Kurt Elster • 13:38.300
Uh, Melby machine learning.
Vanessa Lee • 13:39.980
Yeah, machine learning alongside with some LLMs, but it's it's really just a machine learning um model that's able to classify and and say, okay, this is a class. Right. And so it's not to go into it, but it takes a lot of energy to build that. And so once we had UPI and we said, okay, we're reliably detecting uh that these are the same product. You know, don't even get into the complexity of variants and swatches because you also want to be able to within that PDP say, all right, well that dream jogger, that jogger comes in red and blue and you know uh black and gray because sometimes people do that in many product listings, right? Separate product listings. So this has been a absolute, you know difficult problem that we spent a lot of energy on. And now we're at this place where all of those pieces, the taxonomy, the clustering and the UPI, and the ranking system, is now at a place where it's a very, very compelling search API. I'd say this season is like the first time that we're saying like, oh Every version of the catalog that you saw up until this point was us working on getting to this point. And we'll it will continue to evolve and get better and better. But it now powers shop. It now powers a lot of our partner conversations as well where we can. And now we're making it available to everyone. So like that's the thing that I love about this edition is now like, hey, you can go reach for the catalog. Go into the Dev Dash, play with it, build some cool shit. I think you'd be amazed at like the type of creativity that comes out.
Kurt Elster • 15:09.339
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Vanessa Lee • 16:23.759
I definitely think that this will part uh this will power a lot of really, you know, large partnerships. That's our goal, is to evolve the catalog and continue to make it better and better to power um, you know, our our big partner conversations. But I actually this editions, I actually asked the editions team because they are wildly creative to go and create a bunch of shopping experiences. Because I'm like, guys, it's not just conversation. AI makes it possible for us to do some really, really cool stuff, right? And so I hope you'll pop off into it because it's just incredible to watch. But part of this edition, you'll go and find um, I think it's like five applications. that the team has honed in. And a lot of the designers created these from scratch because they had enough, you know, tokens to be able to generate the the code that backs it. but they just used the catalog. And then they they were able to create things like I think the first one I saw that blew my mind was it's a z it's a I don't I'm not super into horoscopes. It's like a horoscope app. I guess it's like there's a horoscope popular app. So they like thought of something similar to that. And these are all just, you know, you know, example repositories that we created. And then it's so it tells you your horoscope. And then within each it says, okay, here's some products that you can buy that will help you with, I don't know, whatever plagues you. in this horoscope day that like whatever prediction it was, right? And it was like so seamless. It was like burn uh I guess it's burn some uh burn some incense to like help you through this day, right? That's difficult. Um, you know, wear something sparkly. It was just like so creative and fun. Another one was like you could upload uh a video of hey I really wanted to shop this like um this like scene And then it'll just pop off in the funnest way. Like it will just like kind of explosion, create all of these different, um, all of these different like shopping options that are you found in the photo, which was really cool. I like just you have to check it out, but it's just like these are the type of niche creative experiences that are still backed by AI Because they have like they use image recognition or they, you know, they have a lot of re like they have a lot of AI APIs that they've used to create it, but it's not the standard just like, okay, I have a conversation and I found a thing, right? That that definitely will be popular, but I wanted to force us to break out of like just that that mode modality as like a a way to build shopping applications.
Kurt Elster • 18:46.519
You know, I I played with the an early version of UCP when it was less powerful and it I was impressed I only gave it really esoteric items to find. And the breadth of Shopify merchants is so wide. It Everything I gave it, it found someone that was selling it. I couldn't believe it. Like I dish I started with just Hot Wheels I knew were out of production Just returned it. Like, okay, that's a deed. And it did like, and there were no false positives. That I also found very impressive. Because when you think of like, you know, the size of a catalog. Just trying to sort through something like that. Extremely difficult. This was able to do it. Um and do it remarkably well with stuff that was like odd, you know. I was like Hot Wheels Cyberpunk. It's like, well, there's three people that sell that. And it didn't have anything wrong about it. I was impressed. So I see the, you know, the potential of where this is going, but it's an algorithm. You know, there's billions of products, but in a quarry it can only return, I believe it when I played with it it was ten, I think it's thirty now. Like in one request.
Vanessa Lee • 19:53.740
Yeah, and in a request you can now paginate through it. So like we we are we are encouraging like maybe you want to build a really uh large uh you know collection page, you know, search results page. You you can do that if you want now. And we also we also partnered it with a couple other companion APIs, I want to call them. Like We did lookup endpoints so that you can then go and say, like, okay, well, out of all of these queries that I'm getting, I want to get the latest exact like all the options, all the variants, all of the prices, all the, you know, the um the details of it uh up to this minute so you can populate a PDP. Like I do think that when you tried it early, the nice thing is, and you it's funny because you you found it even back then, now it's billions of products. Like that's wild. So now the catalog contains billions of products. And I think it's just, it's something that you're going to continue to see time and time again. But we also partnered it with two big features, right? So we're announcing paid placement. on catalog. So if you are building using the catalog, you can earn a bounty if you turn on a flag, right? It's something that I think uh will enable developers to keep their apps alive. You know, it's not hosting is still not free in this day and age. And then we're also adding uh personalization. Like great search is personaliz Like we all know that now for a long time, having watched Google and watched other major search engines, personalization is like the key to making uh making something you know resonate with whoever you're trying to build for. And so we've partnered uh shop login as well as the catalog. So you can pass in a identifier if someone's logged in. we will privacy preserving look up everything that they we know about that individual, that buyer, and we will re rank according to what we know about what Vanessa likes. Vanessa likes these particular brands. When she runs she wears on uh you know sneakers. And then also she's a size, you know, seven shoe or whatever. And then it will actually re-rank uh intelligently based on that. And so those are two that we announced. uh features that like, oh, it's something that is very imminent uh and we want to make sure people can follow along on the catalog journey that I'm super pumped about. Those ones are really cool.
Kurt Elster • 22:08.900
This is the power of of Shop. This is the power of Shopify as a platform, the network effects of like all these products and features. being interconnected and now being able to talk to each other, being able to leverage each other's data in unique and advantageous ways for everybody. So now it's like, okay, we could get the entire catalog Served through an API, essentially billions of products served up through that. All right, you've built a search engine for shopping on the internet. I accept this. This first one to really to do this. Uh then we have It personalization, but it's all based on the convenience of shop. You know, I would log into a store and you pay with shop because it was so easy. I hear all the time people, oh, like, oh, I hate when I go on a store and discover it's not Shopify. Cause it's hard, right? I want the convenience. But it ha and then it has my order, it has everything. And so now we could apply that to this algorithm and intelligently without either side having to really do much of anything to figure out that personalization. Shopify does it for us.
Vanessa Lee • 23:11.020
Yeah.
Kurt Elster • 23:11.740
That's cool.
Vanessa Lee • 23:12.380
Yeah. Isn't it cool? It's it's the thing that gives me so much joy, like watching these things these things come together. Because absolutely it's like serendipitously fit so well together. And that just is so satisfying to see like, okay, well, of course, of course we would leverage everything that we have understood about customers. And then it prov it provides so much benefit for both the consumer. Of course I want everything personalized to me as I'm going around the internet. That's actually what I want. And then on to uh on the other side, developers would have an incredibly difficult time. building that into their own whatever application they're trying to do. Right. So yeah, you it's just an impossible, an impossible, you know, network effect that you could never get access to, would never be able to help you with conversion Um and you would never be able to earn money if if you if it wasn't converting really well. And so this is just like like positive on positive on positive, which is just the the funnest feature to work on.
Kurt Elster • 24:06.720
The other um okay if I'm a developer now you know my head is spinning with possibilities of integrating this The catalog API because I want the search, I want the personalization, shop sign in. Like there's just a lot I get out of integrating with this. And it's just not that hard to do anymore. cost of software development just keeps going down. And so I've got, you know, if I could point my my AI agent of choice at the documentation for this, they could probably build it. And of course Chopai's got, you know, an MCP and um you know Well, I use the the AI toolkit, it's just phenomenal. Yeah. To get going here. If I'm the merchant, how do I optimize for this? I mean, essentially you've said to be, hey, there's an algorithm with future limitless possibility How do I optimize for it? What do I do in my catalog?
Vanessa Lee • 24:58.000
That is such a uh yeah, that's I mean the perfect segue. We did not plan this, I promise. Um, but it's the perfect segue into Agentic Storefront. So we released Agentic Storefront last year, right? And it was like the very early. I I I'll just say that it was a very early time, but we wanted to make sure people knew that this was uh going to be something that's automatically in their admin that they would be able to control. Like how do I show up in the catalog? What what does my app uh what does my what do I my products look like? How do I rank? How do I improve? Like we already got those questions very early on from merchants, even at the early days of when ChatGPT was coming out and starting to make waves. um with their commerce. And so this edition, we we're going to continue building on this, but with this edition, we we uh kind of we actually launched it a while ago, but we're kind of refeaturing it. Where you can now go into your admin, go into agentics storefront, and you can see how your products are doing in the catalog How am I ranking? Which terms am I showing up for? Which terms am I not showing up for that I should? And then what product information do I need to fill out to give Shopify and the catalog a better sense of what this product does? Right. And like what, you know, if you're missing a product description, you're not going to rank as well. Right. And I think that's what people want to understand is like, well, what's your it's like just like SEO in the back uh uh back in the day it's like what is your what are you looking for so I can be honest about what my product does is like okay if you put that this is an Auburn brown bag in the description Like we could like we would also like for you to you know confirm that in the attributes section of your products that it it maps to the standard brown color, right? Or tell us a better, maybe it doesn't. Maybe it is it's actually like taupe. We don't know. Like Tell us more information about it. So you can actually do a bit of a health check on how you're ranking in the catalog inside of Agentic Storefronts And then also you can keep tabs of any refer traffic, what GMV is coming from, these partners, like all of it is within one spot. And then you can also control, you know, which channels am I enabling for embedded checkout if that's available. So let's say a partner has an embedded native checkout. Um, meaning their pixels are kind of helping with the finalization, even though it's running through your checkout engine. But I don't want that, right? If you don't want that because for whatever reason, because I really want to keep my checkout UI the same and and I've built it, you can then specify and control that there, right? So I think there's everything from we've tried to create like a one stop shop. inside of Shopify that has everything from how well am I ranking to what is the checkout experience look like on these channels and how do I control it so that people didn't have to think about it. And this is something that we're going to continue to invest in in the rest of the year. year.
Kurt Elster • 27:45.620
And this is the the agentic sales channel in Shopify.
Vanessa Lee • 27:48.420
Agentic storefront, yeah, exactly.
Kurt Elster • 27:50.340
Agentic storefront. Yeah. So I go, I find that sales channel. in my Shopify admin and then once I'm in there I can get all the info I need. It's got my config in here. I'm looking at it for a real store. Uh it generates it I'm thinking of this as this is an investment in a potential future that is developing so quickly, we're really not quite sure what it'll look like in 18 months. Having said that, this store has already generated $60,000 in the last 30 days, and it's been steadily generating increasing revenue. through agentix sal storefronts for geez, about a year now, since last November is when we started to see it. And there's this isn't the only one. You know, there's there are more. So it It's happening. You know, it is it is worth the effort to see, you know, where this goes. And the best part is, in my experience, it just is not if you're co confident in how this works then it just is not a ton of effort to optimize for it and implement it. So I can look at it.
Vanessa Lee • 28:55.000
You're automatically, you're automatically in those channels. Like you didn't have to do anything. Like you just you're on Shopify. You are on the latest version of UCP. You have your own well-known, right? You have your own continue cartier. All the APIs are already available. You're UCP enabled by default because we are, you know, um you know, with Google and a couple other partners, we are the help the co-authoring UCP as a protocol. And then we've built the catalog, right? And so you get both of those things and you don't need to even think about it. But yeah, it's it's early and growing. I will say that. I will say like a lot of folks have been very skeptical about the growth of you know AI-powered commerce. And I think this is like, I've said this kind of before, but I think this is also where we make the bed. It's like, what are the tools that we're providing to make uh partners and developers successful in building new types of shopping experiences Right. I don't I don't think we have to be afraid of it. I think that it's just uh we can make a more creative and natural UI for consumers to shop from as long as we are honest about what what we have to do to get there. Right. So like the other part is a lot of folks are saying, I have this huge infrastructure built up. for sessions and visits and UTM parameters and some like all of that is gonna break because I won't see the top of funnel anymore. Like that stuff is gonna go happen inside of an application. uh out of the website and how do I know what's what's going on, what conversations are happening about my um my you know product, uh how am I showing up? I know that there's a lot of anxiety around that. That's totally fair and understandable. This is our first foray into, okay, we're going to share as much as we know and we're going to try and give you as much control as we have. on how your products are doing. And that's why the catalog is such a big investment. It's only going to be useful to you as a merchant if it's useful to all of the developers and partners that are building with it. If not, we don't really have control, right? Anything. We don't have anything to give you. We don't have any data to give you. And so like that's why the investment on do both sides is important. Like we had to build the catalog. so that it was infrastructure that was very much needed for new partners who you know don't have their own search info already. And then also as it's being used, that means that we have better data to give back to merchants. Right as well. So it's kind of like that dual, yeah, dual philosophy of doing both.
Kurt Elster • 31:20.640
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Vanessa Lee • 33:15.960
Exactly. I think it's because people want to also spend energy optimizing because they're like Well, I have all this, you know, I I want to to take action and do something about this as like early but growing set of traffic. Where do I put that energy? Right. And so we needed to also say, okay, well, this is what we know. This is where we think you should put energy, filling out your product details, making sure that your products are categorized correctly. Um, and we will continue to do that. Like I I don't think this is like another milestone in agentics storefronts, but it's gonna be a long journey. You will continue to see this channel change and grow.
Kurt Elster • 33:50.320
I think this is gonna evolve.
Vanessa Lee • 33:51.520
Yeah, absolutely.
Kurt Elster • 33:53.200
The um Well, and then the other nice part about this is really you would you gain outside of just a Gentex storefront by having a more complete listing Right? That's going to anything that generates a product feed, anyone who is viewing the catalog, SEO and structured data, all that's going to benefit from these changes as well, I would have to imagine.
Vanessa Lee • 34:13.960
Yeah, you're right. Absolutely. Because it goes into your it's your it's your product model at the end of the day. So it it'll it'll be surfaced everywhere.
Kurt Elster • 34:21.079
So I want to go Just to to recap it, give me a give me a one-liner, you know, a headline for for UCP, either like what it is or why, you know, some takeaway on the on what you're building here.
Vanessa Lee • 34:36.899
Yeah, I mean catalog and UCP are like kind of two two parts to of the same coin, right? So catalog is about discovery. It's about making sure that your products show up wherever customers are shopping, not just today, but into the future, right? And to your point, you don't have to do anything. So like it's the easiest thing. We're building the infrastructure. If you want, you can optimize it and help make sure that your product information is like complete. But you don't have to do anything. The second part is the transaction. That's what UCP does, right? UCP also includes some discovery as well, but the bulk of UCP is about cart. and checkout and the negotiation that happens every time a checkout happens, right? So we poured all the energy that we we had around what is um what do we know about uh basically helping millions of businesses transact billions of times, right? And the variety of business rules that have to get executed every single time any handshake over the internet happens. Right. And we said, okay, let's build it into a protocol. It really isn't AI specific. Like you could actually use UCP to power any shopping experience. It really is just like codifying a lot of what we have known in the Building, you know, our checkout and then working with partners and and kind of bringing their, you know, retail expertise or you know, bringing their transaction and their technical expertise together and saying, like, okay, well, this is a protocol. that essentially models everything from, okay, there's a cart. Okay, this is what I know about the consumer of the cart. This is the final API for I want to Do a checkout. These are all the ways that as a business you can say, I support these payment providers. This is my shipping options. I support um you know, a discount code or I require a loyalty program to be able to check out, right? And then all of those capabilities are are then kind of codified and then any application on the other side can then say, cool, I cannot support a loyalty program. I'm going to pop up and do a web uh a web checkout instead so that this is super smooth. So it's this UCP is this kind of like handshake between, okay, I'm the application and you guys are the checkout. How do we make this work, right? And so it's it's that it's that API layer that is basically enabled on all of Shopify stores. All of Shopify stores have the right handshake well-known, you know, uh um well-known uh site so that it's reachable by any uh agent or any application and all of the APIs we've kind of updated over the last few months to support the latest version of UC. So like everything from cart all the way to checkout, it's supported on Shopify. So you're UCP enabled. If some application developer in the future says, cool, I'm gonna build against UCP. you are already uh capable of supporting a transaction on that site.
Kurt Elster • 37:27.960
So so anyone out there, you know, I would imagine people people are already building with this. My products, that's just increased surface area across the internet. You know, more impressions, more people, more potential. All my My reward for being a good boy and filling out my product listings completely. Everyone is happier with me, but all my products are gonna show up more often in new experiences that have not even been imagined yet.
Vanessa Lee • 37:57.500
Exactly. And then UCP is also open and available. So that developer, like developers, can take the catalog and UCP and start developing end-to-end shopping applications. And that is so cool.
Kurt Elster • 38:08.680
That is cool. The okay. One thing I don't know if we we touched on this at the start. You have been at Shopify a long time.
Vanessa Lee • 38:14.680
How long? Oh yeah, I've been here um I want to say like nine and a half years now. It will be ten years in February.
Kurt Elster • 38:21.800
Congratulations.
Vanessa Lee • 38:23.360
Yeah, it's been I I mean like it's it's been a ride. It's been uh I I can't I almost can't believe it's been almost a decade.
Kurt Elster • 38:31.120
Beautiful. Uh okay, coming to the end of our time together, I want some practical takeaways. What's the thing if I'm, you know, if I'm a partner or I'm a merchant, what is the one thing you want me to go do?
Vanessa Lee • 38:42.720
Ooh, okay, go look at Agentic Storefronts. Give us feedback on it. Let us know how it's working for you or how it's not working for you. So this is Agentic Storefronts. Go try the catalog. Like literally, even if you are not a developer, whether you're, you know, you're maybe a designer within a partner team. Go use it and think of a new shopping experience. Use the catalog to power. You can even within the catalog say, I only want this catalog to search across these shops. So if you want to create, let's say I want to create um, you know, an application that only shops across the brands within this umbrella brand. Right. And then like, what can you do with that? That is like super cool. These brand experiences are just like super fun. Build something that, you know, isn't You know, it could be just like a a campaign that could launch, you know, unleash some of that creativity. I would love to see it. Please tweet me uh tweet X X post tweet.
Kurt Elster • 39:34.240
Oh, it's uh always Twitter in my heart.
Vanessa Lee • 39:36.460
Yeah, yeah, that's what I like to think too. Um, but like tell me about it. I would love to see it. And what can we do to make that easier and better? Um, I I think those are probably like the two big takeaways. The other thing that I'll leave you with is to, especially for you know our die hard partners, is to not sleep on retail in 2026. Like if I were to impart the last kind of like completely tangential thing from everything agentic and AI that we just discussed is like. The retail team is absolutely popping off in terms of the features that they are releasing. If you have not checked out, you know, the new version of uh POS that we released in March.
Kurt Elster • 40:15.660
PLS point of sale. That's point of sale. That's like that's the I think if you're an app developer, that one is the blue ocean. You know, the Shopify, the App Store. We pretty much solved all our problems unless you're like really creative. Yes. POS retail, so much more opportunity there. I have, you know, I've had my eye on it. I want to build something for it.
Vanessa Lee • 40:37.540
Build something for it.
Kurt Elster • 40:39.260
I think it's starting to go. You know, ex extend uh extend our latest promo our free gift app, get it so it it integrates into POS. That's a good like first experience with it, and then you know see if we come up with something original for it. But no, for sure. I Well when I I come to. dev in Toronto, I'm I'm definitely gonna be talking to the the retail team.
Vanessa Lee • 40:59.460
Yeah, yeah, please. Because the thing that like I I stress with the retail team a lot is our job is to build the foundations. Right? Because with without the foundations, we don't have enough reach to make it an interesting surface for you to build on because there's not enough people using it. And so we spend a bit of time kind of going back to our roots of like, okay, well, what is an in-person checkout machine need to be? It needs to be reliable and it needs to be fast. It's not that different from online checkout, right? And so we did everything from like, okay, the hub helped with peripheral reliability. We've now uh halved the amounts of peripheral connection failures. Which is good because that means you get there and you're right away starting to scan items, your receipt printer is there, everything is smooth. We redesigned the application itself. Not like a full redesign, but we took we took like really important steps to make sure that everything from the ergonomics of the cart is always stable. The tap target It's actually feel like tap targets that you can touch, not small tiny, you know, buttons or or links that you have to you have to uh hit We've released uh we've kind of got rid of all the modals. We've really we've reduced uh the screens that um take you from checkout to back to oh I'm ready for the another the new checkout by something from like five to like one. Like it's been it's been such a journey. We've saved now, I think I looked recently, we've saved like years of time. From sales associates around the world from the features that we've shipped in the first half of this year. And so now we're at this place where we're like, okay, we're not gonna continue that. That's our bread and butter. We're gonna continue to invest in the foundation. It's gotta be fast. It's gotta be reliable. Right. And there's still some work we have to do there. However, we've now earned the right to be like, okay, now let's play. Now what can we do? What else can we do with this platform? Right? We've now earned the right to be a reliable POS out in the market. In my opinion, now one of the best. And if that's the case, now we can be like, okay, what are we doing with the smart grid? How are we allowing app developers to build fast, reliable, but like creative experiences now, right? Inside of in right inside of um uh inside of the in the in the point of sale smart grid. And so there's a lot more that we're looking at. Okay, how do we there was a there was a set of APIs already in extension points, but like how do we build it to be even better, even even more capabilities? um all based on the fact that we've invested so much on like the the foundation. So don't sleep on retail. I think that that's really interesting. There's also a lot of interesting stuff we're gonna do with um with customers and making sure that retailers know who's walking in there. their store, you know, so there's a lot of stuff coming in the in the second half of this year that I'm excited about.
Kurt Elster • 43:33.960
The yeah, I had e a couple of years ago got to like a behind the scenes on how a local large uh garden business, Shelley Nursery Um, the North Shore Chicago is using POS in practice. And I was like, wow, even then I was like, I didn't know it did half of this. And then, you know, we have in an upcoming episode, uh, we're gonna talk to one of your colleagues, Helen Moo, who's gonna walk us through She's gonna walk us through the POS changes. And so I'm looking forward to that. Because 20 years ago, I did a lot of retail. You know, I I have used my share of painful POS systems. Man, I would have killed to have something like Shop Fight POS then.
Vanessa Lee • 44:08.460
Oh man, it's it's just the beginning. This next year, I would say the next 18 months, 12 to 18 months for retail will be a huge effort for Shopify. And so it's like it's like this funny thing 'cause like we've invested so much into agentic and UCP, but also like I loved to expose this layered cake because people forget sometimes. UCP takes such agentic takes such a such a large amount of mind share from people. But like we are also a growing point of sale, right? And what does that mean for how much we can help merchants uh you know, build the retail locations that they want, uh, understand the customers that are coming through. Like there's so much opportunity. So yeah, absolutely don't sleep on retail.
Kurt Elster • 44:48.640
The uh okay, but the important one, where do we go to learn about additions?
Vanessa Lee • 44:53.460
Well, it will be in everyone's admin. So if you are on Shopify, uh please go check it out. It will be uh in your home screen Uh but also there will just be the edition site, which is probably the best way to to come across it. So uh yeah, and we will be doing a lot of stuff on uh on X. uh in the next week uh as editions kind of rolls out and we have people kind of nerd out on it and give us feedback. So please give us feedback. We love it. We really thrive on it. But yeah, it'll be in everyone's admin. And if not, it will be absolutely on Twitter X.
Kurt Elster • 45:24.299
I love it. Vanessa Lee, thank you so much.
Vanessa Lee • 45:27.099
Thank you so much, Kurt. This was so fun. Let's do it again.
Kurt Elster • 45:30.380
Absolutely. Hey, before you go, I was hoping you would check out our new app, Promo Party Pro. It is what I want to be the single best, easiest way to run a free gift with purchase promo on Shopify. We just put it live in the App Store. We've got less than 50 users. We want your feedback. So if you need to run a free gift with purchase promo in the near future. . Install it, try it. There's a live chat. I check that all the time. And so if you have any issues at all, you know, or any suggestions on how we can make it even easier to use. Let us know. We're happy to help. If you want to try it, search promo party in the app store. Promo Party Pro's the app. Give it a shot. It's got a free trial. Thanks.