Agents will become a common way people shop. So today we are releasing 3 tools to make adding commerce to those agents trivial:

- Checkout Kit: embed commerce widgets and checkout(!) directly into your agent and chat. This is already being used by Microsoft’s @Copilot.
- Shopify Catalog: low latency global product search across millions of merchants
- Universal Cart: shop from any store, anywhere, in one cart

With these, you can build seamless embedded commerce experiences quickly, starting with all the best products by the best merchants in the world instead of having to sign them all up individually. No need to build a complex new checkout, or dealing with regulatory marketplace rules. Commerce just plugs in and feels seamless in conversations.

We believe commerce should be everywhere people are, so we’re making that as easy as possible for the AI age. There are some really cool technical details in how this all works. We heavily invested in MCP-UI, an extension of the MCP protocol to allow exposing widgets that a host can choose to display. The product cards you see in the video are exposed through MCP-UI and then securely rendered.

I just clued in how insane text2vid will get soon. As crazy as this sounds, we will be able to generate movies from just minor prompts and the path there is pretty clear. Whisper allows very good transcription of existing videos and movies. Speaker detection is lacking but minor problem.
CLIP and Blip-2 are very good at extracting scene descriptions from still images, so you can also get set design, shot description and color grading.

All storefront requests are now served by the latest version of ruby with YJIT enabled! We are seeing ~10% speedups across the board.

YJIT that has been developed by @Love2Code's and team at Shopify. The latest ruby version also has Variable Width Allocation, which allows the VM to store bigger objects to improve data locality

Some really cool (programming) tech that I think are underrated right now and that have proven very useful to me this year: Apache Arrow system, Parquet, Datafusion are incredibly strong foundation for the next chapter in data. DuckDB is a delight as well. We are going towards much simpler stacks based on extremely well designed infrastructure and that's really becoming for the data world.

Some extra Shopify BFCM data:

Purple is this year’s GMV

Looking strong despite the macro economical pessimism. That’s great news for independent commerce! cumulative plot:

Company news: We totally revamped our compensation system this summer. In short, "Flex Comp" now gives everyone a simple UX where you see your total compensation and choose a mix of Cash/RSU/Stock via simple sliders. Shopify hires world-class, and we pay world-class compensation to match. But compensation is complex. We once polled hundreds of people who happened to make the same amount. We got widely different opinions on how much they thought they actually made!

Can't stop thinking about this and go: ☹️

"The reason we don't have fusion already is because we, as a civilization, never decided that it was a priority. Fusion funding is literally peanuts: In 2016, the US spent twice as much on peanut subsidies as on fusion research." Every problem in the world is ultimately an energy problem if you dig few levels deep.

We choose to have energy problems.

There really isn't such a thing as a meeting with more than 6 active participants. If it gets bigger it's really a panel or presentation where people should be able to enter and leave quietly. Clubhouse gets this very right. Who will build video chat clubhouse for companies? It's probably not hard to build. Start with open source meet.jit.si or twilio.com/video. Allow pre-scheduling and invitation only events. Change the default to be a spectator after joining unless you are panelist.

Hey Video game industry - we need to talk. I know it's hard to break with orthodoxy but you are playing a new role now in the world of social distancing and we need some changes. We need a new class of multiplayer games. Specifically ones that don't require your whole brain and whole attention. Fallguys is a good example of the general direction. We need games that are just fun to do while talking with friends.

As of today, Shopify is a digital by default company. We will keep our offices closed until 2021 so that we can rework them for this new reality. And after that, most will permanently work remotely. Office centricity is over. Until recently, work happened in the office. We’ve always had some people remote, but they used the internet as a bridge to the office. This will reverse now. The future of the office is to act as an on-ramp to the same digital workplace that you can access from your #WFH setup.

I realize everyone's twitter feed looks different. But I'll go ahead and subtweet two conversations that I see going by right now: a) How the heck did Shopify get so big this decade and b) You have to work 80 hours a week to be successful.

Thread/ Shopify grew up very far from the primary places where people build companies. For its founders, this company was our first real Job. If the startup ecosystem is a Darwinian struggle for survival, Ottawa is the Galapagos islands.

We haven’t done this in a while! Ask me anything with hashtag #asktobi Q: #asktobi As an avid car guy with a Lemons car, I'm desperate to get more info on your Shopify endurance race car!
- @kurtinc

A:

Yesterday we announced Shopify hit one million merchants. I asked my team to figure out what that actually meant on a global scale and impact to the economy. Here are some of my favourite stats: Shopify merchants contribute billions to the global economy and are a significant percentage of the internet GDP