Show HN: AskUCP – UCP protocol explorer showing all products on Shopify

Posted by possiblelion 5 days ago

On January 11th, Google and Shopify announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (ucp.dev). It's an open standard that lets any application query products across e-commerce platforms without needing APIs, integrations, or middlemen.

AskUCP is one of the first applications built on it.

Right now, if you want to buy something online, you have to know which store sells it. You go to Amazon, or you go to a Shopify store, or you go to Etsy. Each one has its own search, its own interface, its own checkout. The experience is fragmented because the infrastructure is siloed.

UCP changes this at the protocol level. If products are described in a standard format, any application can discover them. You don't need permission from each platform. You don't need to build integrations. Anybody or any AI agent just querys the protocol.

AskUCP is designed to be a single pane of glass into online commerce. You search once, and you see products from across the ecosystem. Currently, that means the entire Shopify catalog. As more platforms adopt UCP, their products become explorable too. Eventually, it should be everything.

This is a proof of concept. It's early, and there are rough edges. Let me know what you think, refinements, ideas etc etc.

Comments

Comment by theturtletalks 1 day ago

UCP is genuinely interesting, but I think it mostly trades one form of lock-in for another. Google and Shopify are pushing protocols like UCP and ACP because they can see AI eating the marketplace middleman. As discovery and checkout move into conversational interfaces, Google Shopping and Shopify’s own “Shop” app are at risk, and UCP is a way for them to stay central in that shift.

The issue is that UCP mainly benefits platforms that are already part of that ecosystem. Instead of Amazon et al controlling discovery, you risk ending up with Google and Shopify doing it through AI-driven interfaces. The experience looks more open, but control still sits with a small number of large platforms.

I’m working on something similar with a different premise. We’re building an open-source marketplace stack, basically a Shopify per vertical, where sellers run their own storefronts and discovery happens directly against the shop’s own API. You can see a working interoperable marketplace here[0], built on our first Shopify alternative, Openfront. Our website[1] goes deeper into the different vertical marketplaces we’re building like hotels, grocery stores, etc. We started with MCP-UI[2] for native conversational commerce, and V2 will support UCP, but it’s optional rather than the foundation.

[0] https://marketplace.openship.org

[1] https://openship.org

[2] https://mcpui.dev

Comment by possiblelion 21 hours ago

That's super cool, especially digging the openship UI! AskUCP started as an experiment as well. Let's see where the world takes us in terms of standards and open/closed/hybrid architectures.

Comment by fragmede 1 day ago

xkcd 927

Comment by theturtletalks 1 day ago

Very true, but my fear with UCP is that even if shops support it, ChatGPT and other chatbots might force you to apply and gate keep shops.

MCP-UI is a general standard for rendering any UI in chatbots. Shops using that standard don't have to worry about getting any approval since it's just their storefront being fed thru small UI snippets.

Comment by frigaard 20 hours ago

Cool, congrats! Curious, how did you crawl the Shopify catalog?

It seems Shopify's big play in this is data syndication; they're pushing product data to AI companies before their competitors, and offering it as a service to non-Shopify stores (with their 'agentic plan' which launches soon). It adds a reason for new stores to pick Shopify, and they form relationships with existing non-Shopify stores?

That said, product/catalog discovery is on the UCP roadmap, and it seems you've been able to do it quickly, so I wonder how big their moat really is...

Would love to chat more about it!