alt Hacker NewsShow HN: AskUCP – UCP protocol explorer showing all products on Shopify
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.
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