Ship 26 NYC - Fireside Chat: Building Agentic Storefronts
VVercel
Computing/SoftwareSmall Business/StartupsInternet Technology
Transcript
00:00:00Hello everybody. Thank you so much for joining us, hanging out this afternoon. I hope everybody's
00:00:17having a great time at SHIP. I'm so excited to be joined by Vanessa from Shopify. Welcome to the
00:00:24SHIP stage, officially. It is incredible to be here. Also, I have never seen such a coordinated
00:00:29team. Like, I came in and I was like, wow, everyone is wearing black. I was like, that's wild. I asked
00:00:35how she thought the conference was going so far, and she said, it's okay. It's a little buttoned up
00:00:39for me. I was like, you're wearing a dress. And I don't know. We just, we're a bit more casual. So
00:00:45you guys are a little more laid back than us. A little bit more laid back. All right. Shopify and
00:00:51Vercel have been partners for a really long time. We have some mutual customers, brands like Ruggable,
00:00:56Page, AG1. They've all been running headless Shopify on Vercel for years. One of my favorite
00:01:03examples is actually Topps, Topps Collectibles. They drop a new collectible, traffic spikes 40x,
00:01:09and it's no problem for either of our platforms.
00:01:12What's the latest Topps you bought? The latest Topps Collectible High Box? What was the last
00:01:16collectible you got? I, you know, you put me on the spot in a really mean way, and I resent you for
00:01:22it. You said it was your favorite. My favorite story from the team. We're not done. Okay. Our teams
00:01:30have been cooking. I'm sure you're going to grill me. Yes. I'm going to grill you now because of that
00:01:34comment. We've been cooking on some really exciting improvements to our platforms. Yeah. You want to
00:01:40share a little bit about what we've been building today? Yeah. So, I mean, we've, we've been watching
00:01:45each other, not even that much from the sidelines for almost, what, half a decade now? At least.
00:01:51Um, and we had a lot of customers that were on Vercel and they were doing really well with Next and they
00:01:58liked being with Vercel, but when it came to integrating with Shopify, I don't know if you guys
00:02:03know, but building for commerce is not as simple as it seems. Um, everything from when a item is sold
00:02:10out, uh, and the largest sold out. Um, but how do you know that the, you know, the color picker above it
00:02:16should adjust to the next available variant? These are all like inside baseball things that we optimize
00:02:23for. And we all take for granted in the world of like being a consumer because we made it so easy,
00:02:27right? Similar to our checkout, right? It works every time and it works every time. It's like
00:02:32infrastructure now for the way we live our lives and how, how we buy, but that's not so easy to get
00:02:38right off the bat. And so we looked at hydrogen. Our goal has always been to support developers and
00:02:43building what they want to do. Right. And hydrogen started off with more of a full stack approach.
00:02:48We did, uh, the entirety of the framework back end, front end. We were very opinionated across
00:02:53the bar because performance is extremely important in e-commerce. We all know landing on a PDP and
00:02:58directly getting like time to first bite within like milliseconds is extremely important to conversion.
00:03:03And so we decided, okay, to revisit five years later with hydrogen and said, okay, let's boil hydrogen down
00:03:11to just the core components that are actually really hard. Right. And we have a storefront API and a lot
00:03:17of the merchants were struggling with things like analytics. How do I get that right? How to get
00:03:20cart and, and how do we make sure that cart is actually like an optimistic cart? I don't know if
00:03:26anyone appreciates these details or you want to nerd out, but like when you add things to cart, we actually
00:03:30have to do a bunch of, we have to do a call to the backend to make sure that there's inventory to make
00:03:34sure there's a discount code that you can apply. And then it comes back, but you have to get an optimistic, like,
00:03:39reaction as a user to say, Oh, add it to cart. Right. And then optimistic updates optimistically, uh,
00:03:45optimistic UI is important there. And so we basically distilled all of that and we said, okay, you should be able to bring
00:03:50any backend, right? So you'd be able to bring any framework, right? So for a lot of folks who are using next, this will work really
00:03:57well. And we'll just basically boil hydrogen down to the components that are hard. And then so now instead of like hydrogen or
00:04:04next is now hydrogen and next, which is, which is great for. Finally. Yeah, I know. It's been a long time
00:04:10in the mix. So you guys actually officially announced this this week. Yes, we did. Um, Dodds, we can ship the
00:04:15tweet now, uh, to the blog posts. There you are. Yeah, that's it. We're out. Um, hydrogen and next. I mean,
00:04:23it's always been possible, but it's been pretty hacky. So what's, what's different? Yeah. Like everything from even GDPR,
00:04:28like we don't even go into like analytics, our poor friends who like try and clobber together, you know, next and
00:04:34Vercel and then like, okay, let's try and marry it with Shopify in the past. They couldn't even get analytics on their
00:04:39store, right? Cause it wouldn't work for them. So now all of that is seamless. And then it's also very easy to deploy
00:04:45into Vercel, um, from, you know, whatever CLI you're using. Any Shopify merchants in the audience here? Okay. Oh,
00:04:53what's up? This is great. Um, we didn't know if you were coming to see Vanessa or if you were coming
00:04:58because you're a Shopify merchant, we're glad that you, uh, we have some merchants here. Um,
00:05:03have any of you tried to use Shopify plus next JS? Okay. I'm looking at you in the front now. You're the chosen one.
00:05:11Um, and how has the experience of deploying a next JS front end to your Shopify app historically been?
00:05:21Okay. So you avoided using hydrogen in the past and that's how you made it work. Thank you very much. That was the point we wanted to make. Um, and now
00:05:28it is dramatically, dramatically easier. Our team's been working together on it. And, um, you know,
00:05:32one of the things I love about this is that it goes beyond the frameworks and the platforms. Um,
00:05:37there are more exciting tools that we can now use because these things are working really well together.
00:05:43It's a leading question, but where am I going next? Um, maybe V and a zero? Yeah. Yeah. A V and a zero. Um,
00:05:51so yeah, we recently released the Shopify integration for Vercel marketplace.
00:05:55So now you can actually prompt your way to a store. It's a lot easier. Um,
00:05:58that store will use, uh, next JS on top of headless Shopify and everything just works seamlessly.
00:06:04So what is this type of thing unlock in your mind?
00:06:08I mean, for us, we've always kind of been about developers. Um, I mean,
00:06:13Toby is a huge developer. A lot of us have started stores in the past and built, uh, stores,
00:06:18whether it's on liquid or hosted platform or, or headless, you know, we've, we've always been about
00:06:24enabling developers to build for, for brands. Um, but I think the thing that I love about this,
00:06:29like us coming together is now it's not like a choice that people have to go down. It's like,
00:06:35okay, am I going to use liquid or am I going to, it's a lot more, okay, use the tools that you want.
00:06:38Cause at the end of the day, like our core belief is that, uh, when it comes to e-commerce brands
00:06:44and the way you express yourself, I mean, the internet is all about expressing yourself, right?
00:06:48No matter whether you're selling, uh, collectibles, if you're selling vitamins, like people eventually
00:06:55just want to buy from a brand that they trust, right? And that goes into all the little details.
00:07:01And so we want to have, we want to enable all the developers out there to have control over
00:07:05absolutely everything, um, that they want to express that brand.
00:07:08One of the things I love about Shopify is you guys sort of delegate trusts, uh, to the merchants.
00:07:14So I know that I can trust the Shopify brand. I've bought things with ShopPay more times than I can
00:07:20admit and just clicking that ShopPay button, just everything works so seamlessly.
00:07:24Um, and it sort of reminds me of recently we had an engineering onboarding class and one of the new
00:07:29engineers at Vercel asked me, well, you know, our CTO Malta just got done saying code is free now.
00:07:36So if code is free, what's the new moat? And off the cuff, I kind of had this answer,
00:07:41which was a few things. I think it's actually, um, restraint is actually part of it. So judgment,
00:07:46knowing what to build, what not to build. No, not taste.
00:07:49Oh, not taste.
00:07:49I'm so sick of the taste is the new moat.
00:07:52Everybody just wants to say taste is the new moat.
00:07:54I know. If you want to say they're a tastemaker, it just seems the most amorphous thing.
00:07:58We're not cursing, but it's, it's obnoxious.
00:08:00Yeah, it is a bit.
00:08:01Um, I said, uh, you know, sort of judgment, deciding what to build, execution, all the stuff around it.
00:08:06But one of the most important things is trust. Um, so when you need something that new that you don't
00:08:11have yet, um, where do you get it from? And generally we get it from those that we can trust.
00:08:17So what I love about Shopify is that it has delegated its trust out to all of these merchants that I would
00:08:23not otherwise have experienced.
00:08:26Yeah.
00:08:26Um, and so, but it didn't, it didn't really start there, right?
00:08:29Like I really want to get into this. I watched this video, probably on LinkedIn, that's weird,
00:08:34but I watched a video on LinkedIn, which is an interview with Toby.
00:08:38And Toby was talking about, um, you know, when the, the initial, something about the initial
00:08:44TAM for Shopify was too small.
00:08:45Yeah.
00:08:46So investors wouldn't invest.
00:08:47Yeah.
00:08:47The IPO, yeah, it was like, um, it was early on in our IPO journey.
00:08:53And Toby was trying to get, I guess, institutional investors to start investing.
00:08:58So this is like probably 2014.
00:09:01Um, and it was really tough for us.
00:09:03I mean, even when I, I've joined, I've been at Shopify now for a decade.
00:09:06And I remember celebrating our 200,000 merchant with like balloons and we were so excited.
00:09:13And now like fast forward 10 years, we have millions.
00:09:15But the, the point that he was making to the investors is like the tools actually end up shaping
00:09:21the market dramatically.
00:09:23So in the past we didn't have that many merchants or the TAM wasn't that big because the opportunity
00:09:29was limited by the friction of the tools.
00:09:30It was really hard to get started.
00:09:32It was really hard to start an e-commerce site.
00:09:34And so if we can just make that easier, just like more people will reach for that tool
00:09:39and there will be more entrepreneurs.
00:09:40And this was probably the most, I think he probably didn't, he, he believed it fully,
00:09:46but I think it was hard for the people in the room to see that.
00:09:49But I think that's like resonated true every time at Shopify is like, no, there is a resourcefulness
00:09:54in the general population.
00:09:56That's just untapped.
00:09:58If you make it easier for them to create, the natural inclination for humans is to create things.
00:10:05So this is one of the reasons I think that Vercel and Shopify go so well together.
00:10:09We just really have a shared history of reducing friction.
00:10:12I remember the first time I did get push and it turned into a production.
00:10:17You're alive on Vercel.
00:10:18And I was just blown away, absolutely blown away.
00:10:22And I was kind of late to the game.
00:10:24Everybody had been doing this for years.
00:10:25And I was like, what have I been wasting my time on?
00:10:27I had my own VPS.
00:10:28I managed SFTP.
00:10:30I would build things locally and then deploy them.
00:10:32Sometimes they wouldn't work the right way.
00:10:34And so that reducing friction, I think, actually brought so many more builders online in the same
00:10:39way that reducing friction to a storefront brought so many more merchants online.
00:10:44Yes.
00:10:45So we're going to keep doing it.
00:10:47We're going to keep reducing friction.
00:10:48And now we have better ways to use Shopify with Next.js, with Vercel.
00:10:53Yeah.
00:10:54What do you think that unlocks?
00:10:56Like, what's our next thing?
00:10:57What's our next TAM expansion?
00:10:58Yeah.
00:10:59Um, this is, I've told this story internally a lot.
00:11:04Um, if I was a betting person, so this is like a bit of a thesis that I put out there.
00:11:07And we'll see, like, maybe we'll meet in a year from now and we'll see if it turned out.
00:11:11Um, I think that we are on the brink of, as code is becoming more reachable for people
00:11:18who are not necessarily quote unquote developers.
00:11:21Right.
00:11:21Right.
00:11:22And as a React developer and as a robotics engineer, I like this pains me a little bit
00:11:26because I'm like, oh, like we went through so much hardship to learn how to code, you know,
00:11:29C++ and then JavaScript.
00:11:31And then now it's like just words.
00:11:32Um, but at the end of the day, um, but now at the end of the day, like the thing that is incredible
00:11:38is I, I talked to our team about this because, uh, we, we actually built something recently
00:11:42called the catalog, right?
00:11:44So the catalog is essentially a product search API.
00:11:47For those of you who have ever built anything on the internet, you know that there's actually not
00:11:50a good product search API in the world at the moment that's open for you to use.
00:11:54And so we decided to make one, uh, we have enough products.
00:11:58Now we have billions of products.
00:11:59We have millions of merchants.
00:12:01And so we said, cool, let's just do it.
00:12:03Um, and so we created the first shopping, not the first, but currently the only widespread
00:12:08shopping API and it's optimized for commerce.
00:12:11So it has everything from like, okay, well, this is a shirt and there's four retailers
00:12:16that sell this shirt at different prices that clustering is actually not very easy to do.
00:12:20And it comes in these options.
00:12:22It has colors, it has sizes, and it's all formatted properly across billions of variants.
00:12:27This actually took us years of investment to build.
00:12:30Um, and then we now offer it to anyone out on the internet.
00:12:33It's actually not even, uh, gated behind a bearer token or anything.
00:12:37So you can just use it.
00:12:38And the goal there was to empower the next wave of creatives.
00:12:43So when I think about what has been the, we're about to go on a Ted talk, by the way.
00:12:47So let's go, I mean, we're all here for it.
00:12:50Didn't you see the show of hands?
00:12:51They all came to see you.
00:12:51Well, when I, when I think about retail and commerce, and if you go all the way back,
00:12:56like trade, it has always been about like, Hey, Tomo, like I have this thing.
00:13:00Do you want this thing?
00:13:01And you're like, yeah, I do.
00:13:03Okay.
00:13:03But only if I trust you, but only if you trust me.
00:13:05But, and then the other thing is humans are inherently very lazy.
00:13:09Right.
00:13:09And so not only do I want to find the best products, like I'm kind of lazy to find it.
00:13:14I'm not going to like go out in the world and walk around and find all the shops.
00:13:18I'm just going to be like, you know, Tomo's cool.
00:13:19What does he like?
00:13:20He likes Todd's collectibles.
00:13:21Most of the time I like, listen to a friend I trust.
00:13:24Exactly.
00:13:25What to get.
00:13:26Yeah.
00:13:26So like the mixture of, we are lazy and the fact that we inherently want to,
00:13:31we need to like, we buy things because of many reasons.
00:13:34But a lot of us, who do I trust that has this?
00:13:37Like it's a relay of like trust.
00:13:38Yeah.
00:13:38Right.
00:13:40I think that in the past, we've seen these big waves in commerce every time that the technology
00:13:45has changed.
00:13:46So social change things.
00:13:47Right.
00:13:48Now everyone has a camera in their pocket.
00:13:50Now video editing becomes easier.
00:13:53Content changes.
00:13:53So, okay.
00:13:54Now I can follow Tomo on many social platforms and see what products he likes.
00:13:58Right.
00:13:59That's great.
00:13:59That's another way to discovery.
00:14:01I think that, and I'm very excited about this future.
00:14:03I think that in the future that developers or people who are acting like developers will become
00:14:08that.
00:14:08So I think about things like, I am a runner and I live in a neighborhood called Leaside
00:14:14in Toronto.
00:14:16And so I'm part of the Leaside running group.
00:14:18And someone in our running group decided to use Cloud Code and create a website.
00:14:23It has a leaderboard.
00:14:24It has like the weather coming up.
00:14:26And so with the catalog, they're able to then say, okay, well, I want to, you can also craft
00:14:31like, you know, the radius of the stores that you want and the universe of the amount of shops.
00:14:36And so it says all the Toronto stores around Leaside within a 50 kilometer radius, right?
00:14:42You could do global, you can do this.
00:14:43And then we say, I want to put that in the app, in the web app as a suggestion based on
00:14:48the weather upcoming weather report of products that you can buy from merchants around the neighborhood.
00:14:53Right?
00:14:54And so that is possible through the catalog API.
00:14:56And when you think about where software is going, it's so much more about, okay,
00:15:00can we build more niche applications that are bespoke made?
00:15:04So internally, we've been loud about this, but we have a tool called quick, right?
00:15:08It's a way for you to just launch an internally guarded like website.
00:15:12And so like people have been just enormously creating these like kind of throwaway applications,
00:15:18but so useful at communicating and like understanding and pulling people
00:15:22together on projects.
00:15:23It's literally why we created the enterprise apps and agents platform.
00:15:25The market is telling us we need this, the thing that you guys have been doing for forever.
00:15:30Every company on earth needs that.
00:15:31Yeah.
00:15:32Yeah.
00:15:32So I think that there's just like a next gold rush wave of changing how people think about buying.
00:15:38And then also changing like what e-commerce means.
00:15:40It's not just e-commerce websites and then web applications.
00:15:43That's right.
00:15:44We're going to embed, we're going to see it with the right tools, right?
00:15:47Again, with the catalog API, you will start to see people embedding shopping into what was
00:15:53traditionally known as web apps.
00:15:54That's right.
00:15:55Right.
00:15:55So I love this idea of commerce not being its own destination, but it being part of the fabric
00:16:00of sort of everything you do online.
00:16:02Yes.
00:16:02Aided by agents, you know, powered by some of the tools that we share today and the catalog API.
00:16:08And then so like, I actually internally did this exercise.
00:16:12I think I sent it to your team, but we internally told designers go, cause they,
00:16:16they're quite technical at Shopify.
00:16:18But I told them, I was like, go build some like really cool shit, right?
00:16:22Any guardrails or just like, no guardrails.
00:16:24I was like, I don't know.
00:16:25You guys are designers.
00:16:26You guys are way more plugged in than I am, right?
00:16:28Like what's cool right now with the kids, go build a web app for that.
00:16:32And then try and use the catalog with the kids.
00:16:34Yeah.
00:16:35I don't know anything.
00:16:36So, um, do you want to roll?
00:16:37Do you want to show it?
00:16:38There's a video.
00:16:40Let's, let's tee up the video of the demos of some of the things they built.
00:16:43Inevitably using some of the Vercel agent stack, the catalog API.
00:16:46Yeah.
00:16:47Any of them deploy on XJS, uh, headless to Hydrogen?
00:16:50Uh, I think some of them were using Hydrogen and, and may have deployed to Vercel.
00:16:55But AISDK, it was one of the libraries, I think that was used,
00:16:59but they were just able to create these amazing experiences.
00:17:02Like my favorite was like a horoscope app.
00:17:05I guess horoscopes are cool.
00:17:06Um, a horoscope app that like, based on, based on your horoscope,
00:17:12it was like, okay, well, Tomo, you're a Capricorn.
00:17:14What are you?
00:17:15Do you know?
00:17:16I'm a Cancer.
00:17:17Cancer.
00:17:17Okay.
00:17:17Yeah.
00:17:17My birthday is actually next week.
00:17:19Oh my gosh.
00:17:20Happy early birthday.
00:17:21Should be good.
00:17:21Um, but you're a Cancer.
00:17:23Maybe you're about to enter a season that's like kind of sad.
00:17:26So maybe you want like a, uh, maybe you want like a, uh, like a, like a, like a candle to
00:17:32help you through it.
00:17:33Or there was one up there.
00:17:33You saw like you could upload like and shop from like whatever old school, uh, TV show is
00:17:40your favorite.
00:17:40You'd be able to enter it.
00:17:41And so like, there's just stuff like that, that, oh, this is not what people would traditionally
00:17:45think of as like an e-commerce site.
00:17:47I mean, I saw a demo yesterday of Pippin, which was one of the ones up there.
00:17:50The dice.
00:17:50I hope you can show the video again.
00:17:52And, um, Ben on your team was just, he's just talking to Pippin and describing something
00:17:57that he was looking for using obviously voice, real time API.
00:18:01And, um, it was like, I want a game.
00:18:04It found like a dino.
00:18:06And you were impatient.
00:18:07It kept asking.
00:18:08It was like more, I want to be more specific.
00:18:09I want to really get it right.
00:18:10It was like, just tell it to pick one.
00:18:12And he's like, Pippin, just pick one.
00:18:14It's like, all right, here's the game.
00:18:15And it was like this scary dinosaur game, perfect for two to four players with a five-year-old.
00:18:20Like it was exactly what it, and all built on top of this tech sack.
00:18:23Yeah.
00:18:24Yeah.
00:18:24I mean, bug me afterwards and we'll show you.
00:18:26Yeah.
00:18:26I'll show you a live demo.
00:18:27Yeah.
00:18:28Um, I would love to show the video one more time if it's queued up,
00:18:31because some of these demos were really impressive.
00:18:33And this was like the equivalent of sort of.
00:18:34It's very fast.
00:18:35Oh, it's a very fast video.
00:18:37Yeah.
00:18:37We're going to have to do that.
00:18:38Well, bug me afterwards and I'll show some of it live.
00:18:42The future is bright.
00:18:43I'm so excited that we're continuing to reduce the friction to getting stores online,
00:18:48because I think what that means is that stores aren't going to necessarily just be the destination
00:18:52anymore.
00:18:52Again, commerce is going to become part of the fabric of everything we do on the web.
00:18:56Aided by the catalog API.
00:18:58Next.js running on headless Shopify powered by the new and improved Hydrogen.
00:19:03Yes.
00:19:04Um, and most importantly, I'm just excited that our teams are working together and that
00:19:07we've been partnering so closely.
00:19:09So thank you so much, Vanessa, for being here with me today.
00:19:11Thank you for having me.
00:19:12Um, uh, this was unscripted and very real, and we've been having a lot of fun with it.
00:19:16I think so you could tell.
00:19:17Um, so thank you so much everybody for having us.
00:19:20Thanks guys.
00:19:22Thank you.