With AI, commerce no longer needs a destination. Discovery can happen inside activities people are already doing: planning a trip, reading a horoscope, watching a film, picking out board games, or even just styling a room.

A small group of designers and developers at Shopify built five shopping demos in a few days that do exactly those things. Each app was built directly on top of Catalog API and UCP.

Not long ago, this would have meant dedicated engineering teams, custom backends, and integrations with merchant systems for every store you wanted to feature. Now it's just an API key, structured data, and an idea.

Shopify Catalog is the data intelligence layer for commerce. It's billions of products from nearly every merchant on Shopify, standardized so AI can query, surface, and recommend. The Catalog API is the access point that AI agents and developers use to tap into it, so merchants' products show up accurately in AI conversations. And UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol) houses it all, from discovery to checkout to post-purchase. Together, they open the full commerce flow, anywhere on the internet.

The point isn't that we built some fun apps. It's that they show what's possible. Catalog + UCP is the infrastructure that was missing from commerce. With monetization coming in developer preview, the builders behind apps like these will have a path to earn revenue when their Catalog-powered experiences drive sales. It turns ideas into businesses.

Five apps today. Thousands of shopping experiences tomorrow. As code becomes easier to create, a new wave of niche applications will democratize retail reach. Every merchant gets context that was once only available to the biggest players.

In Spring '26 Edition, the threshold for who gets to build commerce has dropped, and the door is open to anyone who wants to walk through it.

Check out these demos for inspiration.

1. Showroom

There are people who pause a show to look at the furniture or the clothes. Showroom is built for those people. Imagine you're watching season 3 of Severance on your phone or tablet, and you can't pull yourself away from the screen. Not because of the show, but because of the brass lamp on Mark's terminal. Showroom turns that curiosity into a click. Tap the lamp, get the lamp. Showroom returns similar options from other merchants: same shade, same swing arm, in stock and ready to ship.

Visual matching is mostly a solved problem. AI can identify a mid-century brass desk lamp with a swing arm in a video frame. The harder part is finding that lamp in stock from a merchant. Showroom works because Catalog turns the AI's visual identification into matches: same material, same style era, same general form. That's only possible because Catalog API normalizes product data across countless merchants. Every brass lamp gets tagged consistently. Every "mid-century" gets defined the same way. The standardization is invisible to the shopper, but it's the reason visual search actually finds the right product.

2. All Set ✈️

All Set feels more like an editorial spread than a packing app. You pick a destination (Paris in summer, Kyoto in spring, Marrakech in fall), and then you get a shoppable list. A wool dress with the right hemline, or weatherproof boots that won't read "hiking."

All Set thinks about your trip the way you would. So not just "poncho" but how a plastic poncho for backpacking reads differently from a knit poncho for a music festival. AI can do that contextual interpretation. What it can't do is verify those products are real, in stock, and priced right.

That's where Catalog API comes in. It gives the AI a clean, structured view of products across millions of Shopify merchants, with consistent taxonomy and real-time accuracy. The AI can filter by size, gender, color, 3D model, and video - the building blocks for narrowing billions of products down to the right few. When All Set tells you what to pack, the items are real, current, and buyable. Catalog is the platform that turns AI's contextual reasoning into recommendations you can act on.

3. Starred ♏

Meet Starred, where your daily horoscope arrives with a small constellation of things to try.

You tap your sign, and you get a reading plus three shoppable items that complement it: a piece of black tourmaline for grounding, magnesium bath salts for good sleep, a beeswax candle from a small Brooklyn maker. Real products from real Shopify merchants, most of whom probably never imagined themselves on a horoscope app.

The crystal sellers and candle makers showing up in Starred didn't optimize for this. They didn't have to. Their products live in Catalog with rich, structured detail about what they are and how they can be used. So when Starred queries for "grounding crystal" or "calming bath salt" tied to a specific astrological moment, it finds matches because the Shopify Catalog has already done the contextual work. Catalog is the search layer underneath all of this. It organizes products so any AI-powered experience can find the right thing for the moment, even one no merchant planned for.

4. Sourced ️

With Sourced, you drop an image and watch it explode into products. Upload a photo of a kid's bedroom with a fox motif, and matching products fan out around the image like a Pinterest moodboard pulled apart for inspection: the bunk bed, the fox prints, the camel plush, the paper lanterns, the matching dressers. Tap any item to source closer matches.


Sourced is the cleanest demonstration of Catalog's ability to match similar products found across its dataset. When Sourced sees a rocking chair in your photo, it queries Catalog for products matching that category and aesthetic. The type of input doesn't matter to Catalog; it returns structured data that any experience can use.

5. Pippin

Pippin is a sleepy twenty-sided die that helps you craft the perfect game night. When you wake it up, Pippin asks you a few questions out loud-how many players, how long, how chaotic-and pulls board games from real merchants that match the vibe you want. You talk to it. It talks back.

Pippin shops by listening, which doesn't sound like much until you realize what that means. If Catalog can power commerce through a back-and-forth spoken conversation with a bookish polyhedron, it can power commerce through anything: a chatbot, a terminal, a screen on a refrigerator. Catalog works across any surface. And when new surfaces emerge, Shopify merchants are there. They put their products in Catalog once, and Catalog handles the rest.

The door is open

For developers, designers, anyone with an idea, Catalog API turns Shopify into a commerce backbone for the rest of the internet. Build a niche app for a specific community, a specific moment, a specific surface no one has thought of yet. Catalog handles the product complexity. UCP handles the full commerce journey. You bring the imagination.

Anything built on Catalog is a new surface where merchants' products can show up. The real story is what gets built next.

See what else you can build in the Spring '26 Edition.