Executive summary
- What: The Global Catalog REST API, deprecated in April 2026, stops serving traffic on November 2, 2026. After that date calls to it simply fail.
- Why: Shopify is consolidating cross-merchant product discovery onto Global Catalog MCP, which implements the Universal Commerce Protocol rather than a bespoke REST contract.
- Who: Any app or service that still calls the Global Catalog REST endpoints. Storefront Catalog consumers and single-store integrations are not in scope.
What changed
This is a hard cutoff rather than a deprecation warning. The API was marked deprecated six months ago, and November 2 is the date traffic stops being served. No grace period has been announced.
The replacement is Global Catalog MCP, an MCP server that conforms to the UCP Catalog capability and its MCP binding. Rather than REST resources, it exposes three tools. searchcatalog takes a text query, an image, or a set of product IDs and returns similar items. lookupcatalog resolves known identifiers to current catalogue data. get_product takes a product or variant ID and returns options, pricing and seller checkout links.
The shape of the integration differs too. Results are clustered by Universal Product ID and can include offers from several merchants, and the intended flow is two steps: discover candidates, then evaluate a specific product. Teams building a single-store experience should use Storefront Catalog MCP instead, which is a different server with a narrower scope.
Why it matters
For most Shopify Plus merchants the direct exposure is low, because Global Catalog is a cross-merchant discovery surface rather than a storefront dependency. The exposure that does exist sits in custom apps, comparison tools and agent integrations built by internal teams or partners over the past year, and those are exactly the integrations nobody has looked at recently.
The timing deserves attention. November 2 lands immediately before peak trading. An integration that quietly stops returning data in the first week of November will be discovered at the worst possible moment, and the fix is a rewrite against a different protocol rather than a configuration change. Treat this as a pre-peak readiness item, not a post-peak cleanup task.
The migration is also an opportunity to stop maintaining a bespoke client. UCP is a published specification with a CLI and tooling around it, so the work you do now is portable rather than Shopify specific. If you are building a pre-peak checklist, our guidance on avoiding costly downtime covers how to catch dependencies like this before they bite.
Role-specific impact
- Marketers: No direct impact unless a product discovery or comparison feature you rely on is built on the retiring API. Ask which of your tools touch Global Catalog before November.
- Developers: Search your codebases for Global Catalog REST calls, then rebuild against the MCP tools. Expect to rework response handling, since results cluster by Universal Product ID rather than returning flat resources.
- Store admins: Request written confirmation from each app vendor that their integration does not depend on the retiring endpoints, and keep the replies.
Use-case example
Real-world scenario
A distributor built an internal assortment tool last year that queries Global Catalog REST to compare its own listings against competing offers on roughly 2,000 SKUs. The tool runs nightly and feeds a pricing review meeting.
On November 3 the nightly job fails silently and the review meeting proceeds on stale data. A rewrite against lookupcatalog and getproduct is perhaps three to five days of engineering work. Scheduled in October, that is routine. Discovered in November, it is three weeks of pricing decisions made without competitive input during the highest revenue period of the year.
Implementation checklist
- Search every repository and serverless function for calls to Global Catalog REST endpoints, including scripts outside your main application.
- List the apps and partner integrations in your Shopify org that could plausibly use cross-merchant catalogue data, and ask each vendor directly.
- For each confirmed dependency, decide whether Global Catalog MCP or Storefront Catalog MCP is the correct replacement based on whether the use case spans merchants.
- Rebuild the integration against searchcatalog, lookupcatalog and get_product, and update response handling for Universal Product ID clustering.
- Run the old and new paths side by side and compare output before you cut over.
- Complete the cutover and decommission the old client well before November 2, 2026.
FAQ
Q: Will calls degrade gradually or stop outright?
A: Shopify states the API stops serving traffic on the date. Plan for an outright stop rather than a throttle.
Q: Does this affect our storefront or checkout?
A: No. Global Catalog is a cross-merchant discovery API consumed by apps and agents. Your storefront, checkout and admin are unaffected, as are Storefront Catalog integrations scoped to a single store.
Resources
Global Catalog MCP documentation
Need guidance? Talk to Makro.