On February 24, 2021, Shipit!, our monthly event series, presented Making Commerce Extensible with WebAssembly. The video is now available. At Shopify we aim to make what most merchants need easy, and the rest possible. We make the rest possible by exposing interfaces to query, extend and alter our Platform. These interfaces empower a rich ecosystem of Partners to solve a variety of problems. The primary mechanism of this ecosystem is an “App”, an independently hosted web service which communicates with Shopify over the network. This model is powerful, but comes with a host of technical issues. Partners are stretched beyond their available resources as they have to build a web service that can operate at Shopify’s scale. Even if Partners’ resources were unlimited, the network latency incurred when communicating with Shopify precludes the use of Apps for time sensitive use cases.