Don't take this as a harsh criticism but I want to know what problem are you solving? Is this just for fun?
This is a lose-lose game. You will never be able to catch up to the providers (shopify and woocommerce and others).
What you are doing is not a search problem. It is a traffic problem of which you have little to none. There is a reason why Instagram and FB works as a driver for ecommerce products. My suggestion is to test the market before you invest too much in this area.
Finding products that aren't on Amazon or other top sites is a problem for consumers. Google Shopping is pretty bad. Connecting buyers direct to merchants is a win and something they all want.
Every single entity that sells online is trying to boost their revenue share for direct to consumer as a mandate. Because they get more margin and they get to know their customer for ongoing marketing. The pandemic exposed many product manufacturers and brands that had such a high % in brick and mortar partners. They frantically tossed inventory onto Amazon. The only problems with that are
1) amazon tax on sales and
2) they don't get to know their customers.
Indeed aggregated job postings until it had traffic and then it became the place to post jobs.
Google was nothing against other providers until it did better search. And then they got traffic and built a solid ad product that providing bidding on effective cpc not highest bid like competitors were doing. They rewarded better peforming ads and rewarded themselves ($$$) at the same time and the rest is history.
Your thesis is not accurate. This can work. Typically though, these things require a lot of capital until they make real money. Tech costs and then marketing which is really education can be expensive.
Most users originate ecomm searches from Amazon (60%) [1]. Next highest is Google
If the search works really well though, word of mouth can be everything.
I'd probably focus on the audience that has income and would prefer to buy direct from merchants and not search and buy from Amazon which can be painful (too much crap, fakes, bad reviews, doesn't always have high end products, not always cheaper, etc). Maybe even focus on higher priced items first ($250 or $500 and up). They'll likely have better content associated with them, there's typically more margin, and there are a lot of high end products not sold on Amazon, only direct.
Hacker news has a good launch audience for this. Also probably Etsy buyers and merchants.
Not that you would be interested in this - but ecomm search for influencer sponsored products would probably do very well as a niche product. About 11% of searches originate on TikTok. Younger people are into who is hawking what for some reason lol. You could even rank most popular sponsored posts for the celebs too as a leaderboard for the biggest shills haha.
You refute my point and then agree with me that it can be expensive.
I worked for largest eCommerce employer twice and have built scraping and search systems at scale. I know a thing or two in eCommerce shopping sites. Do you know how much infra and people it takes to keep pricing, product, variant data up-to-date? Hint: It's significant capex investment.
Problem is entry point funnel in the shopping journey. If all he becomes an aggregator, it is no different than thousands out there. There is Shop.app which has all access to seller data and analytics. As I said, this is not a search problem. It is product discovery problem which you also seem to agree with. Unfortunately, not a lot of people/teams have managed to solve dicovery problem when site itself is fairly unknown.
Michael from YC also talks about product discovery being a tarpit idea.
I am not saying his search won't work. Search in itself is a solved problem here. You enter criteria/product name and you get results. But, unless you truly solve discovery, which in my opinion he can't do due to lack of first-party data, it won't do much besides a hopper site.
You never even commented that it can be expensive just said it's a terrible idea because it's "lose-lose" and a "traffic problem".
Anyway, I refuted ALL of your points and even supplied angles for keeping costs down while driving value to defined audiences.
I personally scraped and ML'd all AirBnB listings and calendar data every day for over a year to build a product. It didn't cost that much in time and $. Got a shit ton of value out of it. Someone even built a nice business doing exactly what I was doing.
If you look on the other thread for the OP, someone had done 100m products for $550/mo. You also must not understand that shopify and woocommerce have structured data available because you are talking about people being needed to keep product data up to date. They aren't scraping the frontend.
Personally I'm a riches in niches guy and a more defined audience and product set would be the way to go off of what they've started.
The ocean doesn't need to be boiled to provide value to consumers and to merchants here.
GP is correct. There is not much value in search itself.
Are you serious about Amazon? I can absolutely find everything I need on Amazon. Who needs exact search when there are better alternatives through recommendation, people also buy etc?
I am curious to know — if you think search on amazon as broken as you think, why do you think people keep buying from Amazon? They have strong logistic network. But, to even start that logistics part, you need to search and buy.
Amazon (as of today, in Europe, for me) is a Wish with better logistics and replacement policy.
If I search for a product like a milk former or a wine opener or a phone case, I already expect the results to be 80% copycat crap and the reviews fake.
Adjusted ratings by various fake spotter tools usually bring down 4.5+ ratings down to 3.0–3.5.
That the search engine absolutely refuses sometimes to include words I want and exclude words I don’t want is the icing on the cake.
If I didn’t forget the renewal date, I’d have quit Prime (which I subscribed to since its introduction) already last year.
I don't take it as harsh criticism. I try to remain intellectually honest about things so feedback and criticism is welcome. Just couldn't back to you earlier as our search experience went down.
For users (demand-side), the problem we solve: There are user groups that currently have a fragmented experience. For example, a specialized solar technician (just throwing out a random example) has to look through a handful of speciality stores to find and compare products that are only sold there. I think there are specific user-groups we can go after that really feel the pain right now of this process. Additionally, as the number of e-commerce platforms increases, it becomes tougher for every day users to find products they are looking for. They have to either go to Amazon or go store-by-store to discover products. The shop.app solves it for Shopify store but there's also millions of sites on WooCommerce, Squarespace, Wix, etc. We get around the empty-state problem with the crawler and now have merchants signing up to get their products indexed.
For merchants (supply-side), the problem we solve: If they sell on their own website, they have to compete against non-product pages on Google. For example, if you sell "red shoes" on your own site, you have to compete against the IMDB entry for the movie "Red Shoes" for people to find you. Additionally, if they sell on their own website and use Amazon (or any physical retailer) for distribution, they give up a percent of their margin. This increases your sell-through but is a smaller amount of money in your pocket.
I'll note that I've seen this problem first hand. In 2016 I launched a game called The 2016 Election Game, which was like Cards Against Humanity for the 2016 US elections. Sold about 5k units fulfilling order myself. And then again in 2020 called DoneWith2020, which was like Cards Against Humanity for the absurdity of the 2020 year. Sold about 34k units using mostly dropshipping. I remember losing out on search / discovery by choosing to sell on my own store but made a much higher margin on each sale (i.e. made about $15 on each $24.99 unit sold). We did work with a company to get on Amazon but always preferred people purchasing on our own site. It was also really hard to get high intent traffic to my store from ads. Would have been nice to send people searching for "funny card game" to my site. Now if everyone has my same dark sense of humor once they landed on the site, is up for debate.
The goal isn't to catch up to Shopify, WooCommerce, etc. but to rather aggregate products across platforms. I do think we can index most of e-commerce products sold on these platforms (my best guess is that it's somewhere between 10 - 20 billion products). This is obviously a very tough data hosting and search problem at that scale. Even Mongo, which is what we use as our primary database, has a limit of 2 billion records.
I agree that it's a traffic problem. Everything comes down to getting users. Based on the number of merchants signing up, we are validating that others have the supply-side problem. It's a matter of nailing down the demand-side problem (i.e. finding the right user groups, building the right features for engagement, etc). We use 'search' as the conduit, assuming that exceptional search will lead to more traffic. But agreed that there are several other factors to solve.
This is a lose-lose game. You will never be able to catch up to the providers (shopify and woocommerce and others).
What you are doing is not a search problem. It is a traffic problem of which you have little to none. There is a reason why Instagram and FB works as a driver for ecommerce products. My suggestion is to test the market before you invest too much in this area.