Love to see that you have posted again, I commented on your post last time!
I have two main questions here.
Firstly, why would Shopify or Woocommerce not build this themselves? And secondly, how do you intend to drive traffic to the web? I can see how you will solve the search function at scale, but I see a bigger hurdle in driving initial traffic to the site
Thanks! Looking back at your comment history, apologies for not responding to your comment last time. And appreciate your email after that post with advice as well.
So, Shopify does have something similar called the shop.app which is only for Shopify stores. My best guess is that the e-commerce platforms are solving a different problem: store creation. I'll also note that each individual e-commerce platform isn't incentivized to aggregate and send users to stores not built with their platform. When we launched in December, we only had Shopify stores. Now we have Shopify and WooCommerce, and working on support for Squarespace and Wix sites as well.
For user traffic, the primary strategy is to build features with a viral loop back to the product. I mentioned this in another comment but we have have the concept of making shareable 'lists' of products you like. This is already working for us, at a small scale.
The general plan is to aggregate as many e-commerce products as possible from different platforms, keep improving the search experience, add automated filters to ensure high quality products, and then keep layering in features that drive a viral loop back to Agora.
Makes sense, so you will basically focus on discovery of e-commerce products which would then allow you to "sell" traffic to merchants?
On the user strategy side, hope that works, if you can get the viral loops going and constant organic traffic, this could be a success.
I'll get back to you if I come up with any ideas which can help!
Generally, yes. From early conversations, it's both about the quantity and quality of traffic. For example, 100 qualified leads to their site that searched for a very specific product on Agora is better than 1,000 random leads landing on their site. The baseline assumption is that a user with higher purchase-intent will lead to a higher conversion rate once on the store site.
