[senecaso]

I hope you have better luck than I did!

A few years ago, my partner and I built vendazzo.com (now defunct). It was an e-commerce search engine on products listed on Shopify shops (sound familiar? :)). At the time, we had > 100m products listed, and I don't remember how many shops we were indexing.. over 100k I think, but we had access to over a million. Overall, I think your approach is very similar to ours, but we managed to keep our costs lower. At the time, we were spending ~$550/mo, and our search times were under 300ms. We had established partnerships with a number of shops, and we had a few users, but not nearly enough. That's where the wheels came off. The site operated for over a year, but the monthly costs wore us down until we finally decided to pull the plug.

I still maintain that this is a good idea, and constantly have to fight off the urge to "try again", however, to do it properly, I think funding would be necessary, or finding some way to organically gain a lot of users.

Looking back, there are things I could have done to reduce my opex further, but in the end, it still wouldn't have mattered if I couldn't figure out how to acquire users.

[DeathArrow]

>but in the end, it still wouldn't have mattered if I couldn't figure out how to acquire users

In EU there are many price comparison engines with millions or billions of products. I don't know how popular they are. Some monetize trough ads, some have partnership with stores and you can buy directly from the search results.

I generally search first on the local Amazon equivalent, if I don't like what I see, I search on a smaller store. If I still can't find or dislike the products or prices I search Google. If I am still not contended with the results, I will go search on comparison engines.

And I also have a browser extension called Pricy who polls the comparison engines, so once I land in a product page I know which store has the better price and what was the price history through last year.

Probably many people have similar patterns. I expect people in US to search Amazon first, if it's not a very niche product they are after.

I think you can have a better monetization proposal, if instead of just search you build a sales platform, so people can directly buy after searching, without hoping to various websites.

[berkes]

Unfortunately many of these "comparison" websites have a businesses model built on affiliate fees.

It doesn't take much imagination to predict which products show up as "best" or "cheapest".

And the fairer ones have to keep playing cat and mouse with shops lowering pricing when they detect a scraper coming by. Or employ tricks to make their shipping seem free, lowering their overall price on the comparison platform.

[senecaso]

We were intentionally limiting the number of products and shops we were indexing due to opex. We needed to keep it low enough to provide ourselves with enough runway to keep things floating for longer.

pricerunner is another site which operates in a similar space. We had plans to build out the price tracking and a number of other features, so that we would appeal more to users who had your use cases. Sadly, we weren't getting enough traction. We did have regular users from the EU, but we simply couldn't seem to get in front of enough eyeballs for it to matter. At least at first, I expect that a large amount of your traffic to a new site like this has to be driven by Google, and we failed on that front as well. I'm not an SEO expert, so there were likely many things we did wrong or didn't even do which lead to this situation.

re: a sales platform, that's a pretty big challenge to take on, which would require massive investment up front. Not sure thats a viable route for most. We did have plans to address the "without hoping to various websites" problem, as we identified that as problematic for users very early on. The solution was relatively simple, but required more money to build out. We simply ran out of funds before we could get there.

[wingerlang]

> In EU there are many price comparison engines with millions or billions of products. I don't know how popular they are.

Anecdotally, I guess, I'd say extremely popular. I never search for products anywhere else.

[olivermuty]

What do you consider the local Amazon variant? And which country?

[bruce511]

Im curious why you consider lack of users to be the problem. I would have described it as lack of revenue.

What plans did you have for generating revenue from the site? (Serious question - given your low costs it would seem like a tiny amount of revenue would gave been enough.)

[senecaso]

Our business model revolved around referrals, so lack of users directly translated to lack of revenue. While its true that even if we had millions of users but none of them were buying sponsored items we would have had a revenue problem, that wasn't the problem we were facing, as the few users we did have were in fact purchasing sponsored items.

[pencildiver]

Thanks for sharing this! If you're up for it, I'd love to talk more about your experience, especially the technical tooling. Working as fast as I can to understand the right way to approach the tech, as there are tradeoffs with performance and price. I'm at support @ searchagora .com

[bytearray]

What strategies did you consider or implement to attract more users, and what would you do differently now to ensure better user acquisition?

[senecaso]

We had no capital, so advertising or solutions that basically involved "throwing money at the problem" were off the table for us.

We spent time posting in forums helping people find items they were looking for, and we had a few posts here on HN that generated short-lived, explosive traffic bursts. I remember those days we had posts get picked up on HN, it was always an exciting night!

We were looking at influencers and getting our name getting bloggers to talk about us, but, again, without capital, our options were very limited here. I'm sure someone with more of a marketing background would have found a bunch of ways we could have generated organic user growth, but neither me or my business partner had that skill set.

If I were to do it again, I think I would try to get someone with a marketing background involved to help gain traction. Without that, even the best product in the world will die of starvation if no one finds it.

[grumpyviscacha]

Wow, it's cool to see this idea trending on HN! Full disclosure, I'm one of the co-founders at https://www.marmalade.co. Speaking from personal experience, it’s been a long road getting from the universe of all Shopify products to a curated inventory that’s easy for people to shop on. While ChatGPT isn't going to replace human curation anytime soon, the AI tailwind has made it much easier to build search and recommendation systems. On our end, we've definitely caught the semantic search bug. Watch out for it - you’ll wake up one day with a cross-modal hybrid search index on pinecone and any number of models on huggingface :). However, as you rightly point out, user growth is still the key. We're working toward launching a community aspect of the platform in the coming months as a solution.

[senecaso]

You site looks good, and your results are fantastic! Job well done. I did hit a server error though, so obviously still some issues to work out, but overall, really well done. Moving to semantic search was one of my top priorities before we went under, but I struggled to justify the costs of it as we were operating on a shoestring budget.

Best of luck to you and your team on user acquisition!