[exclusiv]

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.

[1] https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/online-shoppers-...

[rivercraft]

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.

[exclusiv]

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.

[rrr_oh_man]

> You enter criteria/product name and you get results

Not on Amazon. At least not since 2020 or so.