[seibelj]

Thanks for your write up. After my own failed attempt I came to the conclusion that any product based primarily on aggregating products that others sell is a failed model. You are a middle man in an already thin-margin industry and are competing directly with shops (who are incentivized to have customers come directly to them and bypass you) and other aggregators. It would be better if you became a drop shipper and sold the products yourself. Much more control, and the audience you were building with ads would have stayed.

[aherlambang]

The point of having an aggregator is not to have a headache with stock keepings and shippings, on the other hand doing an aggregator leads you to have less control over the products and customer service. Each has its own drawbacks

[seibelj]

Yes I understand the thought process, but as you wrote in detail, it was a failed model. The benefits to being an aggregator (lack of stock and shipping headaches) is far outweighed by the negatives (lack of control, competition, lack of loyalty, little money).

If you were building a shopping platform, and getting loyalty, perhaps you should have just sold the items yourself. The experience would have been much better, for sure.

[aherlambang]

So any successful aggregators out there? I think the closest one seemed to be pinterest

[skewart]

There are lots of successful aggregators: NerdWallet and Credit Karma for credit cards and financial products, all the different car shopping sites, also Trulia/Zillow for real estate.

All of those companies have a clear value proposition for buyers (one place where you can get information instead of lots of scattered websites that might or might not be helpful). They also tend to have strategically strong customer acquisition channels that give them some degree of leverage with sellers (i.e. they can say, do what we want or else we'll stop passing buyers through to you).

[eterm]

I think it's interesting you mention real estate and cars, neither of which are impulse buys.

Aggregation makes sense in markets where the buyer knows that they have to buy, but don't know what/which/where to buy, but seems to do worse in markets where purchasing is done on impulse.

[aherlambang]

Interesting analysis, how about news aggregation :)

[w1ntermute]

> any product based primarily on aggregating products that others sell is a failed model

What about eBay?

[blcArmadillo]

I don't think eBay is really an aggregation service; it's a platform on which people directly sell items. An aggregation service on the other hand goes out and finds shops already selling items through other platforms and provides one place where you can search all these shops. They would then presumably collect some sort of commission on sales.

[seibelj]

eBay is not forwarding you to third-party websites in order to purchase products. They are listing products directly. The company the author was creating forwarded you to someone else. In return the store paid a monthly fee. Essentially this company was targeted lead-gen, and stores paid a fee for them to do the work and drive traffic.

[w1ntermute]

My bad, I didn't realize the OP's company was forwarding traffic to a 3rd party. That's indeed a bad idea.