[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.

[Semaphor]

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

Never seen a "best" outside of amazon, which does weird shit even without any affiliate fees. And "cheapest" is not really up to the site, unless they want to go under quite quickly.

[zo1]

Many if not all are like that. It's like everyone wants to take advantage of the lack of perfect information in the marketplace, as opposed to actually being helpful for consumers.

[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.

[SantiagoRuberto]

<< 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. >>

What were your plans to solve this problem?

[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.

[timthelion]

Yeah, here in Czechia I always look at https://www.heureka.cz/ first.

[olivermuty]

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

[pbmonster]

Amazon has no direct presence in Switzerland, but you can order a fraction of its products from neighboring countries. Many products are not available, mainly because nobody wants to deal with customs once the product crosses the EU boarder.

Amazon itself never moved into Switzerland in the first place for many reasons (small market, unusual customs situation, relatively high salary for warehouse workers), and in the meantime the largest Swiss supermarket chain created an Amazon clone which became hugely popular pretty much immediately: Galaxus.ch

[SushiHippie]

If you wouldn't have said that it's basically the Amazon in Switzerland, I'd have thought that this is some blogspam dropshipping site...

[timthelion]

Amazon is a blogspam drop shipping site in Europe

[VPenkov]

There are alternatives throughout Europe. The Balkans have Emag, Benelux has bol.com. I think in both regions Amazon is less popular. I'm sure there are other examples.

[gsa]

The Netherlands has plenty of them. Tweakers.net is a price tracker for electronics and such (eg: computer parts, phones, laptops etc) and usually it's easier to find a shop cheaper than Amazon. I have some go to stores for my needs because their content is organised way better than Amazon. I also find some alternatives better than Amazon because they have free next day shipping, something that's not free on Amazon.

[DeathArrow]

Emag in Romania. I hate it, they bought most of the competition, they did a lot of anticompetitive things, but it's really easy to buy from them.

[amne]

At some point, a couple of years ago when they introduced marketplace, I actually thought they are aiming for an "exit" to Amazon. They really got the service part of e-commerce nailed down. Merchants quality is and always will be an issue, but it is the same as on Amazon.

[julesvr]

hagglezon.com to compare Amazon variant prices

[vargr616]

bol.com in the Netherlands

[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.

[DeathArrow]

Then the problem seem to be the lack of users.

Have you tried having an YouTube channel, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, blog and explain daily how you built the website, how your platform is going to help users?

[senecaso]

we did have channels on various sites, yes. However, its difficult to maintain a steady stream of content there for people to consume. Not only that, but you have the same discoverability problems as you do for the main site. Also, a blog outlining how you built the site may be of limited value. At least my experience on that front was it would generate short-lived bursts of traffic, but wouldnt generate returning users. So I think those articles were mostly appealing to technical users, and not necessarily users who were looking to do some shopping. Of course technical users do also shop, but after reading a technical article, they probably arent looking to immediately shop, and without some other mechanism putting the site in front of them again when they needed to shop, we would miss the opportunity.

[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.

[slim]

looks like simptoms of no market. maybe you were solving a problem already solved by amazon ? most shops on shopify also use amazon

[senecaso]

Many shops do double list, this is true. However, I don't think its a solved problem. There are many people who do not want to shop on Amazon for their own reasons. There are also people who want to shop locally, and Amazon provides no mechanism to do so (that I'm aware of). There are also many smaller shops who simply cannot afford to list on Amazon, as there are considerable fees associated with running a successful business there. It was these smaller shops who we were initially building to serve, to provide a funnel for them.

Still, there were problems with our solution that if addressed may have provided a better market fit. If we had had more runway, we would have worked to address them, but that simply wasn't in the cards.

[DeathArrow]

To me it seems like a small market. And worse, it's hard to conquer that small market since it's very fragmented. Even if you had money for advertisements, it still would have been hard.

On the plus side, though, if you had the skills to build that platform, you certainly have the skill to build a more profitable and easier to monetize platform.

[DeathArrow]

>looks like simptoms of no market. maybe you were solving a problem already solved by amazon ? most shops on shopify also use amazon

FAANGS get around this by creating problems that they will offer to solve.

[berkes]

Not in all countries though. Amazon isn't present or popular, or as omnipresent in many countries.

That's an opportunity, I guess.

[MuffinFlavored]

> We spent time posting in forums helping people find items they were looking for,

Did you run any analytics on how much overlap there was across Shopify sites on "similar items" (Alibaba resellers/dropshippers)?

[senecaso]

we didn't, no, but we spent a lot of time sifting through our catalog, and there was a _tremendous_ amount of crap in there. We manually curated and purged shops that were obviously just dropshipping or looked like out-right scams.

[avereveard]

Can't you sample ten random product then ask a llm to rate the shop on a scale from drop shipped to artisanal as a first approximation?

[senecaso]

I doubt it would be that easy, but, ya, using some form of automation is necessary. We devised a few rudimentary way to filter out the chaff, and it did quite well to remove the garbage. Still some would slip through, so it still required vigilance to remove them when you happen to see them.

[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!