[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.

[matterofBee]

GP is correct. There is not much value in search itself.

Are you serious about Amazon? I can absolutely find everything I need on Amazon. Who needs exact search when there are better alternatives through recommendation, people also buy etc?

I am curious to know — if you think search on amazon as broken as you think, why do you think people keep buying from Amazon? They have strong logistic network. But, to even start that logistics part, you need to search and buy.

[rrr_oh_man]

Amazon (as of today, in Europe, for me) is a Wish with better logistics and replacement policy.

If I search for a product like a milk former or a wine opener or a phone case, I already expect the results to be 80% copycat crap and the reviews fake.

Adjusted ratings by various fake spotter tools usually bring down 4.5+ ratings down to 3.0–3.5.

That the search engine absolutely refuses sometimes to include words I want and exclude words I don’t want is the icing on the cake.

If I didn’t forget the renewal date, I’d have quit Prime (which I subscribed to since its introduction) already last year.