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Comment by TravisSc6tt | Hacker News Reader

That's a good point. Initially I would only include big-name stores. If you searched for filing drawers you may see results from Office Depot, Staples, or directly from whoever makes filing drawers. When you order from those websites, you know you're getting a product shipped directly from them. When you order from Amazon, you don't know who is selling you the product (more often than not it's from a third-party seller).

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If I want a filing drawer from Office Depot, I can just go to the Office Depot website. And if I want an oven mitt from Walmart, I can just go to Walmart. By which I mean that there's not much curation going on because at the scale of everything from filing mitts to oven drawers there can't be.

Curation of oven-mitt offerings means that there's someone who is obsessed with oven-mitts sorting through all the different offerings. If it scales it isn't curation.

I see what you're saying, but I'm not curating products--I'm curating online stores on which users can then find products. Does that make sense?

I understand what you are doing. It makes sense in the sense that it's easy. And it makes sense in the sense that there are a myriad of webscraping "middleman" services so there's probably a business there.

However, to me, it's not curation in a meaningful sense because big box stores sell the same white label oven mitts from the same factories as Amazon. And for oven mitts and filling drawers fakes aren't a problem when purchasing from Amazon.

It's not clear to me, what problem it would solve. But I wish you all success.

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