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Comment by senecaso | Hacker News Reader

Problems like this are why my business partner and I started building Vendazzo (https://vendazzo.com/). My partner had been looking for a way to run an independent shop, outside of Amazon, and realized there was no central way to funnel traffic to independent shops. Each shop is left to figure out how to get their name out there and get users onto their site, whereas if you sign up for Amazon, users are given a central search to search across all sellers and find the item(s) they are looking for.

Our product is very much a WIP, and will likely fall over with even modest load, but feel free to kick the tires. We have a lot of work we need to do, but if anyone (buyer or seller) has feedback, we would love to hear it. We're currently only indexing ~140k shops, and ~90m items, mostly from shops in the US, Canada, and Europe, but its a start.

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Heads up on your landing page. I didn’t know what I was supposed to type into the search box. Category, item, zip code?

Good to know! We'll have to add something in there to make it more obvious. At the moment, you can just search for the item you are looking for `red shoes`, `58 telecaster`, etc. The location filtering is after you search using the "filter" button, and it requires your location (currently). We plan to extend it to filter by ZIP as well, but we're not there yet. Also, of the 140k shops, we only have location data for ~20k of them. We're working on it.

Oh wow yeah, I really agree. GP - I think this is a great idea, and from your description here on HN it's really clear how to use it, and I thought parent commenter must be overstating it, but no it really looks like I might be supposed to enter where I want to shop, rather than what for.

It would help to preload some products (popular/trending at the moment perhaps?) I think or show some categories. So that it looks more like Amazon or any single shop, but the search gives you results from many.

I've wondered before why Shopify doesn't do this fwiw. Why isn't there a central shop entrypoint for all Shopify shops? Bit of crossover with Etsy perhaps, but probably the more serious end and beyond.

Thanks for the input! Ya, we are already working on getting featured items onto the main page to make it more obvious that its a shopping site and that you can search for the thing you're looking for. We will also look into adding a location filter right up front on the main page for users who specifically want to shop locally. Very small team at the moment, so changes take time, but we'll get there!

I would start fixing about page https://vendazzo.com/about

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