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Comment by StriverGuy | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off topic but I am always surprised Shopify hasn't every created something akin to the amazon homepage that allows you to browse and find items at shopify stores more seamlessly.

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You can do this with the Shop mobile app (it's an official Shopify product). I think stores are defaulted to showing up but they have are able to opt out.

I've wanted this exact same thing. I've used `site:myshopify.com item` to search via Shopify URL pattern in Google

Unfortunately that will exclude any Shopify powered store that has a custom domain.

Didn’t Google use to have an “inhtml:” operator or something that let you search for matches in the html of pages? Shopify powered websites have commonalities in their html that can give away very quickly the fact to a crawler that it is powered by Shopify, just by looking at the html of the main landing page of the shop.

Also, the DNS entry for a Shopify hosted site, even if using a custom domain, will be either a CNAME pointing to shops.myshopify.com, or an A record pointing to an IP address owned by Shopify, like 23.227.38.65. https://who.is/whois-ip/ip-address/23.227.38.65

We were surprised by this as well, but since one didn't exist, we started to create one!

https://vendazzo.com/

We still have a long ways to go, but you can search for items and filter based on things like category and distance (if you are trying to shop locally). We're doing things on a very tight budget at the moment, so sometimes the site goes down, but we're working on it :)

If you have any feedback, we would love to hear it.

Is it broken? It just says "An error occurred" when I typed "Plushie" and then "Fruit"

Yep, it just went down. We've been using spot instances, and those are hard to come by around Black Friday. I'll look into it.

back up!

Interesting! Could you explain how did you manage to find sites and how can you know where are they based?

Right now, we gather location data from the pages themselves. Some shops (not many) include an address. The process is very error-prone though, so our accuracy in this area is likely not where we want it to be. We are working on other ways to improve that.

Seems like you would also take a lot of responsibility for the negative experiences from that pathway.

Store scams someone and Shopify takes the hit.

Yep, amazon takes a lot of earned hate for all the scammers on the platform. The current setup has shopify as not a real consumer brand and just a piece of infrastructure like how your VPS host isn't part of the store.

No website but check out the Shop app on your phone. Kind of does that. I also really enjoy the product tracking.

They did/do this. One of the big problems is competing with customers. i.e. you go from being a platform (Windows, Unity, Shopify, etc) to an aggregator (Amazon, Spotify, Instagram, etc) and your relationship goes from the small store to Shopify. Similar to how you might browse Doordash for "food", rather than look specifically for "Chipotle".

Upside of an aggregator is discovery/distribution. Downside is you rely on the aggregator for that discovery/distribution.

Rare for billion dollar businesses to be built on aggregators, not so rare for them to be built on platforms.

Despite using the same platform, no two companies setup their product catalogs the same way, from how multiple products/colorways are grouped together to metafields are used to communicate more nuanced product features. There's simply no way Shopify could hope to present a unified catalog given those implementation nuances.

Yep, this is pretty much it. Amazon has the advantage that they are able to force their sellers to specify metadata about their products in very specific ways, which allows them to build on top of that consistency. With Shopify, as tomnipotent said, its all over the place, and it only gets worse as you cross languages.

I've seen both Amazon itself and sellers use wildly inconsistent ways listing products using the "multiple flavors of this item" functionality.

Probably hands-down the most irritating metadata issue with Amazon is when sellers don't include quantity information properly - or even include quantity in the title when selling just one size - which I'm sure they do on purpose to make price per unit shopping more difficult.

Sometimes the way the items are listed will be different between one product and another made by the same company, or between Amazon's listing and a third party's listing for the same general product...and they each have different types of the item available. Say, Amazon will sell Ken's Socks in purple and blue, all sizes in purple but only small in blue...while Blankenship E

Things seem to get especially messy when you have a matrix of two 'flavors' (such as a sub-model and color, or unit size), and not all combinations were manufactured or available.

Even the UI isn't consistent. Sometimes it's a drop-down list, sometimes it's the rectangles.

Oh, and often the model/part number isn't entered...

Maybe it could be opt-in. Specify your metadata in a certain way and you can get in a central homepage.

This feels like the right answer. Everyone already does this already for product feeds to Facebook/Google.

Why would anyone want to filter by that though? I should not want to purchase from people who use a different payment processor?

Wouldn’t it be a huge risk in some ways? People don’t know site xyz is Shopify until they’re on xyz and therefore probably have no qualms with Shopify hosting xyz. If it were a marketplace, someone “just browsing” would find something that offends their oh-so-delicate sensibilities and the next day some grotesque exaggeration like “Shopify supports terrorists” or “Shopify is pro/anti-abortion” leads the headline news.

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