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Comment by cameronpm | Hacker News Reader

Shop app (made by shopify) has had cross shopify search for a few months in beta. I recommend trying it out! I worked on the infrastructure for this.

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Love the Shop app. But one major compliant is that there is no email verification. So I get notified of every order that accidentally used my email address (common Indian name @ gmail.com). Wish I could only be notified of orders that I placed.

Stopgap solution until they fix it: change it to name+shopify @ gmail

You might need to make it more unique if someone else had that idea.

The problem is that some rando is using his email.

No it seems like the name is just common, so someone else mistypes their own email and it then becomes common indian name@gmail.com, which is actually OP's email

I actually have people use my gmail.com like this. Someone even signed up for facebook with this. I accidentally clicked 'yes' like an idiot and then it took months before they'd let my email off the bloody account.

Everyone uses my (real first name / not my middle name) email for all sorts of receipts. I've received African tenant agreements, some dude's Intel payroll document, all sorts of shit.

That's pretty funny. Sorry for the trouble. This has literally never happened to me. There are two other Arthur Collé's in the world, hopefully the booby traps work and I become the one true king one of these days

Does that mean you also get the email receipt for every transactions?

Yup. Email receipt. Tracking information.

>> So I get notified of every order that accidentally used my email address (common Indian name @ gmail.com).

Someone needs to solve the (common Indian name @ gmail.com) problem. Preferably, Google/Gmail would solve this. But my email gets signed up on a daily basis to new services.

I’ve got that problem too with my username minus the “the” at gmail. It’s so annoying.

Super sweet. I love Shop app. Tracking shipments is a nice way to get app installs... and you can backdoor a shopping experience as you roll out new versions. Well played!

It's funny, I sent them an email long long long time ago asking if there was some way to source all products on Shopify so I could build just this. Maybe they noted it and turned it into a product.

No offense intended, but I doubt it. It is a good idea, but it's also an obvious idea.

This reminds me of my number one response when "friends" come to me with startup ideas.

Your company is another company's feature. As in, you are trying to build a business, on something that is an afterthought, tiny feature for an existing company to add.

This comment reminds me of this post with discusses the feature -> product -> company evolution: https://medium.com/@sethlevine/the-feature-product-company-c...

What company isn't? My problem with this is that I can't think of a company that started as anything other than a missing feature.

Start with a bigger idea. Shopify isn't a missing feature. Why not take them on?

Showing the store is certainly a trivially missing feature of Amazon's.

Shopify has been around for a while—since before Amazon became the everything-retailer that they are now. It started out of frustration at the myriad annoyances in trying to get set up using osCommerce and other tools of that generation.

(Disclaimer: employee)

None taken.

I think an even better solution would be a curated search. Like Amazon there are plenty of dropshipping low quality stores / products on Shopify. I would like someone to build out a search of the best 500 stores.

Shop app has a bunch of curated search areas in it, I would check it out!

I had a look, #1 there doesn't seem to be a search option (maybe not public to all yet?). #2 I had a look at some of the stores shown in the "search" icon tab, aka explore, but how am I meant to find out if something is just a dropshipping product from ali, marked up at 400% or a genuine, good quality product, worth spending $40 on. (the one I saw, could well have gone fro $4 on ali)

That, and I hope this arrives on desktop, I dislike shopping on mobile, makes it hard to compare and verify a product isn't cramp from ali.

How is this not Amazon minus each storefront page is custom designed?

One main distinction is that Shopify shops have a direct to consumer relationship. They can send you emails, and build up a brand. Amazon keeps the customer relationship, and if you succeed, they'll try to commoditize you. So it isn't that much different for the user (with a unified checkout out cart), but is much better for the store owner.

Edit: you might find this article about the differences between the Shopify and Amazon ecosystems interesting

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/magazine/shopify.html

I worked on the shop app too (backend and iOS app). Small world.

I’ve moved on from shopify but still use the app.

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