Comment by callmeed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by callmeed | Hacker News Reader

I built this a couple years ago (now defunct) for the same reason :) The public JSON endpoints on shopify stores make it pretty easy to get the data. You mentioned using Mongo but it sounds expensive. I honestly think you could do this with just elastic or even postgres full text search and save money.

Here's a pro tip + feature you should implement: Shopify has a semi-hidden hack where you can link directly to checkout of a product if you know the variant ID. You could add a BUY NOW button to your site without forcing the user to navigate the original site or checkout flow. Example: https://hapaboardshop.com/cart/42165521907955 (it also supports quantities and coupon codes)

A word of caution: more products isn't necessarily better. I definitely found there to be a long tail of really bad shopify stores and products. IMO it's better to curate or audit the stores you index–otherwise you risk your site being littered with kitchy t-shirts or drop-shipping garbage.

Thanks for the heads up! I spent some time trying to get the cart route to work. Doesn't seem to be supported anymore (link you sent leads to a 404 page). Tried it with every combination of Product ID, Variant ID, etc. Let me know if you have any ideas on how to get this to work. It would be a great feature to add to Agora.

And I agree on quality over quantity. Writing a script to remove all stores that are shutdown, products that are sold out, and a few other characteristics. Heavily focusing on the search algorithm and data quality now.

I didnt know about the link to checkout. That's a slightly nicer user experience for sure. Still, its confusing for users who want to do more shopping at the same time. I had users who clicked on a number of items, clicked "add to cart" in each one (all different shops), and then couldn't figure out how to checkout on the main site afterwards! Obviously people were looking for a more complete one-stop-shopping experience than I was providing at the time.

I mean a single checkout from multiple shopify stores isn't really possible (at least by 3rd parties)

My hypothesis is that, if you could drive traffic to your site and offer a fast checkout experience, there's probably multiple ways to monetize that. Driving the traffic is the hard part.

>otherwise you risk your site being littered with kitchy t-shirts or drop-shipping garbage.

You mean like Amazon?

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