Comment by seanw265 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanw265 | Hacker News Reader

I assume that payments from purchases come from you guys, rather than me needing to create and manage an affiliate account with each individual vendor?

You say that commissions average 5%, but what is the variability and where does it come from?

Last, a bit of feedback about the product.

I tried searching "nintendo switch 2" on your homepage and the results that came up kind of sketched me out. You mention that the products are US-only, but the first result clearly says "hong kong" in the title. And the store listed is "My Nintendo Store PT"; is that the official store? When I google that it takes me to the Portuguese version of the nintendo website, and that makes me even more confused.

The second result for the same search appears to be a dress, which is obviously completely unrelated to video games in general.

EDIT: I'm noticing irrelevant results for many queries. Searching "plain white pillowcase", the third result is a t-shirt, the seventh result is a dress, and the eleventh result is a light bulb.

Searching "men's wallet" the very first result is an outdoor picnic table.

Regarding payments, your understanding is correct. We have and manage our affiliate partnerships, all you have to do is drive sales and we forward on the commission to you. We're working on improving signal into the range of commissions you can expect, but, in short, the variability stems from merchants and product type. For example, technology (e.g. iPhones, laptops) typically have lower commissions than beauty supplies.

Thanks for the feedback. Managing and cleaning this volume of data is an ongoing task, and our catalog is getting better each day. I'll check out the nintendo case in particular.

Yes certainly! I've dealt with large datasets like this in the past and know firsthand how challenging it can be to wrangle them.

Something like this would be a great fit for my travel planner app if I knew I could trust that the results were high quality before prompting the user with them.

Btw I edited my earlier comment with a few more examples just before you replied.

Good luck!

Appreciate it. FYI, for the specific bugs you flagged, looks like Nintendo was improperly named (reindexing products with that name now), and sounds like the pain point you felt was extraneous search results that really didn't belong. Transparently, the problem we're facing there is vector search can be a bit of a black box, so we're trying to tune our hybrid search to cull out really crazy results, but obviously it still needs work.

One of the ways we're combatting these search problems in the early days is developers can curate their catalog with specific brands, merchants, and categories (and even down to the product level) so you know exactly what the search space for each of your queries is. Curious to hear about your travel planner app -- if you think this would be a helpful tool, feel free to reach out at george@trychannel3.com

Hi, we fixed this bug and you should see better results now. I'm getting good results for "men's wallet" and "plain white pillowcase". Try it out and let me know what you think!

The results look much much better now. Great job.

Putting my affiliate hat on here for a minute...

Very cool to see how you've aggregated so many products into one service. How do you plan to compete with FMTC and others that aggregate feeds together? Speaking as a publisher, I'd not want to share commission unless absolutely necessary and would prefer to just pay a fee so I can access the feed and not have an unknown amount of revenue lost between myself and the merchant.

As a brand running a program, I'd be very cautious about allowing my feed into your database if I didn't have any way to finding out who is featuring my products and where/how. Are you providing visibility to the brands since you're effectively functioning as a sub-affiliate network?

Those questions aside, great to see YC funding a startup in the space!

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