Show HN: I'm Building an Alternative to Shopify
searchagora.com
After talking to hundreds of merchants, I heard the same thing over and over again: e-commerce stores are expensive to build, tough to manage, and require a lot of customization to be successful. Shopify is a good starting point but requires a lot of work to get your first sales. There's even a whole industry of expensive service providers that help merchants navigate the Shopify ecosystem.
I built the Agora Store Builder to solve this problem and give merchants a single platform to easily build and distribute their store. Users can build, manage, and deploy a custom e-commerce store via chat. And everything is optimized to help stores succeed: store analytics, payment integrations, order tracking, domain management, code access, and more.
Here are some key specs:
1. The vibe coding interface is powered by V0. We manage previews and deployments with Vercel with a lot of middleware to manage integrations, state, products, checkout, and orders. We provide a Products and Orders database built in. No external data source required to set up. The Products database has a similar structure as Shopify with parent products, variants, and stock management.
2. Using the same crawlers we've built for our search engine, we've enabled a "Import Shopify store" and "Import WooCommerce store" option from the home page. You can enter any existing e-commerce store and we'll automatically import the product data to save you time switching over to Agora.
3. We've built a native integration with Stripe to manage in-store payments and merchant payouts. We also have a Zapier app to enable merchants to connect incoming orders to the tools they already use like ShipStation, DHL, Klaviyo, Mailchimp, and more.
There's a few things on our immediate roadmap: improve the initial loading speed, introduce more design variety, and add full stack apps that are easy to install (e.g. adding customer reviews to a store).
I'd love your feedback!