Show HN: Agora – A Chrome Extension To Enhance Your Online Shopping

Most immediately, sorry to hear about the brokenness of the extension. Send us an email at contact@agora.sh and we'll try to get it up and running. Reloading the extension and refreshing the page may do the trick.

Thank you for your thoughts! Didn't expect this to make it to the front page and it's been great to get everyone's feedback so far.

We've decided to delay our mobile app for the moment. If we had the resources we would already be working on it, but we have to prioritize things with a 4-person team.

If you're experiencing a problem with the extension go ahead and email us contact at agora.sh and we'll try to get it fixed. There's also a little contact form in the extension itself you can use.

We will definitely be supporting sites like Airbnb, Autotrader, etc. in the future.

Decisions will also be shareable soon. You'll be able to set specific permissions like in Google drive. This is something we're going to be focusing on very soon.

Designer weighing in...

Thanks! We're honestly really unsure of the best way to approach the marketing of this service. That's part of what we're doing right now is for.

Mobile is an inevitability, but focusing on nonmobile has been a more comfortable starting place for us to explore ideas. We're also working off the at least partially education assumption that a lot of the more thoughtful, comparative shopping still happens on desktops. That likeliness is likely decreasing every day though.

Accidentally skipping step two definitely decreases the smoothness of the tutorial. We'll need to get around to making it less skippable. Our quickest fix was to add a button that need to be clicked and have it away from the product so that people's cursors would not interact with the product prematurely. Development priorities are the only thing keeping us from implementing a more thorough fix. But if more people report that issue, we'll likely bump it up. So thanks for mentioning that detail.

We plan to have continued (non narrated) tutorial messages that will explain individual features at opportune moments. This continued tutorial would illuminate things like accessing the inspect button from the belt, or hovering over a decision to access it's associated workspace.

YES! Planes, trains and automobiles (and real estate) are all excited prospects for Agora. We just started with commerce cause it seemed like a more financially lucrative focus and affiliate commission systems are already in place for us to monetize from immediately.

Thanks again for your thoughts and feedback.

(After installing)

OK, you aim to work with a whole lot of sites. You should sell that, even though it's a 'work in progress'.

No privacy statement/policy. This deterred me somewhat from crating an account, especially since the extension already required pretty generous permissions. Again, you could use an extra stage on the landing page to tell me how up front that stuff works - IMHO it's worth the extra time in these days of mass retail data breaches. If I know you're going to ask to account link via G+, FB, or Twitter then it doesn't come as a surprise. Surprises are bad where PID is concerned.

Good manual. You should have had that accessible from the landing page, don't hide the menu under the logo. I do love the UI.

They do flat out say "top retail sites", not just amazon.

Thanks for your feedback! Here is our list of supported sites: http://agora.sh/supportedSites.html. We plan to increase the number of supported sites by a lot in the next month.

Our target market is definitely predominantly women. I don't know why we decided to use shoes for our tutorial...

Keep in mind this is our beta. There will certainly be lots of bugs and the service is very far from where we envision it even in just the next 6 months.

Ugh. We're not filing a patent. I appreciate the suggestion, but I've already wasted too much time and money researching it. We almost gave away equity to a patent attorney to do it for us, but the deal fell through.

I believe the market for this type of tool is massive. Google/Amazon, etc. want people to shop using their own site and it's hard to change people's loyalties when it comes to online shopping. By offering an extension that enhances the experience a user has while shopping on the sites they are already loyal to we believe we can reach more people.

Thanks! You can check out our list of supported sites here: http://agora.sh/supportedSites.html. We plan to add a lot more in the next month.

twotap looks awesome! How have I never heard of it? Please shoot me an email so we can chat. Contact info is in my profile.

Hmm. They recently made a philosophical shift towards single function extensions, but I haven't encountered any indication that they are moving away from or downplaying extensions as a whole. If you wouldn't mind sharing info on this, that would be super great. Mobile apps, and even a packaged app are in Agora's future. This stage of a browser extension targeting technical users is primarily serving the function of building a savvy userbase that we intend to empower and co-create value with for the benefit of a larger audience. We're attempting to lay a foundation.

An agora was a public space in ancient greek cities where commerce and forum took place.