They're individual websites run by the stores themselves, so you need to find them the old fashioned way by finding the store that sells what you want. I definitely think there's space for "local" directories (eg by country or state maybe) for online stores. Google Shopping and all the big sites that attempt it are an absolute joke, full of SEO gaming and manipulation. An old school Yahoo-list style index of local stores that's searchable would be killer right now.

Source: consumer who buys lots online, almost daily, and would absolutely love to support local (national) stores.

Solving this seems like a lay up for Shopify. Some sort of "shopify universe" product that takes products & categorization information and brings it all together would be a huge move forward.

Amazon's interface, without the centralization.

It also lets them start going into Etsy's space of marketplace

They've just launched an app for that. Shop.app. An aggregator of all Shopify merchants searchable and proximity-aware. Haven't tried it yet though, if it's any good.

Seems to be US-only, and mobile only.

I can use a 34" for Amazon, I'm not gonna switch to comparing products on my phone. Especially given that I'm locked so my computer is always nearby.

Took a very quick glance at this. I expect that it's limited to those that are running Shopify POS, rather than all Shopify stores.

It's not limited to POS - it has a way to pay during online checkout and tracks package deliveries.

If you have any alternative that gets popular, it'll probably be full of SEO gaming, too?

(Though, of course, the team behind the alternative might be better at resisting the gaming? Google, the company, isn't magic.)

You mean Shopify would need proper search/listing capabilities which handle gaming and spam if they were to do their own index pages?

At some point, yes. Amazon needs them, too.

I think the main problem is both Amazon and Google (and all the similar ecosystems) have a vested interest in rigging the results towards personal profits.

I see this more like an open index of local online stores, curated and not using scrapers/bots to index but by stores submitting their URL and search endpoint for meta-search across all their products. Let the user sort the results by price, location, etc.

Obviously there's always going to be people trying to game the system but it would still be better than what we have now, which is us consumers needing to use Google/DDG/etc to scrape through the 99:1 noise:signal ratio of search results these days just to try fluke upon a local online store that has what we want.

I made a shopify global search [https://snapshop.netlify.app]. Hastily completed just for this post but it should work.

Nice! I'd use something like this, but it's not very useful to me currently if I can't search by region or country.

Planning to do that, try searching for "product <location>" for now. Should work to some extent.

This is a great search UI but when you click a link the provided URL is cut off. IE search for journals, click a link and you get sent to the following url:

https://www.oberondesign.com/collections/journals...

which the website reports as a 404

Thanks for feedback. I fixed that, have another try :)

Much better!

I initially jokingly searched for pizza, but was blown away when I found a ton of great looking frozen pizzas. There seems to be a shortage of chicken breasts in my area right now as well and some of the options here look nice. This app seems very useful to me and I will probably be ordering some items today!

Haha great, enjoy your food! I wonder how do you structure your search term?

Searched for "elastic laces", and 2 out of 3 results are 404. For other keywords, there's a very high ration of 404s.

I'd also like to filter by region, since I don't want to buy small, cheap items from the other side of the world.

Yeah, it's quite fragile and hacky at the moment. A quick abstract from a portion of an old project. Will probably do this properly this weekend. Filter by region/country is doable.

Give it a test; the short-form URLs shown in each card are also referred in each href, so "website.com/your_prod..." is what's literally provided as the url when you click through.

Thanks for that, fixed now

thats a good start but it would be nice to get individual items directly with price

Yup agreed, what i had in mind for proper version, price and pic are absolute must.

On websites specialized on comparison shopping. I don't know about the US, but when I was in Italy I used to use a lot one of such websites [1]. Think like shopping on Amazon except that you are redirected to the seller's website for details and actually buying the product, no ads, no SEO, and the rating is about the seller, not the product.

On the other side, you no longer have a central entity helping you with issues such as warranty, scams etc, but given the behavior of late of Amazon, I don't think that it is a big deal.

[1] https://www.trovaprezzi.it

Same thing here in Czech Republic - you go to a comparison website, check the prizes, availability and reviews of both the think your are looking for and the shops selling them. Then you pick a shop and go to their website (in some cases there is also integration for buying directly via the comparison site).

The main Czech sites:

https://www.heureka.cz/

https://www.zbozi.cz/

It kinda seem like Amazon has been a bit too successful in some parts of the world, to the point people can't imagine alternative online shopping workflows.

They've recently launched an app to help with this discovery. https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/28/shopify-launches-shop-a-ne...

In countries with a functioning market and healthy competition (high number of online stores per capita), there are online store aggregators where you just search for the product you want and it gives you links to all the stores. Sorted by price, rating, etc.

https://geizhals.at/ https://heureka.cz/