Search bar would bring the same problem to Shopify. Knockoff will always sell for cheaper, and will try to game the search so they'll end up at the top and quickly become the most purchased.

It's the lack of search that differentiates Shopify. You get to hear about the shop itself, instead of wanting a product and searching for the cheapest/best. This latter behavior means you'll always end up finding drop shippers or asian sellers. While in the former you find a merchant that you like, trust, feel has a good reputation, and you don't mind purchasing from them even if they don't have the best price (mostly because you can't easily compare the price).

As a seller on Amazon I whole heartedly disagree.

You have to experience trying to sell on Amazon to understand that their policies forbid quality markers like stating patents. The entire system is rigged so that people who design and make products can’t even differentiate from the knock offs.

Amazon needs the competition so there is someplace on the internet where domestic manufacturers can have a leg up.

> You have to experience trying to sell on Amazon to understand that their policies forbid quality markers like stating patents.

Can you expand on this? Do they have rules that stop you from saying things like, "Patented Blozzle Technology prevents the widget from snagging on gadgets" or listing a patent number in the description?

Yes, absolutely. If you say covered by patent X your product page won’t go through. It’s explicitly states in their guidelines that mentioning patents are disallowed.

What if you name your product like "Patented Toaster #54386549"? And you trademark that. Surely they can't prevent you from using the registered product's name to describe it?

You're guilty of applying computer-thinking to human-problems, unfortunately.

Amazon, much like a judge and jury, will not find your "clever loophole" interesting, and will deny you. Even if you have done everything to the letter, they may still ban you should they have their reasons.

Having worked for a firm that attempted to publish applications to the Amazon app store that would have in some sense competed with their own (reading app), we had an experience where we did everything to the letter, our app would be "approved" but would magically be unavailable for download when we attempted to download it. Some form of hell-ban applied to the app store.

Our C-Suite had previously sold a firm to Amazon and had a rolodex of high-level contacts at Amazon who all went from "good friend" to "cold shoulder" when asked if they had any clue or guidance from their former colleagues.

They are a shifty, immoral firm.

I'm not denying your experience, but I'm not able to find that policy/guidelines, can you link to it?

> (mostly because you can't easily compare the price)

there would be third party scrapers to compare prices. I don't think you can really solve the problem of poor quality dropshippers, except if the platform mandates a return policy which doesn't cost the user.

Shop app (made by shopify) has had cross shopify search for a few months in beta. I recommend trying it out! I worked on the infrastructure for this.

Love the Shop app. But one major compliant is that there is no email verification. So I get notified of every order that accidentally used my email address (common Indian name @ gmail.com). Wish I could only be notified of orders that I placed.

>> So I get notified of every order that accidentally used my email address (common Indian name @ gmail.com).

Someone needs to solve the (common Indian name @ gmail.com) problem. Preferably, Google/Gmail would solve this. But my email gets signed up on a daily basis to new services.

I’ve got that problem too with my username minus the “the” at gmail. It’s so annoying.

Stopgap solution until they fix it: change it to name+shopify @ gmail

You might need to make it more unique if someone else had that idea.

The problem is that some rando is using his email.

No it seems like the name is just common, so someone else mistypes their own email and it then becomes common indian [email protected], which is actually OP's email

I actually have people use my gmail.com like this. Someone even signed up for facebook with this. I accidentally clicked 'yes' like an idiot and then it took months before they'd let my email off the bloody account.

Everyone uses my (real first name / not my middle name) email for all sorts of receipts. I've received African tenant agreements, some dude's Intel payroll document, all sorts of shit.

That's pretty funny. Sorry for the trouble. This has literally never happened to me. There are two other Arthur Collé's in the world, hopefully the booby traps work and I become the one true king one of these days

Does that mean you also get the email receipt for every transactions?

Yup. Email receipt. Tracking information.

Super sweet. I love Shop app. Tracking shipments is a nice way to get app installs... and you can backdoor a shopping experience as you roll out new versions. Well played!

It's funny, I sent them an email long long long time ago asking if there was some way to source all products on Shopify so I could build just this. Maybe they noted it and turned it into a product.

No offense intended, but I doubt it. It is a good idea, but it's also an obvious idea.

This reminds me of my number one response when "friends" come to me with startup ideas.

Your company is another company's feature. As in, you are trying to build a business, on something that is an afterthought, tiny feature for an existing company to add.

This comment reminds me of this post with discusses the feature -> product -> company evolution: https://medium.com/@sethlevine/the-feature-product-company-c...

What company isn't? My problem with this is that I can't think of a company that started as anything other than a missing feature.

Start with a bigger idea. Shopify isn't a missing feature. Why not take them on?

Showing the store is certainly a trivially missing feature of Amazon's.

Shopify has been around for a while—since before Amazon became the everything-retailer that they are now. It started out of frustration at the myriad annoyances in trying to get set up using osCommerce and other tools of that generation.

(Disclaimer: employee)

None taken.

I think an even better solution would be a curated search. Like Amazon there are plenty of dropshipping low quality stores / products on Shopify. I would like someone to build out a search of the best 500 stores.

Shop app has a bunch of curated search areas in it, I would check it out!

I had a look, #1 there doesn't seem to be a search option (maybe not public to all yet?). #2 I had a look at some of the stores shown in the "search" icon tab, aka explore, but how am I meant to find out if something is just a dropshipping product from ali, marked up at 400% or a genuine, good quality product, worth spending $40 on. (the one I saw, could well have gone fro $4 on ali)

That, and I hope this arrives on desktop, I dislike shopping on mobile, makes it hard to compare and verify a product isn't cramp from ali.

How is this not Amazon minus each storefront page is custom designed?

One main distinction is that Shopify shops have a direct to consumer relationship. They can send you emails, and build up a brand. Amazon keeps the customer relationship, and if you succeed, they'll try to commoditize you. So it isn't that much different for the user (with a unified checkout out cart), but is much better for the store owner.

Edit: you might find this article about the differences between the Shopify and Amazon ecosystems interesting

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/magazine/shopify.html

I worked on the shop app too (backend and iOS app). Small world.

I’ve moved on from shopify but still use the app.

Shopify is mostly crappy drop shippers buying of Alibaba and selling for x more. If you add a search bar the problem will just come to the surface. Just say you don't like amazon.

Amazon is mostly drop shippers too, and Etsy for that matter, what's being sold by "shops" on Shopify or "merchants" on Amazon isn't really the issue. It should not at all be surprising that "low effort" shops are more numerous. There's quality stuff on all those platforms, and Shopify (for now) is better to the merchants.

Amazon's total dominance of online shopping is because of their logistics network and having more than one company providing fast inexpensive shipping is good, it means people have somewhere else to go if Amazon gives them a raw deal.

Isn't shopify also a lot of non-Shopify branded web shops? I don't think crappy dropshipping stuff from Asia will ever go away, that's why middlemen are important, those can filter out the bad crap products. At which point those middlemen also become a brand, it doesn't work without reputation. Funny little commerce actually changed from the first time someone sold a stone knife for a handful of berries.

[disclaimer: I work at Shopify]

My experience is that all the shops are non-Shopify 'branded'. Some are on shopify.com subdomains if they haven't set up a custom domain.

yes it is. Alot of apparel and sneaker sites use shopify. I’ve interacted with them when i used to make bots,but Filtering products won’t work when buyers are looking for the cheapest product at least in my opinion. Also imo shopify is the reason bots are/were able to become so dominant.

disclaimer I work for Shopify, opinions are my own.

I do not think this is true. I don't know the % of shops that are drop shippers, but I do not think it's the majority. Most Shopify merchants are selling things. A lot of stores are Shopify stores that are on custom domains and unless you look at the source, nothing tells you that they are a Shopify merchant. I know of RPG and Board Game publishers and designers with Shopify stores, a local coffee shop and coffee roaster is a Shopify merchant, food companies, etc. There are companies that that have IPOd that started as Shopify stores selling their own things; Which is really cool.

> and unless you look at the source, nothing tells you that they are a Shopify merchant

Unless they are doing a headless integration, the Shopify UI is very easy to spot. For me this has started to become a signal of shops to take great caution and best to avoid.

If not during shopping, then once you add the product to the cart, it is very obvious.

> this has started to become a signal of shops to take great caution and best to avoid

Interesting, I've generally felt the opposite. Do you feel it is as bad as Amazon? Do you have some examples of Shopify shops that are particularly bad?

You do know that as soon as you set up a new Shopify store, the first suggestion from the install wizard is to add a plug-in that makes it easier to drop ship AliExpress products, right?

I buy lots of stuff from Shopify merchants who make / source unique products: clothing, bike gear, skincare, electronics. I'm sure there are a lot of crappy drop shippers too but I'd hope to not see them in a search experience. Guess that would be up to Shopify to sort out. But I'm hopeful. Anything who's been paying attention realizes that trust in Amazon is eroding fast. It's an opp for Shopify.

Shopify basically has the data for this. They could just exclude from the search sites that don't already get a decent amount of direct sales. There are other metrics as well like refunds/ chargebacks and return customers.

i am looking for some unique products. Wondering what people's favorites are.

The next shopify site I'm queued up to work on is something I'm choosing the platform for because its POS offering looks like it offers a better rate than stripe terminal. I think it's a pretty sweet option if you're selling something in-person or services to this end, I like the timeslot plugin stuff.

Pretty sure as I understand it that a lot of that dropshipping crap from alibaba kinda petered out with those massive shipping container delays

As with any open marketplace, there will always be varying degrees of quality.

The best way to respond is to build tools that allow the market to bring high quality shops to the top, and lower quality shops that provide poor customer service or fraudulent products to be suppressed. In this way, the consumer benefits through the consumer experience of others.

Shopify is a little too close to their shops to be able to provide this type of tool, because they have the obligation to support each and every one of their shops.

Third party search engines, built to support the Shopify platform are able to implement these types of tools and bring a user curated shopping experience to shoppers.

So, you're right in that a search bar can shine a spotlight on the dark corners of e-commerce, but that doesn't mean that there aren't ways to create a better experience.

The big problem I have with Amazon is that the damn search is just so terrible - even if you try to search for an exact item (which you know exists and is legit and sold on Amazon) half the time it gives you a bunch of unrelated aliexpress garbage. Especially for more niche queries.

Fun example: there is an issue with Amazon grocery search where it will tell you that they are out of a very common item, such as bananas, but when you check out it will suggest that you add bananas. You can also add the allegedly out of stock items by going to your previous items page. Just bizarre.

And it happens even if there is a good number of relevant products. I've searched for something like "[brandname] 12v fridge" and had a few [brandname] results mixed in amongst countless other random brands. If I'm searching for a specific brandname, that's exactly what I want!

Yea this is super frustrating. Rarely the actual brand name product does not show up until like the second page if its something without a lot of reviews or popularity. And it does not seem like they allow any types of "advanced" search...

> Just waiting for the search bar to shop every Shopify store.

That's exactly what my startup [1] is making. We have 395,000 shops at the moment. Love to hear any feedback.

[1] https://www.delomore.com/

Hey Craig.

We appear to be working on solving the same problem! :)

I had a chance to use delomore and you're off to a great start... Just finding the shops to index is certainly a challenge. When we search for an item like "Oxford Shoes" the search returns are for all the shops that may sell shoes, presumably oxfords.

Are you also building out the ability to return individual items that match the search query? In order to be a functional shopping search engine, users will want to be able to view and click on relevant results, and not just the shops that might sell the items.

We have built a search engine that indexes 100 million items from 140,000 shops... We are currently returning product cards from relevant results for the search query, and we're working to help shoppers find the exact item they are shopping for, and compare against other items from other sellers...

we are https://vendazzo.com/

daniel

I always considered doing something like this and then I realized the only technique I know to get all shopify sites is subdomain enumeration and that's probably not uhhh white hat or whatever the term is

I'm sure there's people doing market research out there who don't really give a damn about any of that but I'm curious as to how you build out your search functionality if it's not that?

Awesome. How do you source your merchants? I ran two searches for specific merchants I buy from and didn't find them.

I've listed all of the (English language) shops I can find through Common crawl etc. That gives me 56 million products from 395k shops. Shopify quotes 1.75 million shops in all languages. So I've got a fraction of the total, but enough to be interesting, I hope.

Check out https://storeleads.app – should have close to 100% of public Shopify stores, plus other platforms if those are interesting.

Thanks that looks like a fantastic resource.

I just tried out delomore and am very impressed. Bookmarking now!

Have you considered offering the service as an API?

Would you like to use it as an API? What would the use case be?

I've pretty much given up on any kind of shopping aggregator.

I go to the brand/manufacturer website directly and buy online there if possible. I feel that's the best way to get what I am intending to buy, even if it's not the lowest possible price.

Before you totally give up, perhaps try one more? We built a search engine / shopping aggregator to help shoppers find items to purchase directly from independent shops and brands. We currently help shoppers find items from 140,000 Shopify shops, making 100 million items searchable for the shopper.

By Shopify building out their fulfillment network, this will help close the gap between the product offering from Shopify shops and Amazon. In the end, the shopper will get a better shopping experience by shopping directly from the independent shop, because they can control the customer service experience, and not a third party that sits between the shopper and the seller.

We're extremely bullish on independent online shops, and we want to help them get as much traffic as possible. There are a number of reasons for this, but it all comes down to, we want to help shoppers support their local communities first, and if that isn't possible, then help them choose where their money goes.

We'd love your feedback. Check us out at https://vendazzo.com/

daniel

A lot of the time that's gonna be more expensive in Canada, if not only cause a lot of manufacturers only have warehouses in the US. You'll likely pay more for shipping (which could be significant, like $15 shipping on a $20 item), potentially get a letter a few weeks later from the courier saying you owe them money for import fees, and will likely wait longer than if you just got it through the free Prime subscription you're already paying for.

>I'd love to give Shopify more money (but presumably less than we pay 3rd party shippers) for better overall delivery service for my customers.

Better quality for a lower price? Don't we all want that! I wish them luck on actually pulling it off.

They already did that with Canada post shipping. If you buy directly from CP you pay $x. If you buy a CP label from Shopify it costs less than $x because they’re a massive CP customer.

> As a buyer, I'd love to spend more with not-Amazon and get comparable service.

Comparable service? My experience buying from Amazon is a nearly 100% rate of telling me my item will be delivered on a certain date, and then, the day after, saying "We're so sorry that unforeseeable circumstances (really?) have resulted in the late delivery of your item. We hope the date wasn't important! No, we do not offer any compensation for late deliveries. Please suck it."

I wonder if this is location dependent... I order way too many things from Amazon, and 90% of the time they deliver on time. I live in a very large city, though, so I wonder if that explains the difference.

> I'm increasingly disappointed with Amazon. It's full of knockoff crappy products with unrelated 5 star reviews. That eroding trust in Amazon

Anyone remember eBay?

Me. I use eBay a few times a month, but never, ever touch Amazon.

*shrug

Shopify would be even worse. I've actually been trusting Walmart.com more but they're also adding sellers now.

I can't stand Amazon. In my mind they are equivalent to a cancer that society needs to collectively purge. I don't say this hyperbolically, I say this after much experience. I only do work on GCP now