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.
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 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...
There totally is... My co-founder and I created a search engine in early 2021 that indexes 100 million items from 140,000 Shopify shops and makes them searchable to shoppers.
We built this with the specific goal of helping small businesses be discovered by consumers looking for a way to support. You nailed the problem... without a place to search for items, it seems that there isn't an easy way to support small businesses, and bypass Amazon. From the shop's perspective, getting eyeballs is extremely difficult for them, so they end up relying on influencers and SEO in order to get eyeballs.
We would love to help you shop online without defaulting to Amazon first... Would love your feedback.
Oh, wow! Thanks for pointing that out. I'll take a look and try to get that cleaned up.
We don't have a lot of shops with electronics at the moment, so a query for "router" would be light anyway, but these particular results are not useful at all.
We have almost anything you could look for, but for some reason, we don't have a good selection of computer parts and accessories. Its like all of the electronics shops decided not to use Shopify or something :)
Of the 140k shops we currently have, the vast majority are clothing (shoes, shirts, jewelry, etc), home & garden (furniture, kitchen, cups, glasses, etc), and vehicle parts. The other categories still have a significant number of products in them, but we're light on the computer accessories, and much of what you find will be either older generation or enterprise. Its possible that the 140k shops that we selected just happen to not be electronics/computer shops, but until we're able to index the remaining 1.2M+ shops (that we're aware of) we won't know for sure.
One other thing to point out is that the filters (after you search), can be very helpful We're still not at a point where we can build out semantic search, so using the filters to select a category, colour, etc, can drastically improve the relevance of your results. Hope that helps!
BTW, I have made changes to remove the "Route Protection Package" from our index, and it should start disappearing over the next week or so. Thanks for pointing that out!
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.