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I'm probably thinking about this backwards, but I'm embarrassingly well trained to search for anything I need on Amazon. if I want to support Shopify at Amazon'

I'm probably thinking about this backwards, but I'm embarrassingly well trained to search for anything I need on Amazon. if I want to support Shopify at Amazon's expense, is there a straightforward way of breaking out of this training and find what I need among Shopify-powered merchants? Without getting lost in SEO-spam or influencer peddling?

Vendazzo_daniel 4y ago
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. daniel https://vendazzo.com/ https://vendazzo.com/
- bdefore 4y ago
  This is interesting. I'll need a few days to try some more searches out. But my initial thoughts is this is presenting unique results. One query that could use some cleanup is 'router', which is filled with 'Route Package Protection' items. https://vendazzo.com/products?q=router&currency&page=1 https://vendazzo.com/products?q=router&currency&page=1
  - senecaso 4y ago
    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.
    - bdefore 4y ago
      Got it. What particular business types do you feel your search currently provides good results for?
      - senecaso 4y ago
        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 :) You can find a rough breakdown of our product counts by category in our "Why Shopify is the best (only?) alternative to Amazon" post: https://blog.vendazzo.com/why-shopify-is-the-best-alternative-to-amazon/ https://blog.vendazzo.com/why-shopify-is-the-best-alternativ... 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!
khendron 4y ago
One trick I know of is to add site:myshopify.com to your google search. For example https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amyshopify.com+mens+sweaters https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amyshopify.com+mens+sw...
organsnyder 4y ago
Shopify's Shop app will search across Shopify merchants.

Vendazzo_daniel 4y ago

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. daniel https://vendazzo.com/ https://vendazzo.com/

bdefore 4y ago
This is interesting. I'll need a few days to try some more searches out. But my initial thoughts is this is presenting unique results. One query that could use some cleanup is 'router', which is filled with 'Route Package Protection' items. https://vendazzo.com/products?q=router&currency&page=1 https://vendazzo.com/products?q=router&currency&page=1
- senecaso 4y ago
  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.
  - bdefore 4y ago
    Got it. What particular business types do you feel your search currently provides good results for?
    - senecaso 4y ago
      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 :) You can find a rough breakdown of our product counts by category in our "Why Shopify is the best (only?) alternative to Amazon" post: https://blog.vendazzo.com/why-shopify-is-the-best-alternative-to-amazon/ https://blog.vendazzo.com/why-shopify-is-the-best-alternativ... 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!

khendron 4y ago

One trick I know of is to add site:myshopify.com to your google search. For example https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amyshopify.com+mens+sweaters https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amyshopify.com+mens+sw...

organsnyder 4y ago

Shopify's Shop app will search across Shopify merchants.