senecaso

5 ms·

1.
by senecaso 1y ago
Why don't sites just start publishing a dump of their site that crawlers could pull instead? I realize that won't work for dynamic content, but surely a lot of these "small" sites that are out there which are currently
2.
by senecaso 3y ago
You site looks good, and your results are fantastic! Job well done. I did hit a server error though, so obviously still some issues to work out, but overall, really well done. Moving to semantic search was one of my top priorities before
3.
by senecaso 3y ago
I didnt know about the link to checkout. That's a slightly nicer user experience for sure. Still, its confusing for users who want to do more shopping at the same time. I had users who clicked on a number of items, clicked "add
4.
by senecaso 3y ago
we did have channels on various sites, yes. However, its difficult to maintain a steady stream of content there for people to consume. Not only that, but you have the same discoverability problems as you do for the main site. Also, a blo
5.
by senecaso 3y ago
We were intentionally limiting the number of products and shops we were indexing due to opex. We needed to keep it low enough to provide ourselves with enough runway to keep things floating for longer. pricerunner is another site which ope
6.
by senecaso 3y ago
I doubt it would be that easy, but, ya, using some form of automation is necessary. We devised a few rudimentary way to filter out the chaff, and it did quite well to remove the garbage. Still some would slip through, so it still required
7.
by senecaso 3y ago
Many shops do double list, this is true. However, I don't think its a solved problem. There are many people who do not want to shop on Amazon for their own reasons. There are also people who want to shop locally, and Amazon provides
8.
by senecaso 3y ago
Our business model revolved around referrals, so lack of users directly translated to lack of revenue. While its true that even if we had millions of users but none of them were buying sponsored items we would have had a revenue problem, t
9.
by senecaso 3y ago
we didn't, no, but we spent a lot of time sifting through our catalog, and there was a _tremendous_ amount of crap in there. We manually curated and purged shops that were obviously just dropshipping or looked like out-right scams.
10.
by senecaso 3y ago
Ya, curation is sadly required in the Shopify ecosystem. There are millions of shops, there is a tonne of garbage. Its also difficult (but not impossible) to properly classify items so that you can better target results for a given query.
11.
by senecaso 3y ago
https://www.searchagora.com/about Seems he is indexing nearly 650k shops.
12.
by senecaso 3y ago
We had no capital, so advertising or solutions that basically involved "throwing money at the problem" were off the table for us. We spent time posting in forums helping people find items they were looking for, and we had a few po
13.
by senecaso 3y ago
Yes, this has been available for a few years now. Initially, they only indexed a very small number of shops, so it was less useful. Based on a few queries, it seems like the are still using some form of text-based search with rank boostin
14.
by senecaso 3y ago
I hope you have better luck than I did! A few years ago, my partner and I built vendazzo.com (now defunct). It was an e-commerce search engine on products listed on Shopify shops (sound familiar? :)). At the time, we had > 100m produc
15.
by senecaso 4y ago
I was thinking more along the lines of a public dialog, where a user could post a comment like "This is a great idea! However, if you could make it do X and Y, it would be even better!" Getting access to people's contact inf
16.
by senecaso 4y ago
ya, a way to submit feedback/comments might be a good idea. I just submitted an idea, and immediately was wondering how I would be able to engage with the people who voted (or didnt)
17.
by 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 b
18.
by 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 r
19.
by senecaso 5y ago
Right now, we gather location data from the pages themselves. Some shops (not many) include an address. The process is very error-prone though, so our accuracy in this area is likely not where we want it to be. We are working on other wa
20.
by senecaso 5y ago
Yep, this is pretty much it. Amazon has the advantage that they are able to force their sellers to specify metadata about their products in very specific ways, which allows them to build on top of that consistency. With Shopify, as tomnip
21.
by senecaso 5y ago
back up!
22.
by senecaso 5y ago
Yep, it just went down. We've been using spot instances, and those are hard to come by around Black Friday. I'll look into it.
23.
by senecaso 5y ago
We were surprised by this as well, but since one didn't exist, we started to create one! https://vendazzo.com/ We still have a long ways to go, but you can search for items and filter based on things like category and
24.
by senecaso 5y ago
Yes, we were surprised as well, but since they didn't seem interested in building it, we started building one! ;) https://vendazzo.com/
25.
by senecaso 5y ago
Thanks for the input! Ya, we are already working on getting featured items onto the main page to make it more obvious that its a shopping site and that you can search for the thing you're looking for. We will also look into adding a
26.
by senecaso 5y ago
Yep, but then you have to work harder to drive traffic to your shop, since Shopify doesn't have a central marketplace or search feature.
27.
by senecaso 5y ago
Good to know! We'll have to add something in there to make it more obvious. At the moment, you can just search for the item you are looking for `red shoes`, `58 telecaster`, etc. The location filtering is after you search using the
28.
by senecaso 5y ago
Problems like this are why my business partner and I started building Vendazzo ( https://vendazzo.com/ ). My partner had been looking for a way to run an independent shop, outside of Amazon, and realized there was no central
29.
by senecaso 6y ago
you would retire on RRSP + CPP (very small) + whatever you currently have in your 401k + whatever you have in retirement savings from any other country(ies) you have lived in. That said, depending on your age, with a max RRSP contribution o
30.
by senecaso 6y ago
Ya, I was pretty surprised as well. I expected Canadian taxes to be much higher, but they seem to be fairly competitive actually, especially when you factor in other costs as you pointed out. Overall, the biggest detriment appears to be t

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