Sorry to hear that! We're working to make search better, but we still have a long way to go. I'm curious where you felt the biggest pain points with search.
> If i’m building an ecommerce website, why would I need your API if I’m just selling my own products?
You're right, Channel3 isn't for existing ecommerce websites. Channel3 let's anyone build a shopping experience (which I vaguely conflated with ecommerce website). You don't worry about managing product, you just build the platform. Some AI shopping experiences like this already exist, check out plush.shop, daydream.ing, and onton.com.
> Can you explain the main use cases when i would want to add shopping to my platform?
In short, if you want to monetize your platform without running ads. What's neat is there aren't really "main" cases -- this is up to the inventiveness of our users! We believe some of the most lucrative opportunities are yet to be imagined. My co-founder, Alex, experienced this problem at his last job when he was building an AI tutor; they decided to try to add an additional revenue stream by letting the AI tutor recommend products. Maybe blogs can integrate an AI-recommended product feed based on their article. Maybe yoga teachers who have a website for booking classes can recommend their gear to their students and earn some money when they do. Maybe someone just loves the color orange and wants to build a shop for orange products. We don't know what devs have in store for Channel3, but we do know agentic commerce is going to reshape how we interact with products!
Thanks for the feedback! We're working to improve search results right now. Bummer the price filter got ignored, we rolled out natural language filter extraction recently, clearly we have a bug there :(
Developers! Anyone who wants to add shopping to their platform, build an e-comm website, or monetize their agent can use Channel3 to earn commissions on the products they sell. Totally see how that could get lost in this post, we tried to focus more on what we built than try to sell to devs. Hopefully our website makes this clearer.
This is definitely one of our hard problems. There are some optimizations -- e-tags / last modified headers, comparing page content hashes -- but there's also only so much you can do before you just have to check the page again.
Rye is an awesome company! They're in the universal checkout space now, stay tuned for a Rye + Channel3 demo in the next week :) We think the combo of product discovery with Channel3 and universal checkout is the future of commerce. To answer your questions:
1. Channel3 doesn't support shipping/payments, but there are a lot of great companies that do, so Channel3 + universal checkout is a full-fledged e-comm site.
2. We hope our pricing ($7/1000 req) is low enough that any reasonably-converting store won't need to worry about it. Average e-commerce order value is $180, so at 5% commissions you need <1 sale per 1000 queries. We're cheaper than any alternative, and, with rev share, we pay you to use us! (+ vector store is expensive :) )
3. We do have shopify stores on our platform
4. An interesting idea! We're excited to see how agentic commerce evolves, and for now we're just trying to build the best discovery solution out there.
Love this! This is one of the key painpoints we're trying to solve. It takes building in the space to know how hard (/impossible) monetizing products on your site is, but we think once people try to do so, they'll end up building with Channel3!
Excited to hear about what you were building. If there's anything Channel3 can do to support, feel free to dm me at [email protected].
Thanks for the feedback. Releasing early vs releasing a polished product is always a tough balance to strike, and I'm grateful for insights like this. Do you have specific queries that missed the mark, or specific problems with the results? The common refrain we've heard is some products surfaced are good, but some random products also slip in there. If that's not consistent with your experience, I'd love to know what went wrong!
Ah, sorry for misunderstanding. There are a bunch of challenges with that approach that my co-founder experienced first-hand (actually, that exact workflow is why we started Channel3!). To get up-to-date info, you'd need realtime websearch -- that's slow and expensive. To monetize, you'd need to set up affiliate relationships yourself. And, at the end of the day, the info you get from foundation models isn't really sufficient for building a rich shopping experience. So, someone could try that approach, or they could just use our API for cheaper and not deal with the hassle.
Appreciate it. FYI, for the specific bugs you flagged, looks like Nintendo was improperly named (reindexing products with that name now), and sounds like the pain point you felt was extraneous search results that really didn't belong. Transparently, the problem we're facing there is vector search can be a bit of a black box, so we're trying to tune our hybrid search to cull out really crazy results, but obviously it still needs work.
One of the ways we're combatting these search problems in the early days is developers can curate their catalog with specific brands, merchants, and categories (and even down to the product level) so you know exactly what the search space for each of your queries is. Curious to hear about your travel planner app -- if you think this would be a helpful tool, feel free to reach out at [email protected]
Certainly, for end users, foundation model providers (just ChatGPT right now) will be a great option for shopping. But, we don't believe it'll be the only place people shop. With Channel3, developers can build their own agentic shopping experience, and they also can monetize it.
Regarding payments, your understanding is correct. We have and manage our affiliate partnerships, all you have to do is drive sales and we forward on the commission to you. We're working on improving signal into the range of commissions you can expect, but, in short, the variability stems from merchants and product type. For example, technology (e.g. iPhones, laptops) typically have lower commissions than beauty supplies.
Thanks for the feedback. Managing and cleaning this volume of data is an ongoing task, and our catalog is getting better each day. I'll check out the nintendo case in particular.