Agora is an AI search engine for e-commerce products. We've indexed 4 million products sold on 8,100 Shopify and WooCommerce stores and made them easy to purchase with a single cart transaction. Think of a decentralized Amazon.
Hi Product Hunt! š I'm Param, founder of Agora.
I'm excited to launch Agora, an AI search engine for e-commerce products! We've indexed 4 million products sold on Shopify and WooCommerce stores and made them easy to purchase with a single cart transaction. Think of a decentralized Amazon.
We donāt hold any inventory ourselves, route payments to merchants, and give customers an order tracking link that shows the shipping status of products from the different stores. By aggregating the supply of products, we've layered in AI powered features that enhance the customer experience. This includes image search, similar products across stores, collections, pros and cons, price alerts, and a chat-based shopping assistant named Athena.
Agora is completely free to use. You can search, purchase, and track orders as a guest.
You can sign up for an account to unlock more functionality.
šø Lists: Create lists of your favorite products and share them. For example, here are some gift lists.
šø Chat history: Save a chat history of your conversations with Athena.
šø Faster checkout: Add payment methods and shipping addresses to save you time at checkout.
We offer a $99 per year Agora Membership for features that help customers save time and money.
š¹ Free shipping: We waive the $4.99 per product shipping fee.
š¹ Price alerts: If the price drops of any of your saved products, we'll email you.
š¹ Automated discounts: We scan the internet for coupons that are applied automatically at checkout.
We provide 24 / 7 support to all customers at support@searchagora.com. This includes helping with an order, issuing refunds, exchanging products, and more.
Unlike Amazon, we don't take a commission of sales from merchants. Store owners on Shopify and WooCommerce can continue selling on their own website and we give them network effects which drives more revenue. The inventory upload process is automatic with our crawlers and there's no change to their existing point of sale system. Our crawler, aptly named Hermes, runs 24 / 7 to keep product and inventory data updated on Agora.
I originally launched Agora as a side project on HackerNews to find a pair of red shoes for my wife last Christmas. The product looked like it was designed in MS Paint (by yours truly) and took 5 - 10 seconds to load results. Although I was sufficiently embarrassed, it was just enough to show the potential. Since launching the MVP, we've improved our search algorithm, rebuilt the app to be faster, processed hundreds of orders, signed up paying merchants, and raised a pre-seed round from investors like Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel.
ā We're launching today on ProductHunt in honor of Black Friday. As a thank you for checking out our product and providing us feedback, we're giving the community $10 off the Agora Membership.
It may sound unreasonable right now but my vision is to build "The World's Store", one unified layer on top of all products sold on the internet. I believe that search is only the entry point. Agora can revolutionize the entire e-commerce journey with AI: product discovery, purchasing, order fulfillment, support, same day deliveries, packaging, and more. With more servers, we'll soon be indexing products from Squarespace, Wix, Etsy, Amazon, Temu and more.
I'd love your feedback! You can also reach me at param@searchagora.com.
@mishra_mayank We can currently index products from any store that is built with Shopify or WooCommerce. Next up is providing support for Wix and Squarespace. Then the marketplaces like Amazon, Etsy, and Temu.
Merchants can use this store checker to see if they are already on Agora: https://www.searchagora.com/stor...
@alexander_okonji Thank you! Yes, we built this with e-commerce stores in mind. We automatically index products sold on Shopify and WooCommerce stores and bring free sales to them. Merchants can also partner with us to get more visibility, track analytics, and integrate Agora orders into their workflow.
https://merchant.searchagora.com/
Hi ProductHunt! I'm Ale, Head of Growth at Agora.
The number one question we get at Agora is "How do you get distribution?". Other than customer word of mouth, we have over 150,000 product pages indexed by Google which drives high intent organic traffic to Agora. For example, if someone searches for "Taylor Swift Official Store" on Google, they'll see links to the original Shopify store and the listing on Agora. Whether a customer checks out on the original store or on Agora, the merchant makes the same amount of money. Over time, we plan to index millions of our products on other search engines to drive steady state traffic to our site.
We're also really excited to be supporting online merchants, while giving customers access to millions of unique products from stores with a purpose. We recently introduced a feature that lets merchants add "Tags" to their store like "Women owned" or "Carbon neutral". This is just an example of the tools we are providing to customers to improve store discovery and shopping experience. As more customers discover these stores, Agora becomes their entry point into the fragmented world of e-commerce.
Let me know if you have any questions or feedback about how we think about Growth at Agora!
I love the idea, congratulations on the launch!
One question: Are you focusing only on the US for now? I ask because I found a product Iām interested in, but unfortunately, itās only available for delivery within the US (I am based in Europe).
Regardless, this is such a cool idea. Congrats again on the launch, and wishing you lots of success!
Thank you @morgane_prr! Appreciate the kind words.
Search is available in every country but purchasing is only available to US addresses right now. Most of our stores are also based in the US. We'll start expanding this soon country-by-country.
In case it's helpful, from the product page you can click on "Visit store" to order directly from the merchant. A lot of Shopify and WooCommerce stores on Agora do international shipping. If you have any trouble, feel free to email me at param@searchagora.com and we'll help you with the order (e.g. contacting the merchant directly to see if they'll make an exception to do international shipping).
Big shout out to the team; the product looks amazing. This is truly the future of merchandising. You can count on me and the Meilisearch team to help you grow to a billion products!
@quentin_dq Thank you for the support! Huge fan of Meilisearch.
Let me know if you have any feedback on our we can improve the Agora product experience.
@alessandro_colombo@ashitvora Thanks!
Shopify and WooCommerce have public data files for what "Variants" are in stock for a specific product. Here's an example on Shopify: https://calzuro.com/products/cal...
We do a few creative things to handle the crawling and data load to keep our server costs low. For example, we store and update store and product data in our database but only check the inventory data when a user clicks on a product page. This allows us to not have to store variant data until the moment it's actually needed.
@shane_deol1 Thanks!
And thatās exactly what weāre doing to monetize. The model works out where we breakeven on orders but make our money with subscriptions from Merchants that want to customize their store page, verify products, track analytics, and integrate the orders into their workflow. Letās see how that evolves as we grow.
https://merchant.searchagora.com
Thanks @ihuzaifashoukat!
Originally, I found that every Shopify store has a public JSON file that is available in the same route. The JSON file appears at [Base URL]/products.json. For example, the store for Wild Fox has their file available here: https://www.wildfox.com/products...
Then, found that thereās also a public file available for all stores that use Wordpress and WooCommerce at [Base URL]/wp-json/wc/v1/products. For example, the file for Good Works Tractors is available here: https://www.goodworkstractors.co...
Our crawler is built in Javascript to run through a list of e-commerce stores, access various public data files that have store and product information, and index the exact data we want for Agora. We have purposely kept the list of stores relatively small to nail down the platform experience before scaling the dataset.
For search, we use a few different AI tools and methodologies to help customers find products. After we index products from both Shopify and WooCommerce stores into our standardized data model, we make some of these fields searchable by using embeddings. This includes the title, description, tags, and image. For Agora, having the image being detectable with AI is critical because some products have creative names (e.g. a yellow dress could be named "Sunshine" and may not have any mention of being a dress). We then use these embeddings to power things like text search, image search, and finding similar products.
This is super exciting! Agora feels like it could completely change the way we shop online. Itās like the Amazon of the future, but decentralized. I canāt wait to see how this works in action!
Thanks @maneesh_shaji! I'd love your feedback on the product.
Btw, I saw Nfig and think it's super cool. Will check it out for Agora. We may be able to collaborate on orders automation.
Agora is a great solution for easy AI shopping! If you're looking for a platform to find products quickly and easily, Agora is the way to go. Millions of products from thousands of Shopify and WooCommerce stores are aggregated here, and the AI search makes the process incredibly easy.
Agora