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.
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 :(
Also, I'm always mystified in these Launch threads how much very simple QA gets pushed down onto users, or early adopters as is the case in these threads. How would you have spotted that bad sync if you didn't have someone giving you free QA in an Internet forum?
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.
> 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!
I still fail to see a positive use case for this. Feels like offering flooding the ocean with toxic slop as a service on the presumption a few of the more lucky customers can pick up some tiny fish corpses floating to the surface.
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.
Last modified headers is always set to the current time in the majority of cases, and it also requires a web request too (albeit a HEAD request would likely suffice)
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 george@trychannel3.com.
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!
Hey! I know that you probably don't have any groceries there, but i tried "Goat cheese" and search result is super weird.
We build something similar and experience the same problem. Our current solution is not that effective, but we use vector-based search + llm to resolve such queries
Yeah, physical products for now. No groceries! We also use vector search + lots of LLMs, but not surprised you'd see funny search results here. We're working around the clock to make this better.
2nd employee at Semantics3 here. Considering all the AI available today I think things like product disambiguation becomes wayyy easier. We were trying many tricks and heuristics to identify the same products across sites.
