I would love to be able to just type "buy me a FooCorp BarBaz" into an LLM, and have it take care of choosing the retailer based on whatever criteria I've decided, whether that's lowest price, best return policy, fastest shipping... whatever. That sounds like it could be a much better experience than what we have now.
But I do worry that a service like yours could be biased in myriad ways, and an unscrupulous owner of such a service could do shady things like allowing retailers to pay to be preferred over others. Ultimately I'd want the open source version of this that I can self-host.
We felt AI was the perfect glue between different types of stores and could navigate them using intelligence. An example of this is being able to paste in your address in chat and AI will figure out which is the country, state, etc. Different stores handle addresses differently.
Also, you're adding a discovery platform where businesses have to compete against other businesses for visibility and customers. Why would I choose to, yet again, help create another "aggregator" to the already saturated "aggregator" market (Amazon, Shopify, Google, ChatGPT, etc.)?
Btw, I'm not trying to bash your idea. The reason I ask is that businesses (even smaller ones) don't pay just for software, but for everything else (support, etc), and among those things, software too, and frankly, the main problem 15 years ago was discovery, but with social media (Twitter, ig, and now TikTok), discovery itself is a solved problem.
This marketplace doesn't charge transaction fees because stores already have their own infrastructure. We're just connecting to it. Marketplace operators who fork this can charge flat listing fees or affiliates, but the model works because discovery is separate from infrastructure.
On discovery being solved: social sends traffic to your site, but checkout still happens on your platform. Same here. The difference is stores aren't locked in. They expose a standard interface once and automatically work with every marketplace using that protocol. One store can be listed on multiple marketplaces serving different audiences without any extra integrations.
You're right that businesses pay for more than software. But they also shouldn't have to pay 15-30% transaction fees when they already own the checkout stack. That's the shift.
That would be nice indeed. Let’s decouple ratings, reviews etc from the place we purchase the product from. Those can never be in the same place.
It’s actually the idea behind the decentralized marketplace I’m building. It uses MCP-UI to bring the whole storefront and checkout into the chat.
I’m keeping a close eye on e-commerce and AI and the recent deal Paypal made with OpenAI and Amazon getting aggressive, it’s clear they want to make AI powered commerce a walled garden.