Feed back on idea
In the fashion eCommerce space, aggregation tools like lyst are popular as they make it easier for customers to find products they like.
With the growth of smaller merchants online and product discovery becoming an increasingly difficult challenge for both merchants and users, why hasn't someone built an aggregation-based discovery tool for products across the web?
Current options tend to be very search focused (implying that customers know what they're looking for):
- Google Shopping
- Pricegrabber
- Shopping.com
- Shopzilla
To be fair, these existing options do have discovery but it tends to be clunky and unusable category navigation.
Here are some reasons I can think of why customers could benefit:
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Search across more varied product offerings (Google Shopping tends to concentrate results from the top merchants only - Walmart, Best Buy, etc)
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Discover content-driven products (Most of the time when purchasing a product, consumers want to accomplish something - i.e. fix a canoe - and smaller merchants tend to help customers accomplish that goal via content.
-
Discover quality over price (most shopping online is price driven. I would bet there are customers who would be open to paying more for higher quality products)
-
Support more sustainable business practices (this is dependent on the business, but with more options customers could opt to support businesses that reflect their values)
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The product could learn from their interests and provide a personalized experience
Here's why vendors would benefit:
- They can acquire customers with less costly paid media
- Less dependence on social media channels like Google and Facebook
- More brand awareness
- Provides an easy way for customers to impulse shop (low price sensitivity)
On paper, this sounds good but a few immediate drawbacks include consistency of quality service from smaller brands and that the product is relatively useless in specific commodity product categories.
The biggest problem today with smaller brands is shipping time. Customers are spoiled with short shipping times from big retailers and come to expect it from every brand while shopping online.
Luckily, more and more companies are coming up in this space to help small brands compete cost effectively with bigger companies like Target, Walmart, Amazon and more so I expect this issue to be less of a drawback over time.
What do you think? Do you like shopping from smaller brands or prefer big box retailers online?
There are a few tools out there. Though they are not that good. Fancy.com, Wanelo and I am sure there are a few others that I have forgotten now. I used to work for a company called Yroo and we had 2 products that were trying to accomplish something like this yroo.com and shopbrain.com. We made a Shopify app which allowed small merchants to have their catalog integrated on our site and our goal was to provide a way for them to get exposure along side the big guys as we aggregated from the big merchants too. This proved to be very difficult. Here are some of the challenges we faced:
For many of them, their products just weren't very good.
They had much higher mark ups and therefore ended up being exposed as being rip offs. You could get stuff from other merchants for significantly cheaper and their products would often appear right beside an Amazon product or a Walmart product.
It was a lot more overhead to work with smaller merchants as we had to do a lot more back and forth with them and they required way more support than a Walmart or Amazon as those guys have well established affiliate programs. It was extremely difficult to work with 100 small online stores with more or less 30 products (some times more) each. With Amazon, Walmart or Target it was a set it and forget it type of thing. Maybe you would have an issue with one of them like 2-3 times per year and they had a dedicated team to help you resolve issues.
Our users were looking for deals rather than the latest boutique and so smaller merchants didn't get much traffic. This caused them to be super mad and caused more back and forth. They only paid like 20$ a month to use our Shopify app and I am sure we spent orders of magnitudes more working with them and we really didn't benefit other than learning stuff. I know there might be a niche out there that is looking for cool new small merchants and are willing to pay more but, our data didn't show that. Before we built a Shopify app, we had plans to build apps for all the e-comm marketplaces and after the experience with Shopify we didn't even bother. I think we should have charged more and I think we intended to...but it ultimately wasn't worth it.
Like you said, they often can't offer the same benefits like fast shipping and free returns and really solid customer service. That stuff makes a difference to shoppers. Like a HUGE difference.
I know our experience was limited to Shopify but I have a feeling it might be similar on other platforms too. We tried to integrate with Etsy and we did not get approved for their affiliate program for whatever reason. Discovery is definitely an issue for small merchants but I am not sure if one giant aggregator is the best strategy. I think good ol social media might be the solution for that. I am also not sure if the biggest challenges customers are having is with discovering stuff (I don't know if they care that they aren't seeing small retailers). I might be wrong.
My personal preference is Amazon or any retailer with 2 day shipping. Fast shipping and customer service is a must. I don't mind small retailers but they are not my first choice. I think it might be more useful for us to physically aggregate products so that they can compete in having these other services that people want. Then after that we can try aggregating listings. For now they can continue using social to get the word out.
above mentioned sites are not in working condition.
Yea they have since been discontinued as they were acquired by Affirm.
@jleigh First off, thank you for your thorough and thoughtful response!
I absolutely agree with the points you made but wanted to dig a bit deeper into your experience with yroo.
My immediate reaction when I checked yroo and ShopBrain out was that yroo is like Google Shopping (i.e. a product search engine) and ShopBrain is like honey or a number of other price comparison extensions.
Initially, in my post I pegged the problem users were facing as discovery but now I'm more unsure that's the real problem as social media plugs most of this gap pretty well and your data supports that.
On one hand, your point about customers not caring in general (i.e. its not a big enough pain) about discovery seems true based on the data and makes selling the yroo concept much harder.
But on the other hand, I'm seeing that consumers are starting to value quality over quantity in their purchases. I think this hasn't reached the masses yet but I definitely see inklings of it in the tech community (check out this piece from HN where people are talking about the quality problem on Amazon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20777206). If you read through the comments on that post I think it becomes clearer that people ARE looking for alternative medium (not small) sized brands where they can get relatively fast shipping (2 days - 1 week) and a high quality product.
My thought here is that the positioning of yroo as a "save money" tool is wrong and the focus should instead be on finding quality specialty brands to buy from (i.e. save time researching and figuring out which companies you should buy from) which is a much more compelling reason to use a product. As people become busier, products that save time are more desirable.
A great example of the saving time and building trust among its users concept is Xiaohongshu (https://www.dragonsocial.net/blog/xiaohongshu-marketing-for-business/) where customers post their experiences with products/brands and has become a de-facto way for urban women in China to research a product as merchants in China have a reputation for fake reviews and other unscrupulous behavior. To better prove out the positioning idea, I'd love to learn more about how yroo's acquired users and why users used yroo in the first place.
A couple questions I had while reading your piece:
How small were these merchants you onboarded in terms of order volume (100+ day?)
Did you focus on any specific niche or merchants who sold more general products?
Did you guys aggregate products from shopify stores outside of your app? E.g. Scraping
Again, I want to say thank you for your response. If you're open to it I'd love to chat via email or, even better, a quick 15 minute phone call. No pressure but if you decide you can email me at aldrin dot clement at gmail.com.
Regards,
Hey @buzz_aldrin,
I have no problem hopping on a call if you want more info. I'll email you.