It’s surprisingly hard to find good product data. If you want your software to recommend products and deep-link to merchants, you’ll quickly discover that the data you need—clean titles, normalized attributes, deduped listings, current prices and inventory, variant options, images, and brand info—is not just messy; it’s also spread across a long, long tail of retailers, and often lives behind advanced bot-detection systems.
We ran into this problem while building an AI teacher that could recommend relevant supplies. We asked Exa for products, but got back articles, not structured data. Same for Tavily and Bing (deprecated as of 8/13/25). And we got rejected from affiliate programs, who suggested we come back with 1000s of TikTok followers. Channel3 is the API we wished we had.
Product detail pages (PDPs) usually present the main item alongside recommendations. We use computer vision to isolate the main product and find its attributes, like title and price. We apply the same logic to the rest of the PDPs on the domain.
Products are often sold across multiple retailers, with no guarantee they’ll be labeled consistently. We collapse products across the web into a canonicalized set by using LLMs and multimodal embeddings to actually understand each product.
To normalize everything into a schema that tries to be both minimal and extensible, we have to be opinionated. Are a $50 10” and $60 12” skillet the same product? Probably not, but the S/M/L variants of a T-shirt are. Our goal is that any product you’d search for specifically is treated as its own product.
We process a massive amount of data. We quickly ran out of room on our Cloudflare Vectorize indices and moved to the brand-new AWS S3 Vectors platform, syncing to OpenSearch for faster response times and more dynamic filtering. We hit rate limits constantly, so we spread our work over multiple cloud providers and AI models.
You can search things like “outdoor grill, less than $1000”, or “sweat-resistant, wireless running earbuds”, or "women's jeans from Paige that look like [https://www.gap.com/webcontent/0020/666/799/cn20666799.jpg]”. Products come back as JSON with title, brand, images, price, specs, etc.
Developers earn commission on sales they drive (averaging 5%). Channel3 takes a cut. We want you to earn way more money from Channel3 than you spend on it. We win when you win.
We provide an API, SDK (Typescript and Python), and MCP. We offer 1000 free searches, and charge $7/1000 searches after that. You can view expected commissions per-brand on our dashboard.
So far, products are US-only (sorry! we will expand). We’re live with millions of products and hundreds of developers.
To get started, make a free account at https://trychannel3.com, then select which brands you’d like to sell (choose from 50k+ or request your own), generate an API key, and start selling and earning.
We’d really appreciate feedback from this community. If you’ve built product search before, what did we miss in the schema? If you’ve tried to add commerce to an app, what blocked you? If you tried to build this yourself, what did you learn? Are there endpoints you wish existed (e.g. price alerts, back-in-stock webhooks, product feed)? For any suggestions, we’re all ears.
We’ll be in the thread all day to answer questions, share more technical detail, and hear whatever would make this most useful to you. Comment away!
You say that commissions average 5%, but what is the variability and where does it come from?
Last, a bit of feedback about the product.
I tried searching "nintendo switch 2" on your homepage and the results that came up kind of sketched me out. You mention that the products are US-only, but the first result clearly says "hong kong" in the title. And the store listed is "My Nintendo Store PT"; is that the official store? When I google that it takes me to the Portuguese version of the nintendo website, and that makes me even more confused.
The second result for the same search appears to be a dress, which is obviously completely unrelated to video games in general.
EDIT: I'm noticing irrelevant results for many queries. Searching "plain white pillowcase", the third result is a t-shirt, the seventh result is a dress, and the eleventh result is a light bulb.
Searching "men's wallet" the very first result is an outdoor picnic table.
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.
Very cool to see how you've aggregated so many products into one service. How do you plan to compete with FMTC and others that aggregate feeds together? Speaking as a publisher, I'd not want to share commission unless absolutely necessary and would prefer to just pay a fee so I can access the feed and not have an unknown amount of revenue lost between myself and the merchant.
As a brand running a program, I'd be very cautious about allowing my feed into your database if I didn't have any way to finding out who is featuring my products and where/how. Are you providing visibility to the brands since you're effectively functioning as a sub-affiliate network?
Those questions aside, great to see YC funding a startup in the space!
Something like this would be a great fit for my travel planner app if I knew I could trust that the results were high quality before prompting the user with them.
Btw I edited my earlier comment with a few more examples just before you replied.
Good luck!
I have a site that has lots of sports data on it. If you go to look at a page for one of the teams, maybe I want to put a link to buy their jersey. I could potentially go direct to the source and apply for affiliate programs from Nike, Adidas, Under Armor, Puma, etc, but that's a lot of effort to both set up and maintain across all the different partners for something that's not part of my core business.
Instead I can just use Channel3's affiliate links. I make a little less, but the trade off might be worth it for the simplicity.
Honestly, I'm not 100% sold on the idea being a good business, but I kind of get the idea. My concern would be maintaining the whale type customers. It feels to me like the product makes sense for minnows who don't have high volume or for people building an MVP or looking for a proof of concept, but once a customer has hit a certain scale, I don't get why you wouldn't just get a direct affiliate program and cut these guys out.
If I'm driving a $1000 a month to Nike and getting 3% from these guys, but I can get 5% by setting up an affiliate program directly with Nike, maybe it's not worth my time to chase that extra $20. If I'm driving $50k a month to Nike then that's an extra $1000 a month I could get by cutting these guys out which feels a lot more worth it.
Can you explain the main use cases when i would want to add shopping to my platform?
If i’m building an ecommerce website, why would I need your API if I’m just selling my own products?
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
I had tried to sign up for affiliate sales a while back, but:
It is complicated to sign up for it – depending on the vendor you have to fill in a number of forms, or sign up via a different affiliate network to even use them.
Wait times for a response are long – I remember some networks or individual sellers got back to me months later.
There's a high bar to entry – I had a tiny website, so I didn't get approved, but I had a good CTR. I eventually had to shut down the website since I realized there was no viable option to monetization and was just burning money on name registration + hosting.
My website was also not in the blog-space, i.e. I didn't do reviews, but I did offer good info, and Amazon for example specifically denied me affiliate permissions because of this.
I might revive the website and see if it'll work again with you guys. This is a path to monetization that could make it sustainable. Thanks and good luck!
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.
The price errors stem from a bad sync between our product database and OpenSearch index. We're working on fixing this now. Let us know what you think!
I'd be weary of paying too much attention to cynicism on here. However, as another guy mentioned, also great feedback and room for improvement mentioned. Cheers