glawrence13 (u/glawrence13)

glawrence13 commented on Launch HN: Channel3 (YC S25) – A database of every product on the internet · Posted by u/glawrence13

Bnjoroge · 7 months ago

Great idea but the search is awful which is dissapointing given how mainstream search has gotten.

glawrence13 · 7 months ago

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.

glawrence13 commented on Launch HN: Channel3 (YC S25) – A database of every product on the internet · Posted by u/glawrence13

AznHisoka · 7 months ago

Can you be more specific?

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?

glawrence13 · 7 months ago

Yep, I should be more precise

> 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!

glawrence13 commented on Launch HN: Channel3 (YC S25) – A database of every product on the internet · Posted by u/glawrence13

lloydpick · 7 months ago

Tried searching for "red high top sneakers under $40", and the first result was a shaft seal? The next result was a red high top sneaker so good, but it had a price of '0', bad. Then it started showing basically random items skin care, dog food, white sneakers, dog bandanas etc. The price limit started to get ignored.

glawrence13 · 7 months ago

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 :(

glawrence13 commented on Launch HN: Channel3 (YC S25) – A database of every product on the internet · Posted by u/glawrence13

codegeek · 7 months ago

I am confused on who this is exactly for ? Is it for an end user/buyer who is looking to buy something and you just aggregate from various sources based on query OR is this for other developers/providers who are providing their own search interface on their own eCommerce website etc ? I assume the latter but isn't very clear at least to me.

glawrence13 · 7 months ago

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.

glawrence13 commented on Launch HN: Channel3 (YC S25) – A database of every product on the internet · Posted by u/glawrence13

blancotech · 7 months ago

Curious, how are you keeping the product data up-to-date? We built something similar for price alerts on specific URLs, that we use all the time, but have to poll it daily to see the price change (https://lowlow.bot). I imagine that would be a lot of $$ for every product on the Internet.

glawrence13 · 7 months ago

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.

glawrence13 commented on Launch HN: Channel3 (YC S25) – A database of every product on the internet · Posted by u/glawrence13

trollied · 7 months ago

I can't see this disrupting the EDI world any time soon. Big business people will know what I mean.

glawrence13 · 7 months ago

All good, not the space we're targeting

glawrence13 commented on Launch HN: Channel3 (YC S25) – A database of every product on the internet · Posted by u/glawrence13

MarcelOlsz · 7 months ago

So by definition not every product on the internet. Do you have my girlfriends handmade bags on there? I don't see them.

glawrence13 · 7 months ago

We're adding millions of products every week, so hopefully if you don't see your girlfriend's handbag there today, you'll see it soon!

glawrence13 commented on Launch HN: Channel3 (YC S25) – A database of every product on the internet · Posted by u/glawrence13

bosky101 · 7 months ago

Rye allows you to even enter shipping info and pay for the product. But I can't help but feel it hasn't got the traction it deserves.

1) Are there plans to allow Devs to do the same?

2) why wouldn't you open the limit beyond 1000 free as long as you are making a rev share

3) does this pick from Shopify products/stores?

Imo the agentic loop isn't really closed unless you allow agents to pay and paywalls today aren't agent friendly. Tokenized cards, 16 digital cards. Perhaps but this involves high trust from users. Which means you are left with guiding users to the link and hoping they buy the product.

4) partnering with merchants where cards are already tokenized maybe your best converting potential customer base. But it's easy to do evil here, or loose trust without guardrails.

5) I would come up with a process to incentivize adding products to the ecosystem. However tiny the reward.

Lot of opportunity. Nice pitch. Good luck!

Would try this out of you can increase the 1k limit to something that is a win:win

glawrence13 · 7 months ago

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.

glawrence13 commented on Launch HN: Channel3 (YC S25) – A database of every product on the internet · Posted by u/glawrence13

shtopointo · 7 months ago

I would actually say that the selling point here is that affiliate revenue goes thru your website.

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!

glawrence13 · 7 months ago

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.

glawrence13 commented on Launch HN: Channel3 (YC S25) – A database of every product on the internet · Posted by u/glawrence13

101008 · 7 months ago

Seems like a great idea but the search is horrible. I tried a few ones and products were completely unrelated, or if related (because of a keyword) completely different from what I wanted. I understand you are working on the dataset, etc., but releasing too early may be bad for you guys. Most people won't try it again if the quality is bad. You have one chance to make an impression.

glawrence13 · 7 months ago

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!