make me (us) quit... please

[dariancohen94]

Alright guys and gals, my good friend and I have been working on this for over 6 months and haven't seen much traction. This could be for many reasons, I would say mostly our fault for not marketing through enough channels. If you feel like we have a glimmer of hope then please share.

• Mergie - shop everywhere at once. Think of the u/ of shopping. This would be useful for anyone who shops online and wants to find the best deal/price quickly and efficiently. Mergie aggregates 20+ online retailers: Amazon, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Facebook marketplace, etc.
• The market: We don't have a competitor per se, but Amazon and Google come to mind as it would require a paradigm shift in the buyers mind to think of Mergie before those two. Thefind.com was acquired by Facebook and then shut down, They were the second biggest search engine second to Google before being acquired by Facebook for an undisclosed amount. No one has filled the void that thefind.com left. We're trying to fill it.
• We just completed our soft launch two weeks ago. Had just over 150+ hits on our website from Instragram/reddit/Y Combinator Startup School. Would ultimately like to raise money.
• We find our customers by Facebook/Instagram campaigns/reddit/word of mouth/influencers
• It's just me and my good buddy right now. My co-founder is a magician when it comes to hacking/engineering. I'm an accomplished Saas salesman coming from a Product Manager role so have experience in building/managing features/products.

Let er rip!

 

[newtofaithjennifer]

@dariancohen94 Name is bad. Like hard g or soft g? Either way it sounds weird in a bad way.

Search was bad. I searched “d batteries” and not only did none of the results come up for batteries but all of the results were unrelated. Like some were speakers and others were flashlights. Then the results kept changing, first it was 30, then 80 and they all moved around, then it got to 400 or so. In summary, no valid results and what did appear was presented in a broken way. The interface to your product is busted and needs to be redesigned.

Finally I have seen all manner of these “search engine for product” websites over the years. All total failures. You can’t beat amazons own search engine without thousands of engineers like they have, so you will always have a subpar product whose only benefit is it hits several websites. Everyone just goes to amazon or Walmart, no one has time for another one. You can’t have a shopping cart that works across websites.

Basically you should focus on a much smaller niche, like “deal of the day” where you auto-search categories of products and alert when a deal is on. But this has been done over and over in many ways.

I give the current product 0% chance of success but maybe you can find a niche to pivot into. Good luck!

 

[lauran]

@dariancohen94 This looks like an aggregator that exists solely to generate affiliate commissions. These have been around for over a decade. Nothing special or new going on here. Like what you see at the top of Google "shopping" search results. Similar items from retailers around the web.

HOWEVER if you could do a white label version for schools and other nonprofits and share the affiliate revenue, you might have something here. My kid's school's newsletter always includes and amazon smile link so they can raise a little money from amazon purchases.

BTW, the second and third times I visited the site, the search didn't seem to do anything. I typed in a few queries and hit enter and nothing happened.

Edit: the search is working again, but your "similar" search is not very good. I searched for "joke" and "prank" and got results for "Joe's fishing lures" and "pants by prana".

 

[613jono]

@dariancohen94

• Name is bad
• Tagline is bad "shop everyone at once". Overwhelming.
• Site background is equally overwhelming.
• Site didn't work for me on chrome. Was unable to search so that's as much feedback as I can get you...

 

[alittlebird]

@dariancohen94 i exited before the initial load animation

 

[mrsminx]

@dariancohen94 Yeah. I don't know the site feels clunky. I don't want to learn it. I'm sorry. I bet many people will see it the same way. I checked it on mobile just convenient. I agree with others niche yourselves.

If you want to keep going. Find a way to categorize better. I searched guitar and it gave me some good searches but the squares on mobile told very little.

I got repeat squares.

Good luck.

 

[tsquared]

@dariancohen94 I got excited, searched for snowboard boots, and the overwhelming amount of unrelated crap that was displayed turned me right off.

1) allow users to filter by the retailer. Canadian users (me) don't want to see Amazon.com, They want to see Amazon.ca.

2) narrow down your search results.. sometimes less is more.

3) Can you search by model number maybe? I'm not sure how to describe this... but my first 5ish results were Amazon, next 5ish was another retailer, 5ish after that another retailer, etc. If I am using your tool to find the best deal/price, I want to compare apples to apples, across all retailers. Show me, model #1, from amazon, Walmart, target. Then show me model #2, that (for example) is available from amazon, facebook, and ebay.

Rather than showing me 5 random results amazon, then 5 different items from the next place... I hope this is making sense?