I originally launched Agora as a side project here on HN to find a pair of red shoes for my wife last Christmas. I quickly realized that some of the best products on the internet are sold by small online stores that struggle to get the same visibility as large retailers. I started Agora on a mission to solve this problem. If you sell the best pair of red shoes in the world, customers should be able to find it.

We recently built a merchant dashboard that helps Shopify and WooCommerce merchants sell more on our search engine. Agora Merchants connects to your existing e-commerce store without any painful setup required and helps you track your store's performance on Agora. We don't take a commission of sales, orders are routed to your existing point of sale system, and inventory is automatically uploaded and refreshed. We do this with a combination of crawlers and AI agents.

So how is this different than Amazon? Both Amazon and Agora give network effects to stores (i.e. if you're searching for red shoes from one store, you may also want to buy a red dress sold by a different store). The key difference with Agora is that you continue selling on your existing e-commerce store, without having to manage inventory and payouts on another platform. This creates a magical experience for our merchants that saves them hundreds of hours. We believe in a future where merchants can sell however they want, we just bring them more customers.

I'd love your feedback!