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Show HN: I'm Building an Alternative to Shopify (searchagora.com)
3 points by astronautmonkey 5 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments
Hi HN! I'm working on an AI e-commerce store builder that is an alternative to Shopify.

After talking to hundreds of merchants, I heard the same thing over and over again: e-commerce stores are expensive to build, tough to manage, and require a lot of customization to be successful. Shopify is a good starting point but requires a lot of work to get your first sales. There's even a whole industry of expensive service providers that help merchants navigate the Shopify ecosystem.

I built the Agora Store Builder to solve this problem and give merchants a single platform to easily build and distribute their store. Users can build, manage, and deploy a custom e-commerce store via chat. And everything is optimized to help stores succeed: store analytics, payment integrations, order tracking, domain management, code access, and more.

Here are some key specs:

1. The vibe coding interface is powered by V0. We manage previews and deployments with Vercel with a lot of middleware to manage integrations, state, products, checkout, and orders. We provide a Products and Orders database built in. No external data source required to set up. The Products database has a similar structure as Shopify with parent products, variants, and stock management.

2. Using the same crawlers we've built for our search engine, we've enabled a "Import Shopify store" and "Import WooCommerce store" option from the home page. You can enter any existing e-commerce store and we'll automatically import the product data to save you time switching over to Agora.

3. We've built a native integration with Stripe to manage in-store payments and merchant payouts. We also have a Zapier app to enable merchants to connect incoming orders to the tools they already use like ShipStation, DHL, Klaviyo, Mailchimp, and more.

There's a few things on our immediate roadmap: improve the initial loading speed, introduce more design variety, and add full stack apps that are easy to install (e.g. adding customer reviews to a store).

I'd love your feedback!



I don't get the initial motivation. I'll add a disclaimer that my job is to build apps for b2b/d2c in Shopify for brands that are migrating. I'd say that's the hard part. Setting up a shop in Shopify isn't hard at all. The text doesn't really tell me what their struggles were.


I wish I could use it without entering an email address.


Completely understand that. We currently tie each store to a user account. But maybe we can let you start the process to see how the builder works without having to register?


Yes. Then I'd get to try it in one mouse-click, instead of one mouse-click and coming up with a fake email and new password and writing them down.




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