Don't take this as a harsh criticism but I want to know what problem are you solving? Is this just for fun? This is a lose-lose game. You will never be able to catch up to the providers (shopify and woocommerce and others). What you are doing is not a search problem. It is a traffic problem of which you have little to none. There is a reason why Instagram and FB works as a driver for ecommerce products. My suggestion…
Finding products that aren't on Amazon or other top sites is a problem for consumers. Google Shopping is pretty bad. Connecting buyers direct to merchants is a win and something they all want. Every single entity that sells online is trying to boost their revenue share for direct to consumer as a mandate. Because they get more margin and they get to know their customer for ongoing marketing. The pandemic exposed many…
I worked for largest eCommerce employer twice and have built scraping and search systems at scale. I know a thing or two in eCommerce shopping sites. Do you know how much infra and people it takes to keep pricing, product, variant data up-to-date? Hint: It's significant capex investment.
Problem is entry point funnel in the shopping journey. If all he becomes an aggregator, it is no different than thousands out there. There is Shop.app which has all access to seller data and analytics. As I said, this is not a search problem. It is product discovery problem which you also seem to agree with. Unfortunately, not a lot of people/teams have managed to solve dicovery problem when site itself is fairly unknown.
Michael from YC also talks about product discovery being a tarpit idea.
I am not saying his search won't work. Search in itself is a solved problem here. You enter criteria/product name and you get results. But, unless you truly solve discovery, which in my opinion he can't do due to lack of first-party data, it won't do much besides a hopper site.