Comment by glawrence13 3 days 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.
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!
I still fail to see a positive use case for this. Feels like offering flooding the ocean with toxic slop as a service on the presumption a few of the more lucky customers can pick up some tiny fish corpses floating to the surface.
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?