Business uses of our engine

[RichardxLee]

-setup Eclipe with Solr -research business uses of our facet search engine

[colinmleung]

http://ecommerce.shopify.com/c/shopify-apis-and-technology/t/what-kinds-of-apps-do-people-want-37865

Great forum thread with lots of input from actual customer merchants, shopify employees, and application builders about what plugins customers want on Shopify.

http://retayl.com/shopify-app-development/

Retayl is a shop that helps people make custom Shopfiy apps. Notice that they have built custom Faceted Search capabilities for a client before. In fact, it may not be necessary to make an intelligent faceted search. Maybe just letting people easily create their own faceted search will be enough

http://wiki.shopify.com/Shopify_App_Development#Get_started_learning_how_to_build.2C_promote.2C_and_sell_Shopify_apps.

Self-explanatory and a must read.

[colinmleung]

I think ecommerce definitely has a future, and I think latching on to an existing platform will give us several advantages:

-a captive audience that is comfortable with paying for internet services, and understands what value software can bring to their business -base functionality is already built, we merely provide additional services on top of it

http://www.infinitytechnologies.com.au/blog/2013/05/21/magento-is-the-worlds-most-popular-ecommerce-platform/

Seems like Shopify is just one fish in a big pond. Our first step is to probably consider what we want to build on top of. Magento seems like the obvious choice because of it's larger audience, but we may have to consider that it's plugin ecosystem is already mature, and may already have many applications that we would have thought of.

http://www.sooqr.com/en/tour#item2

On the other hand, an Ajax Pagination and Sorting application charges 39 euros on Magento. http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/customer-experience/category-product-page-enhancements/ajax-pagination-and-sorting.html

Definitely things to consider.

[colinmleung]

http://dailyinfographic.com/which-ecommerce-platform-is-right-for-me-infographic http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/tech-manager/infographic-which-e-commerce-platform-is-best/8177 http://www.venturedout.com/reviews/shopify-the-best-ecommerce-platform/ http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-Magento-vs-Shopify http://www.duncantang.com/blog/1017/magento-vs-shopify-e-commerce-smackdown http://morganlinton.com/ecommerce-showdown-magento-vs-shopify-vs-bigcommerce/

Examining this issue from the perspective of a merchant looking for an ecommerce platform, it seems like Magento is for people with large corporate budgets and technical personnel, whereas Shopify is more for small businesses. As well, a common complaint customers have is that Shopify is very minimal out of the box, so they have to spend a lot of money on plugins. Seems like a ripe market to me.

Another dimension to consider is the technical complexity of the product and the possible integration difficulties. On this front, I think Shopify wins hands down. Magento is written in PHP, but is open-source.

http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2012/03/01/basics-creating-magento-module/

compared to

http://www.shopify.ca/technology/3671962-developing-shopify-apps-part-1-the-setup#axzz2WYESvegS

Shopify definitely seems more Web 2.0 and more pleasant to develop for.

[RichardxLee]

There are mainly two ways to launch our product, either a stand-alone faceted search engine that can be applied onto mySQL, DB2 etc, or a plugin for E-commerce website. I think it is definitely better to build on top of giants' shoulder. I see more potential, as well as more customers for E-commerce site.

[RichardxLee]

In terms of E-commerce site, there are bunch of them out there, ebay, amazon, which already have their own faceted search. Ones that do not have faceted search so far, but I have found that people find it really popular are: shopify, wordpress, magnento, demandware, and hybris. Wordpress already have faceted search build by someone. I would higly recommend shopify, as it is really API friendly, and most users are startup people who are used to pay services

[RichardxLee]

Is this something similar to what we are trying to do?

http://www.searchify.com