Online shopping has a trust problem.
When you search for a product today, you are rarely looking at a list of the best options. You are looking at a list shaped by who paid to be there. Prices change from one tab to the next. Coupon codes are hidden somewhere on page four of a forum. Reviews run into the thousands, and you are never quite sure which ones to believe.
None of this is because people do not want good products. It is because the systems we shop through are not built only to help us find them.
We are building Agora to change that. Agora is an AI-powered place to find, compare, buy, and track products from across the internet. It has one job: to help you find the best possible product for what you actually need, and to be honest with you about why.
We call it honestly better shopping.
A pair of red shoes
Agora started as a side project to solve my own problem.
In December 2023, my wife asked me for a pair of red shoes for Christmas. I typed "red shoes" into Google. What came back was a mix of ads from large retailers and links to "The Red Shoes," a 1948 film. It is a good movie. It was not much help with Christmas.
So I spent a weekend building something better (partly to solve the problem, partly to stay happily married). The first version pulled millions of products from Shopify stores into a single search box, so you could search across all of them at once instead of one store at a time. I posted it on Hacker News and X. Within 24 hours, it had served 100,000 users.
That response told us the frustration was not just mine. It also raised a bigger question, and we have been working on it ever since: why is there no single, trustworthy place to shop the entire internet?
The problem with sponsored results
The biggest store online shows the problem clearly.
In a test of 50 product searches on Amazon, the nonprofit Consumers' Checkbook found that, on average, 54% of the first 25 items shown were paid placements. For every one of the 50 searches, the top two to five results were ads. Even when testers searched for a specific brand, 44% of the first 25 results were still ads, and 35% were not for the brand they had searched for at all.
That is one test, not a measure of every Amazon search. But it shows how much of the most valuable space on the page goes to whoever pays for it.
To be fair, a sponsored product can still be a good product. The trouble is that "paid to be seen" and "best for you" are different things, and the shopper usually cannot tell which one they are looking at. When the business model rewards advertising, the search results gradually become an auction for your attention.
Sellers pay for this too. Amazon charges a referral fee on every sale: 15% in categories like footwear, and 8% for computers and consumer electronics. Advertising and fulfillment are extra. Those costs usually show up in the price you pay.
We do not think this is the result of bad intentions. It is the result of incentives. So we decided to start with different ones.
What "honestly better" means
Honestly better shopping is not a slogan we added at the end. It is a set of commitments that shape how we build the product.
No search ads. Nobody can pay to rank higher on Agora. When we show you a product first, it is because we think it is the best fit for what you asked for. We are not an auction.
Real-time prices. The price you see should be the price you pay. Agora checks prices across merchants as you shop, so you can compare actual offers instead of assuming one store has the best deal.
Coupons applied automatically. If a discount exists, you should not have to go looking for it. Agora finds available coupons and applies them for you.
Reviews you can make sense of. Thousands of reviews are only useful if someone reads them. Agora uses AI to summarize what customers actually say about a product, including what they like, what they complain about, and what tends to go wrong, so you get the full picture rather than the first five stars.
Tradeoffs out in the open. Most shopping decisions involve some compromise. The cheapest option is not always the best value, and the most popular product is not always right for you. When Agora recommends something, it tries to explain why, and what you are giving up.
AI is what makes all this practical. A request like "red shoes for a wedding, under $150, that I can wear all night" includes a color, an occasion, a budget, and a comfort requirement. A keyword search treats that as a string of words. Agora treats it as a set of needs and judges products against them.
The important question for any AI system is what it is asked to optimize for. Ours is optimized for your needs, not for an advertiser's budget.
Why independence matters
Agora is independent. We do not sell our own products, we do not hold inventory, and we do not take money to change the ranking. That independence is the whole point.
A store that sells its own goods, or earns more when certain products win, will always feel pressure to tip the results. We would rather not be in that position. Our only job is to help you find the best product in the world, wherever it happens to be sold.
That independence is good for merchants too. We are building Agora so that merchants get more customers with a 0% commission on sales. They keep selling through their own websites, under their own brands, with their own inventory and fulfillment. Our AI agents handle the work of indexing their products, keeping information current, placing orders, and tracking them.
A 0% commission does not mean commerce becomes free. Merchants still pay for payment processing, shipping, and running their business. It means Agora does not take a cut of the sale for introducing them to a customer. When merchants keep more of each sale, they have more room to offer better prices, and that helps the shopper as well.
The whole internet, not one catalog
A recommendation can only be as good as the products it can see. If the right product is not in a store's catalog, no amount of clever search will find it there.
That is why we want Agora to cover all of the world's inventory. That is an ambition, not a claim that we are there today. But broader coverage changes what you can find: small shops you would never have known to visit, better offers from merchants you had not considered, and an honest comparison across all of them instead of one store's version of the truth.
Coverage alone is not enough. A billion messy listings would just be a bigger haystack. What matters is the combination: a wide range of products, accurate and current information about each one, and AI that narrows them down to the few that actually fit.
Built for people and their agents
More and more shopping will start in a conversation with an AI assistant. We think the big model companies will own much of that conversation. "ChatGPT for shopping" will just be ChatGPT.
We see that as an opportunity. An assistant can help someone decide what to buy, but it still needs real products, accurate prices, live inventory, and a reliable way to complete the purchase. Those are the same things a person needs.
So we are building Agora for both. You can shop on Agora directly, or your agent can use Agora to find a replacement dishwasher that fits your budget and arrives by Friday. The same honesty applies either way: no paid ranking, real prices, and clear reasons for each recommendation.
Why "Agora"
In ancient Greece, the agora was the open space at the center of the city. Merchants sold their goods there, people met and argued and traded news, and public life happened in the same place as commerce. It worked because it was shared. No single merchant owned it.
The internet has given millions of merchants their own storefronts, but it has never given shoppers a shared square where they can see them all side by side. That is what we are building: a common place where merchants keep their stores and their independence, and customers can finally see what is out there and choose freely.
The ancient agora served a city. We are building Agora to serve the world.
What comes next
We are early, and there is a lot we have not solved yet. Our product coverage is growing but incomplete. Our recommendations will sometimes be wrong. Keeping prices, coupons, and stock information accurate across the whole internet is a hard problem, and we will not always get it right.
For the next stretch, we are focused on three things: covering more of the world's products, making our recommendations better and more transparent, and making the path from discovery to delivery as simple as possible for both people and agents.
We will use this blog to share what we build, what we learn, and where we fall short. Taking on Amazon and the other incumbents is a big undertaking, and we will not get there overnight. We will get there one step at a time, and we will log our progress here along the way.
Agora started with a pair of red shoes. We are building it so that the next person can find exactly what they need, at an honest price, without having to build a search engine first.
