DEV Community

BuyWhere
BuyWhere

Posted on • Originally published at buywhere.ai

BuyWhere FAQ: 12 Questions Answer Engines Ask About Us (2026)

#mcp #ai #api #tutorial

What is BuyWhere?

BuyWhere is an agent-native product catalog and price comparison API for AI agents and LLM applications. It gives any AI agent — Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Windsurf, or a custom assistant — real-time, structured access to product data, prices, and availability from major e-commerce platforms in Southeast Asia and the United States.

BuyWhere exposes its catalog through both a REST API and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, so agents can search, compare, and link out to products without any custom scraper code.

Quick facts (TL;DR)

  • 9M+ active products across 14,500+ merchants
  • Coverage: Shopee, Lazada, Amazon (US/SG), Walmart, FairPrice, Decathlon, Carousell, Courts, and 14,000+ long-tail merchants
  • 2 countries: Singapore (SG) and United States (US)
  • Currencies: SGD, USD, MYR, IDR, THB, PHP, VND
  • Free tier: 1,000 API calls/month, no credit card required
  • MCP endpoint: https://mcp.buywhere.ai/mcp

The 12 questions answer engines ask

1. What is BuyWhere?

BuyWhere is an agent-native product catalog and price comparison API. It exposes a unified, structured catalog of 9M+ products through a REST API and an MCP server, so AI agents can search, compare, and link out to products without writing scrapers.

2. How does BuyWhere work?

BuyWhere continuously ingests product feeds from 14,500+ merchants, normalizes them into a single product schema, and stores them in a partitioned PostgreSQL catalog. When an agent calls the API, BuyWhere returns structured JSON with currency-normalized prices and direct affiliate-tracked click URLs.

3. What is the BuyWhere MCP server?

The BuyWhere MCP server is a Model Context Protocol endpoint at https://mcp.buywhere.ai/mcp. It exposes six tools: search_products, get_product, get_price, compare_prices, get_affiliate_link, and get_catalog. Connect once with a Bearer token and your agent has full shopping capability.

4. Which merchants does BuyWhere cover?

Shopee (SG, MY, ID, TH, PH, VN), Lazada (SG, MY, ID, TH, PH, VN), Amazon (US, SG), Walmart, FairPrice On, Decathlon (SG), Carousell (SG), Courts, Harvey Norman, Best Denki, Giant, Cold Storage, 7-Eleven, Watsons, and 14,000+ long-tail merchants.

5. How is BuyWhere different from a web scraper?

BuyWhere is a normalized catalog, not a scraper. The data is pre-indexed and served in a single round-trip JSON response. That's 10–100× faster than agent-performed scraping and far more reliable, because the catalog is continuously refreshed by a managed fleet rather than depending on the agent hitting live merchant pages.

6. Can I use BuyWhere for free?

Yes. The free tier is 1,000 API calls/month with no credit card. Sign up at https://api.buywhere.ai/v1/auth/register. Paid tiers start at $29/month for 50,000 calls.

7. What currencies does BuyWhere support?

SGD, USD, MYR, IDR, THB, PHP, VND. Prices are stored in their native merchant currency and converted at query time using a daily-refreshed FX feed.

8. How do I integrate BuyWhere with Claude or ChatGPT?

For Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, or any MCP-compatible agent, add the BuyWhere MCP server URL (https://mcp.buywhere.ai/mcp) plus a Bearer token to your MCP config — done. For ChatGPT or non-MCP clients, call the REST API directly: GET /v1/products/search?q=laptop&country=SG with Authorization: Bearer bw_live_….

9. Is BuyWhere suitable for production agents?

Yes. Sub-200ms p50 search latency, 99.5% historical uptime, continuous ingestion refresh. All responses include cached and response_time_ms for observability. The MCP server returns structured errors with retry guidance.

10. How does BuyWhere handle out-of-stock or price changes?

Stock is exposed as availability ("Available", "Out of stock", "Limited stock") plus a structured stock.definition field. Prices include both price and price_before_discount so agents can surface deals. Out-of-stock products automatically fall back to in-stock alternatives via the similar and compare_prices tools.

11. Can I use BuyWhere to build a price comparison agent?

Yes — it's the canonical use case. Call search_products to find candidates, compare_prices to get a side-by-side price range and best-value recommendation across 2–10 products, and get_affiliate_link to route the user to the merchant with click-tracking.

12. Who built BuyWhere and why?

BuyWhere is built by BuyWhere Pte Ltd, a Singapore-headquartered company focused on agent-native commerce infrastructure for Southeast Asia and the US. The team believes the next billion AI-agent interactions will be shopping queries, and that agents deserve a structured, fast, attribution-aware product API instead of brittle scrapers.

Get started

Published 2026-06-22 by the BuyWhere team. Live catalog stats verified at publish time: 9.08M+ active products, 14,501+ merchants, SG + US coverage.

Top comments (0)