How I Built ShopAI — AI Price Comparison Across Every Store (Solo Maker Story)

七爺 — Sun, 24 May 2026 01:25:52 +0000

The Problem

Last month I was shopping for a new mechanical keyboard. I spent 3 hours opening 8 different tabs — Amazon, AliExpress, JD, Taobao, Best Buy, eBay, Newegg, Walmart — comparing the exact same model across every store. The price difference was 40%.

I thought: why isn't there a single place where I can search once and see prices from ALL stores?

What I Built

ShopAI — AI-powered price comparison across every major online store. Type what you're looking for, and ShopAI:

Scrapes prices from 6+ major e-commerce platforms simultaneously
Uses AI to intelligently match products across different stores (same keyboard, different listings with different descriptions)
Shows you the cheapest option, the fastest shipping, and the best overall value
Works for any product — electronics, books, fashion, home goods

The Tech Stack

Next.js + React — Frontend with server-side rendering for SEO
AI Product Matching — Custom model for cross-store product deduplication (this was by far the hardest part)
Web Scraping Pipeline — Rotating proxies + rate limiting to handle multi-store queries
Edge Functions — Price queries resolve in under 2 seconds

Hardest Problems Solved

1. Product Matching is AI-Hard

The same keyboard on Amazon is "Keychron K2 Wireless Mechanical Keyboard (Hot-Swappable)" — on AliExpress it's "Keychron K2 75% BT5.1 RGB Swappable" and on JD it's just "Keychron K2机械键盘". Same product, three completely different descriptions. I had to build a custom matching algorithm using embeddings + fuzzy string matching.

2. Anti-Bot Protection

Every store has different anti-scraping measures. The pipeline handles Cloudflare challenges, CAPTCHAs, rate limiting patterns, and dynamic content loading differently per store.

3. Speed vs Completeness

Users expect results in 2 seconds, but scraping 6+ stores takes time. I built a streaming architecture where results appear as they come in, with the best matches surfacing first.

Results So Far

Launched 2 weeks ago
500+ products searched daily
Average price savings per search: 22%
Users from 20+ countries (mainly US, China, India)

What's Next

Adding more stores (Costco, Target, ASOS, Zalando)
Price history tracking and drop alerts
Mobile app with barcode scanning
Browser extension for one-click price comparison

Lessons for Solo Makers

Ship fast, iterate faster — First version was just 2 stores and a basic text search. I shipped it in 3 days.
AI is the differentiator — Without the product matching AI, this would just be another comparison site. The AI makes it feel magical.
Pricing transparency is a superpower — Users love knowing they're actually getting the best deal. The trust builds quickly.

Thanks for reading! I'd love feedback from the dev community — especially on the scraping architecture and the AI matching. What would you do differently?

Try it out: shopai.fun

Follow my solo maker journey: @yjj061014

DEV Community: 七爺