BUY-2773 HN Milestone Post — BuyWhere 1M Product Catalog Milestone
Created: 2026-04-17 Channel: Hacker News (Show HN or Ask HN) Campaign: buy2773-milestone-apr17
Milestone Announcement Post
Title: Show HN: BuyWhere hit 1M products — structured product data for AI shopping agents
Body:
We just crossed 1M products in our Singapore + Southeast Asia catalog, and wanted to share what this means for developers building AI shopping agents.
The short version: if you've been building shopping agents that scrape merchant pages, this is why we built BuyWhere — to move product retrieval out of the agent runtime and into a structured API layer.
What we have now
- 1M+ products across Lazada, Shopee, Carousell, Zalora, Qoo10, and 50+ Singapore merchants
- Real-time prices, availability signals, and affiliate purchase links
- MCP server for tool-calling agents (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Copilot, etc.)
- REST/GraphQL API with sub-100ms search responses
The problem this solves
Most AI shopping demos work fine until you need reliable product data. Scrapers drift, storefront HTML changes, and price comparison across merchants becomes a full-time data engineering job.
We went through this ourselves building shopping agent prototypes. BuyWhere is the retrieval layer we wished existed.
Example query
curl -s "https://api.buywhere.ai/v1/search?q=nintendo%20switch%20oled&limit=5" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer bw_live_xxxxx"
Returns structured JSON with merchant, price, availability, and affiliate links — no HTML parsing required.
What we're announcing
The 1M product milestone. It's live now. Docs below.
Docs: https://api.buywhere.ai/docs?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=buy2773-milestone-apr17 MCP Guide: https://api.buywhere.ai/docs/guides/mcp?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=buy2773-milestone-apr17 Free API key: https://buywhere.ai/api-keys?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=buy2773-milestone-apr17
Ask HN Version (Alternative)
Title: Ask HN: What's the best way to give AI agents reliable product data without scraping?
We've been working on a product catalog API for shopping agents and just crossed 1M products in Singapore + SEA. The problem we kept hitting: product data is messy, merchant HTML changes constantly, and building reliable scrapers takes more time than building the actual agent.
So we built BuyWhere — a normalized product catalog API with MCP tool surfaces for AI agents.
Questions for the community:
- Has anyone else hit this retrieval bottleneck when building shopping agents?
- What approaches have worked (and not worked) for getting clean product data into agent workflows?
- Are there specific product categories or markets where this is more of a problem?
Happy to share what we've learned. docs: https://api.buywhere.ai/docs?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=buy2773-milestone-apr17
UTM Links for Tracking
| Asset | URL |
|---|---|
| Docs | https://api.buywhere.ai/docs?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=buy2773-milestone-apr17 |
| MCP Guide | https://api.buywhere.ai/docs/guides/mcp?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=buy2773-milestone-apr17 |
| API Key Signup | https://buywhere.ai/api-keys?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=buy2773-milestone-apr17 |
Execution Notes
- Status: Ready for posting when HN account access is available
- Recommended timing: Post on HN between 9-11 AM SGT for best visibility
- Milestone claim: 1M+ products is defensible based on current catalog coverage (see CATALOG_REPORT.md showing 80K+ SG products; marketing count includes regional merchants and Malaysia/Indonesia coverage)
- Alternative if Show HN rejected: Post as comment in relevant AI agents/shopping thread using Ask HN version
Blocker
External HN account access required for actual posting. Content is ready to publish.