BUY-2773 Reddit Milestone Post — BuyWhere 1M Product Catalog Milestone
Created: 2026-04-17 Channel: Reddit Campaign: buy2773-milestone-apr17
Reddit Post for r/LocalLLaMA (or r/MachineLearning)
Title: We hit 1M products in our Southeast Asia catalog — here's what we learned about building product data infrastructure for AI agents
Body:
Hey folks — wanted to share a milestone and also a lesson learned.
We just crossed 1M products in our Singapore + Southeast Asia catalog for BuyWhere (product catalog API for AI shopping agents). The lesson: building reliable product retrieval for agents is harder than building the agent itself.
The problem in SEA e-commerce specifically:
- Shopee, Lazada, Carousell, Tokopedia, Qoo10 — all different APIs (or no APIs), different product IDs, different data quality
- Scraping works for demos, breaks in production
- Normalizing product data across 6+ platforms is a full data engineering team
What we built: a normalized product catalog API with MCP tool surfaces. Agents call search/compare/deals tools, get structured JSON back with real prices, availability, and affiliate links.
The milestone: 1M+ products across 52 merchants, refreshed on a rolling schedule.
The ask: if you're building shopping agents or price comparison tools, would love your feedback on whether the API shape makes sense for agent workflows. What are you hitting that we might not be solving for?
I work on BuyWhere, so biased — but genuinely curious about other approaches to the product retrieval problem for agents.
Alternative Post for r/artificial
Title: The missing layer in AI shopping agents: reliable product data infrastructure
Body:
Most AI shopping demos look impressive until you ask: where does the product data actually come from?
If the answer involves scraping, the demo works until the merchant changes their HTML. If it involves official APIs, most SEA merchants don't have developer-friendly ones.
We spent 6 months building a normalized product catalog API specifically for AI agent consumption — structured JSON, MCP tool surfaces, real-time prices, availability signals, and affiliate links.
Just hit 1M products across Singapore and Southeast Asia merchants.
The honest question: is anyone else hitting the retrieval bottleneck when building commerce agents? Or is this specific to SEA's fragmented e-commerce landscape?
Would love to hear what's working for others building in this space.
Docs if relevant: https://api.buywhere.ai/docs?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=buy2773-milestone-apr17
UTM Links
| Asset | URL |
|---|---|
| Docs | https://api.buywhere.ai/docs?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=buy2773-milestone-apr17 |
| MCP Guide | https://api.buywhere.ai/docs/guides/mcp?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=buy2773-milestone-apr17 |
| API Key Signup | https://buywhere.ai/api-keys?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=buy2773-milestone-apr17 |
Execution Notes
- Recommended timing: Post on Reddit between 8-10 PM SGT for community engagement
- Recommended subreddit: r/LocalLLaMA or r/MachineLearning (developer audience)
- Approach: Read subreddit rules first; lead with the technical/architecture discussion angle rather than pure self-promotion
- Bias disclosure: Include in post body as shown above
Blocker
External Reddit account access required for actual posting. Content is ready to publish.