HomeGadgets has passed $2 million in buying intent sent to Canadian retailers

When I started HomeGadgets, the question was simple: Can I create a simple, yet comprehensive retail map of major consumer electronics and appliances where Canadians spend over $20B a year, and Canadians use it to find the best prices on TVs, appliances, laptops, monitors, soundbars, unlocked phones, cameras, lenses, vacuum cleaners, printers, printer consumables, headphones and more? No clutter, no ads, no sponsorships, no bias.

Seven months in and the answer is in the numbers! And this is just getting started as even more powerful shopping tools currently under testing are about to be launched (more on this below).

Earlier this month HomeGadgets.ca passed $2M worth of products clicked on the site by high purchase intent visitors straight to over 140 Canadian retailers and OEMs. That is $2M of GMV in 7 months and that number is about to get much higher as it now tallies all activities its AI agent friendly API and all other tools that hit the database, where you can ask for the best price of any item in the catalog through your favorite AI chatbot using our /API and/or our /MCP server.

Additionally, in late October/early November three more pricing tools will complete the suite: the HomeGadgets.ca Mobile App will be first released for Android, a Chrome Browser Extension, and a desktop app (Windows first). Following releases will include iOS, Linux and MacOS so stay tuned!

With the mobile app, users will be able to create price alerts for the products they want to track. With the browser extension they will be able to check instantly if a better price is available elsewhere and with the desktop app (the most powerful of them all) users will be able to obtain prices in real time for the entire catalog.

As of today, more than 32,000 product-view sessions have passed through the site. The visitors who clicked out carried that $2 million in buying intent, each click valued at the price shown the moment they made it. That is over $1,500 per click. From those $2M in total (across all retailers) only a small portion is currently monetized through affiliate relationships (amazon.ca). In the next few months, I will attempt to join other affiliate networks to up its monetization potential.

So, based on amazon numbers alone (the ones I have), and setting aside a bot that hammered our Amazon links for a few days in September, it recorded 22 orders from the 213 real clicks we sent, a 10.3% conversion rate, several times the 1% to 3% that retail traffic normally sees. Those orders carried about CA$3,400 in sales, roughly CA$16 for every click sent. Every other retailer keeps that number private, so the $2 million counts intent, not confirmed sales. Keep in mind that the site has amazon affiliate revenue only since July 1st this year.

My intent is to run this experiment for at least a year. I may sell it to whoever wants it. It has taught me quite a few lessons I may apply to extend the agentic component of the site to other verticals of consumer spending. Stay tuned! For now, I can just share the site is cash flow positive, so that is a milestone for sure!