Since launching Shopify, our focus has always been on the individual shop and the care that goes into presenting one’s products in exactly the right way. That focus will always be there in Shopify because we believe that there is enormous value in a uniquely designed customer experience. Up until now, though, each shop has lived a rather solitary life separate from all the others that our users have created.

Enter jaded Pixel’s second product: Shopify Marketplace.

Visitors to Shopify Marketplace can search and find products from all participating Shopify stores using a streamlined interface and backed by a powerful search engine. You can search the Marketplace using a lot of the nice features you might already use with search engines like Google, such as "searching for exact phrases using quotes" and excluding -certain terms -"using dashes". Once you add your shop to the Marketplace, each of your products will be listed there and continually tracked with full-text indexing of all of its attributes. Getting your products indexed by Marketplace is free for any Shopify user.

The benefit to shop owners is obvious since we are providing a way for every visitor to shopify.com to actively search for and buy the products being sold. Shopify.com gets a lot of traffic every day and that traffic is now directly helping customers and Shopify stores find each other. Shop owners are also able to promote their shop by getting it exclusively featured on the front page of the Marketplace for a particular day. A featured shop’s products are also highlighted within visitors’ search results for the next month.

While Shopify Marketplace and Shopify each work to support the other, the Marketplace is really a new entity independent from Shopify itself. Specifically, The Marketplace interacts with our users’ shops completely through Shopify’s API which we will be releasing to for public use shortly. That’s right, developers: the API will give you all the tools you need to build applications with just as much Shopify integration as you see demonstrated in the Marketplace.

Shopify Marketplace is a lightweight product right now, and we are committed to keeping its interface as clean as possible. With that in mind, we also have big ideas for expanding the Marketplace into a really powerful platform for shop promotion, customer interaction, and community-building in general. So stay tuned.

Update: Our friends from CouldBe Studios put together a OSX Dashboard Widget