From an idea sketched out on a delivery round to a live AI-native shopping platform — this is the ShopWithMore story.
I'm 48, based in Preston, Lancashire — originally from London. I deliver parcels for a living, 150 to 240 of them a day, in all weathers. While I'm out on my rounds I think about code, product, architecture, and what comes next. In the evenings, I build.
ShopWithMore is the latest chapter in a long story of trying, learning, and trying again. I've had near-misses. I've spent months on projects that didn't click. I've lost money on ideas that were ahead of their time, or simply the wrong idea entirely. I know what it feels like to be close — and I know what it feels like when something finally works.
This one works.
It didn't start here. There were earlier ideas — a food delivery platform, a superapp concept covering groceries, taxis, and couriers all under one roof. Bold ideas, both of them. But the market had moved on, the competition was global, and something about each of them didn't feel right. So I walked away. A couple of hundred pounds in domains, gone. I gave my head a rest.
Then I started looking at how certain online shopping platforms actually operated. No warehouses. No stock. No fulfilment headaches. Just a platform connecting shoppers to retailers, earning a commission on every sale they referred. The model was simple, scalable, and something I could build alone.
"Simple. Scalable. Then the question that changed everything hit me: how can AI play a part in this?"
That question became the foundation of ShopWithMore — not just another shopping aggregator, but a platform built from the ground up with AI at its core.
I couldn't launch with a grand vision and nothing behind it. So I started with what I had — contacts, determination, and the ability to code. Just like 1994.
The first version was built on a dropshipping model — partnering with a product supplier and importing over 120,000 products into a full ecommerce platform. Search, product pages, cart, checkout, customer accounts, automated daily product imports, image hosting, payments. The whole thing. Built in evenings and early mornings, around a full-time job.
By May 2026, ShopWithMore V1 was live.
"Then came the pivot that changed everything — and made the platform better for it."
Shortly after launch, we made the decision to move entirely to an affiliate model — partnering directly with UK retailers and earning a commission on every sale referred. No stock. No fulfilment. No third-party dependencies. We rebuilt the product pipeline over a long weekend, replaced the old infrastructure with a lightweight PHP architecture, and relaunched with over 22,000 products from 28+ retailers.
Simpler. Faster. More scalable. And better for shoppers — because every product links directly to the retailer, with no middleman markup and no sponsored results.
"22,000 products was the proof of concept. Getting to hundreds of thousands meant rebuilding the engine underneath it."
As the catalogue kept growing, the original file-based system started showing its limits. So the whole platform was migrated onto a proper MySQL database, built a direct integration with Kelkoo's affiliate network, and rebuilt search from the ground up to stay fast even as the product count climbed into the hundreds of thousands. Today, ShopWithMore carries 4,634,000+ products across 280+ UK retailers — and it's still growing, still built solo, still around a full-time delivery job.
V1 is the foundation — a working, revenue-generating platform that proves the model. V2 is where the real vision comes to life: a fully AI-native price comparison platform, built on modern tooling, with intelligent product discovery at its core. V3 takes it global.
ShopWithMore exists because the way customers shop online is changing. With AI becoming the new norm, ShopWithMore and AI together become the perfect shop mall — one that knows who you are, not just what you bought.
ShopWithMore V1 was built entirely in the evenings and early mornings around a full-time parcel delivery job. What you're looking at is the result of months of building, breaking, fixing and rebuilding — alone. It's not perfect. But it's real, it's live, and it's just getting started.
4,634,000+ products across 280+ UK retailers. Still V1. Still growing fast.
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