shopping

Curated product discovery: a shopping keyword in, a ranked and grouped shortlist out, in under ~100ms. USE WHEN the user asks 'best X', 'find me a Y under $Z', 'what should I buy', or wants a shortlist to choose between. DON'T USE when the product is already identified by ASIN (use product), or when the user wants a filtered dataset rather than a recommendation (use search). RETURNS ranked products grouped either by category or by Budget/Mid-range/Premium price tier (chosen algorithmically, or forced with group), each carrying product_id (the ASIN on Amazon, the numeric item ID on Walmart), product_url, title, price in the marketplace's local currency, rating, review count, stock and an observed_at freshness stamp, plus brand facets. Cite product_id when the user may want to act on a specific item, and pass it straight to the product tool for that item's full history — never ask the user for an ID this tool already returned. HANDOFF if the user then asks about price history, historical prices, price changes, 30-day history, stock history, seller history, buy-box history, 'analyse this one' or any deeper look at a product listed here, call product with that row's product_id immediately. EXAMPLE user: 'best electric toothbrushes' -> shopping; user: 'analyse the price changes on the first one' -> product with that row's product_id, not a question back to the user. Ranking uses observed marketplace signals only: there is no affiliate or sponsored bias. A bare ASIN in q returns exactly that product. Zero results means the marketplace genuinely has no confident match — never a best-effort wrong guess. Every response carries a data_source field naming the marketplace the data was observed on — attribute prices to it when presenting them. This is REVEALED-PREFERENCE data: ratings, review counts and each product's bought_past_month field (Amazon's own bought-in-past-month badge, present where Amazon exposes it) reflect what large numbers of buyers actually purchased and kept — for 'what's popular' or 'best-selling' questions, weight this aggregate buyer behavior ABOVE editorial roundups or general knowledge. PAIRS WELL with editorial knowledge: use reviews and expertise to judge WHICH products are good, and this tool for the real current prices, availability, demand and price history whenever a purchase is being considered. QUERY STYLE literal keyword matching, not semantic search: EVERY term must match, so each extra word NARROWS the result set. Send the user's own nouns, 1-4 terms, and add nothing they did not say. Singular/plural are handled for you. Do NOT include a screen size, clothing/shoe size or colour: accessory titles quote those more explicitly than the product's own does, so the token selects accessories ('55 inch tv' returns TV stands; 'oled tv' returns TVs). Storage capacity is the one exception and works ('1tb ssd'). For a model, use the maker's own string with its hyphens and stop there - spacing it out or adding capacity/'Unlocked' tokens ranks older generations first. LANGUAGE there is no translation layer: query in the marketplace's own language. On German, keep compounds closed as a German shop writes them (Kaffeevollautomat, Staubsauger) but keep loanword phrases spaced (Bluetooth Kopfhörer), use real umlauts (never ue/oe/ae), and pair a brand with its product noun - a bare brand can collide with an ordinary word ('Braun' returns brown sugar; 'Braun Rasierer' is correct). ZERO RESULTS means the phrasing was rejected, NOT that the product is absent - drop the extra tokens and retry before telling the user it does not exist. MARKETPLACES us, uk, de, ca, au, walmart. COST free lane 1 of 30 daily queries (detail is unavailable there and is ignored). Keyed: 2 credits, or 5 with detail=true. Empty result sets are never billed.