About Useful Economy

What Useful Economy is

Useful Economy is a discovery directory that helps shoppers find products at independent local retailers. We aggregate publicly available product listings from store websites and present them in a single searchable index, organized by city and category, so people can find what's available near them.

We are not a marketplace. We do not sell, ship, or hold inventory. Every product on this site links directly to the retailer that offers it — you complete your purchase on the retailer's own site or in their store.

How we work

• We use a web crawler called UsefulEconomyBot to find publicly listed products on retailer websites.
• We respect each site's robots.txt directives, including Disallow rules and Crawl-Delay. We rate-limit our crawls to one request per domain at a time so we never put undue load on a retailer's server.
• Where retailers expose a documented public API (e.g. Shopify's /products.json, Magento's GraphQL endpoint), we use the API instead of scraping HTML — it's lighter on their infrastructure.
• We store product names, prices, low-resolution thumbnails, and the canonical URL of the source product page. Every product card and store page on Useful Economy links back to the retailer.
• We do not collect personal data from any visited site, and we do not crawl pages a site blocks via robots.txt.

For shoppers

Search by product or browse by city. Every listing tells you which local store carries the item, where they're located, and links directly to the product on the store's site so you can complete your purchase or visit in person.

Listings come from a wide range of independent retailers. We focus on stores that are part of the local economy — small chains, single-location shops, and regional brands.

For retailers and brands

If your store is listed on Useful Economy, our intent is to help local shoppers discover and visit you. We don't sell anything on your behalf; every click on a product takes the user to your site or store.

Claim a listing.

If you'd like to claim your store's listing — update your description, control which products appear, or sign up to manage your inventory directly — email us at hello@usefuleconomy.com and we'll set you up.

Request removal.

If you'd prefer your store, brand, or specific products not be listed on Useful Economy, we'll remove them promptly — no questions asked. Email takedown@usefuleconomy.com with the store name, website, or specific URLs you'd like excluded. See our copyright and takedown policy for the formal DMCA process.

Stop our crawler.

You can block UsefulEconomyBot from your site at any time by adding this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: UsefulEconomyBot
Disallow: /

Contact

General inquiries: hello@usefuleconomy.com

Takedown / removal requests: takedown@usefuleconomy.com

About our crawler: /bot