One cart, several shops, and what that means
Ask Around is a front door onto independent shops. The cart is ours; the shops, the prices, the stock, the shipping and the payments are theirs.
- 1
You search once
One search goes out across every shop in the catalogue, so you are comparing real shops rather than one shop’s shelf.
- 2
Everything lands in one cart
Add from as many shops as you like. We keep the cart here, grouped under the shop that will take the money, and we re-ask the shops for prices and stock every time you open it.
- 3
You check out at each shop
Each shop is the seller, so each has its own checkout. Check out at one and it opens in a new tab on that shop’s own site, with your items already in its cart. Pay as a guest or sign in there. Then come back for the next shop. No account needed here.
- 4
Or pay for all of them here, with Shop
Where a shop takes orders from shopping apps, you can sign in with Shop once and place each shop’s order on this page, paid from your Shop Pay wallet. Your card number never comes through us either way.
Why not one payment?
Because the money should go straight to the shop that is sending you the thing. Each of these shops is the seller, with its own payment provider and its own refund policy. Collecting one payment here would put us between you and them, and that is where returns, disputes and delivery promises go wrong. So we keep one cart and you check out once with each shop, paid to that shop.
What we can and cannot see
We show an order as placed only when the shop answered with that order. If a shop doesn’t answer, we say so and you can try again, without a second order being placed. We never claim an order on a shop’s behalf.
Prices and stock
Nothing about a product is kept here between visits. Every price, every photo and every in-stock mark is read again from the shops when a page loads, and the cart shows the time it last asked. If a price moved since you added something, the cart says so beside that line.