The Search and Discover Update
We're pleased to announce the first GOMdrop update of 2026: Search and Discover.
Simply put, every public-facing page now has a search bar that lets you search for GOMs, group orders, and even individual items within orders. There's also a brand new discover page with a more detailed search interface, similar to what you'd see on traditional e-commerce sites.
If you just wanted the quick version, that's it! Go click around and explore. If you're curious about the details and the story behind this update, read on.
What's New?
Search
You can see this at the top of this very page!
The search bar is now available across all public pages. Start typing and you'll get instant results for GOMs, group orders, and items. It's fast, it's simple, and it actually works the way you'd expect it to.
Discover
The discover page uses the same technology and logic as the search bar, but with a dedicated page we're able to show way more results and expose a ton of different facets, filters, and sorting options for you to play with.
Want to find group orders for a specific fandom? Filter by that. Looking for orders that are still open? Sort by closing date. Trying to find that one item you saw weeks ago? Search for it directly.
We've tried to make the filter interface intuitive without being overwhelming. Let us know how it feels!
Profiles for All GOMs
We've had profiles as a paid feature for a while now and they've been really well received. GOMs have reached out saying how much they love having a single place to point joiners to.
But with the paywall, the vast majority of GOMs didn't have access to this. Free users always outnumber paid users, and we realized we were holding back something that could genuinely help people.
So we're opening profiles up to everyone, because who's going to stop us?
Here's what profiles let you do:
- Set an avatar and header image
- Customize your pronouns (with pretty flexible options)
- Link to your other sites and socials
- Write a bio
- Add custom pages for whatever you need
On top of that, there's an automatic "directory" page that lists all your current and past group orders. You don't have to maintain a master list anywhere else. Whenever your orders or crates update on GOMdrop, your directory updates too. Just link to your profile and your joiners always have the latest info without any extra work on your part.
We have more profile improvements in the works, especially for subscribers, but that's for a future update.
Public Pages Revamp
Our landing page and other public-facing pages have been pretty much the same since we first launched. We'd manually update the stats when we remembered to (which wasn't often, honestly), and the design was feeling dated.
This update brings a fresh coat of paint to all of that. The landing page is now dynamic with actual content about the site and company, and we've added new sections to better explain what GOMdrop actually does. You're also reading this on our brand new blog, which is part of that revamp!
Stack Upgrades
This probably isn't interesting for most of you, so we'll spare you the nitty gritty. But it's worth noting that we did some pretty major updates to the technology running behind the scenes. There's still more work to do, but we need to balance stability with progress, so we'll sneak in improvements with each update going forward.
Besides the obvious new functionality, hopefully these changes make the site feel a bit snappier and more consistent.
Motivation
Over the years, we've added a ton of new features to GOMdrop. But most of them were targeted at GOMs, since GOMs are our primary contacts and the ones we hear from the most. Sure, joiners got some updates, but we couldn't shake the feeling that they were being left behind.
While planning this set of features, we did some research and talked to joiners in the wild. A lot of them felt like GOMdrop didn't have much to offer once they'd placed their order. The platform was always meant to solve both sides of the equation, so this was a bit sad to hear.
We also kept hearing that joiners struggled to find group orders or trustworthy GOMs in the first place. Everything is still done by word-of-mouth or stumbling upon a GO on social media. Not exactly efficient. Search and Discovery felt like natural fits for a platform like ours: they solve the discoverability problem and give joiners a reason to stick around. A total no-brainer.
Of course, we knew all this already. We'd been planning search since day one. There was just never time to get to it, and when we finally did, we had some real challenges to work through.
Challenges
One of the reasons this took so long is, frankly, us not being decisive about some business and product questions.
What should we index?
Do we index everything? Or are there things we shouldn't index, like private forms? If we're too selective, we miss out on useful content. If we index everything, people might stumble upon GOs they shouldn't be joining. Password-protected forms help with this, but the line isn't always clear.
Does this fit with our wallet?
Should we only display results from subscribers? Or users who use direct pay? We need some way of monetizing the platform to keep the lights on, but we don't want to nickel and dime everyone. And honestly, we don't have enough paid users yet to build a robust search based only on them.
Balancing openness with trust
Group ordering is built on trust. A completely open marketplace could undermine that if bad actors slip through. But being too restrictive defeats the whole purpose. We're still figuring out the right balance here, and we'll iterate based on community feedback.
What does search make us?
This is subtle but important: adding search places us much closer to a marketplace (Amazon, Depop) than a storefront (Shopify, Gumroad). This matters for a few reasons:
- Certain features and functionality makes more or less sense depending on the category
- Marketplaces have different tax implications than storefronts
- How we're perceived will change in the community
- The kinds of responsibility we have will change
We know this update isn't perfect, and we're expecting to get a few things wrong. But in the end, we decided to just ship something and see how it goes. If anything, we can always adjust! Maybe it was the wrong move to index everyone and we should have a verification process. Maybe it should be direct pay only. Maybe search is actually a bad fit for us entirely. Who knows? Let's find out together.
What's Next
We hope to announce the next feature in the coming weeks. This one will be more GOM-oriented, but it's still in the realm of search and usability. Stay tuned!
Have ideas for what we should work on next? We'd love to hear from you! Drop us a line on our Discord.