Read this before you use the table
A listing means a database holds a record. It means nothing else. Of the 849 places here, 736 are held by exactly one of the three databases4 and have therefore been confirmed by nobody at all, including us.
The category a map database gives a business is often wrong. A women's clothing shop in Yerevan reached this list under an aquarium heading, and a discount supermarket under another. Every record has been scored again on its own name, its category and, where it has one, its website, and 372 were dropped from view on that reading8. A further 644 cut-flower shops were deleted outright8, because a bouquet counter supplies nothing an aquarium needs.
It does not mean the shop stocks aquarium livestock, plants, hardscape or CO2. A pet shop in the map data may sell nothing but dog food, and a builders yard may have no stone small enough to put in a tank. The filter says a place is worth asking, not that it has what you want.
It does not mean the shop is still trading. Nothing here has been telephoned or visited. Opening hours are attached to 682 records4 and every one of them is whatever the database held on the day it was read.
A rating is shown for 185 places4. It is the map database's crowd rating for the whole business. An empty rating usually means the source publishes no rating for that place. Confirm aquarium stock and opening hours directly before traveling.
The best shop near you may not be in here at all. This table only knows what three databases know, and a good shop that nobody ever added to them stays invisible. How many of those exist is anybody's guess. If you walk into one, tell us and it goes in.
What is in the list, and what was taken out
A shop's own name is better evidence than the category a map database gave it.
The first version of this page listed 1,865 places4 and a third of them were florists. Among the rest were a women's clothing shop, a mobile phone shop, a barber and a beer shop, every one of them filed by Google or Yandex under a pet or aquarium heading. A category is a guess, and where the guess and the shop's own name disagree, the name wins.
So every record was scored again. The name counts for most, in Armenian, Russian and English; the category counts as evidence rather than as truth; and where a place has a website of its own, the homepage was read and outranks both8. 644 cut-flower shops were deleted, and 372 more carry a verdict of irrelevant and are not shown8. Nothing was destroyed: every deleted florist is still in the three per-database files it came from, and every hidden record keeps its verdict and the reason for it.
What is left divides in two, and the table keeps the two apart. 251 places look like aquarium, fish or pet shops, and 509 are stone, glass or builders yards8, which is where basalt offcuts and volcanic scoria come from rather than anywhere to buy a fish. 89 could go either way8 and are shown only if you ask for them.
- 849
- places listed, across twenty cities
- 251
- aquarium, fish and pet shops
- 509
- stone, glass and builders yards
- 89
- unconfirmed, shown only on request
- 372
- scored irrelevant and not shown, 46 of them with no name at all
- 644
- cut-flower shops deleted outright
- 113
- held by two or more of the three databases
- 611
- carry a telephone number
- 69
- records where two databases give different answers
Every figure in this plate is counted from the merged data files4.
The list
Filter it before you read it.
It opens on the 251 places that look like aquarium, fish or pet shops8. Switch on the stone and builders yards if you are after hardscape, and the unconfirmed group if you would rather judge the doubtful ones yourself. Hover a row to see why it was put where it was.
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| Name | Trade | Category | City and district | Address | Contact | Hours | Rating | Sources |
|---|
Nothing matches those filters.
What this cannot tell you
Before you visit a shop
Not verified
Nobody walked in
No entry on this page has been visited, telephoned or emailed by anyone connected with this site. The verified list, where somebody did check every address against the shop's own site, its social account or the national business directory, is Community and shops7, and it is short because checking is slow.
Not a stock list
A pet shop is not an aquarium shop
223 records carry a pet shop category4. Whether any given one keeps fish, plants, CO2 or hardscape is in none of these databases, and the category is the database's own guess at what the business is.
Not current
The map remembers closed shops
Map data lags reality by months and sometimes years. A record here can describe a unit that has stood empty since before 9 September 2026, the date these were read.
Not infallible
The filter can be wrong in both directions
It is a script reading names and categories, not a person walking in. Every verdict carries its reason and no record was destroyed except the florists8, so a wrong call can be found and reversed. If a shop you know is not here, it is either outside all three databases or the filter took it out, and either way say so and it goes back in.
Not agreed
The databases contradict each other
On 69 of the records shown, two databases give substantively different answers4, most often for the address. Both readings are kept in the data file rather than one being quietly chosen. Where you see that, treat the address as a hint and not as a fact.
Not neutral
The keywords shaped the result
Asking for garden centers and building merchants as hardscape leads is why 417 of the places listed here are in the building trades4. That is a decision about what to search for, and a different keyword list would produce a different Armenia.
How three databases were reconciled
Three separate files per city, and a fourth that reconciles them without hiding the joins.
Each database is kept in a file of its own. Nothing is blended at source, so every record still carries the identifiers each database gave it5 and the Sources column on the table is a real answer rather than a summary.
Two records merge only if both carry coordinates and the pair is within 150 m with a romanised name similarity of at least 0.86, or within 40 m at 0.65, or within 300 m on an identical name5. Names are transliterated out of Armenian and Cyrillic and stripped of legal suffixes before comparison, which is how Gazanik, Газаник and Գազանիկ reach the same string. The thresholds are deliberately tight: a wrong merge invents a shop that does not exist, and a phantom is harder to notice than a duplicate.
Where two databases hold different values for the same field, both are kept. Differences of language or formatting are recorded as alternates and not counted as disagreement, because a Google address in Latin and a Yandex address in Cyrillic are not a contradiction5. Only substantive differences are flagged, and the table says so on the row where it happens.
Reading the three databases cost an estimated $24.486. That figure is our own arithmetic on our own call counts, deliberately rounded up, and it has not been checked against a bill.
- 238 of the places listed1
- Yandex
- 676 of the places listed3
- OpenStreetMap
- 61 of the places listed, all in Yerevan2
- Listed
- 849 places, twenty cities4
The three add to more than 849 because 113 places appear in more than one of them4. Only Google supplies a rating, a review count and a structured opening-hours block. Only Yerevan has been read out of OpenStreetMap.
Keyword groups, in Russian, Armenian and English throughout: aquarium and fish, aquarium equipment and tank building, stone and driftwood, garden and nursery, building materials, glass and acrylic.
How to use it
Treat this as a list of doors to knock on, and the community page as the list of doors somebody already knocked on.
The two pages are doing different jobs and should not be read the same way. Where the two disagree about a shop, the checked page is the one to believe7.
Start with the corroborated rows. 113 places are held by two or more independent databases4. That is not verification, but it is the strongest signal on this page and it is the default sort.
Telephone before traveling. 611 records carry a number4. One call settles what no database on this page can tell you.
Ignore the rating for aquarium purposes. It scores the business, not the fish room, and it exists for 185 of the 849 places listed4.
Send corrections. Anything on this page that is wrong is wrong in a public map database as well, and fixing it there fixes it for everybody. If the filter has put a shop in the wrong bucket, that is our error and not the map's.
- Google Places. Read 9 September 2026, city by city, in Armenian, Russian and English. The source of the rating, the review count and the structured opening hours everywhere they appear on this page. developers.google.com Places read 9 September 2026
- OpenStreetMap. Read 9 September 2026. Places tagged as pet shops, aquarium shops or marketplaces, plus any whose name in Armenian, Russian or English matches the keyword list, inside each city boundary. Only Yerevan has been read. No other Armenian city has been looked at in OpenStreetMap, so its absence from a town here says nothing about that town. Data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0. openstreetmap.org/copyright read 9 September 2026
- Yandex Search for Organizations. Read 9 September 2026, city by city. It gives names, categories, addresses, telephone numbers and opening hours, and no ratings at all. Its Yerevan reading reached a ceiling of 1,000 places before the glass keywords were used, so the Yerevan glass trade is under-represented here. yandex.com Places read 9 September 2026
- The merged data files,
{city}-merged.json. Twenty one files, one per city, each reconciling that city's Google, Yandex and OpenStreetMap files without overwriting any of them. Every count on this page is taken from these files: the 849 listed, the 113 corroborated, the 736 single-source, the 69 disagreements, the per-city and per-category breakdowns, and the contact and rating coverage. Each record carries every identifier it came from, which field came from which database, and both values wherever two databases differ. Alongside them sit the three untouched per-database files per city,{city}-google.json,{city}-yandex.jsonand{city}-osm.jsonread 9 September 2026, filtered 11 September 2026 - The harvester, , and its notes in . Source of how the directory was built: the city registry, the keyword groups, the de-duplication at 50 m within one database, and the three merge rules of 150 m at 0.86 name similarity, 40 m at 0.65, and 300 m at 0.99. Also the list of which field differences count as a disagreement and which are treated as differences of language or formatting only
- Our own arithmetic on the Google bill. Not a published figure and not an invoice. The estimate of $24.48 multiplies our own call counts by rates set deliberately above Google's published ones: $0.035 against a published $0.032, and $0.025 against a published $0.020, on 400 and 419 calls, giving $14.00 and $10.48. The true invoice should therefore come in below this figure, and it has not been checked against a billing console. calculated, repeatable, unverified by a third party
- Community and shops, this site's human-checked page. The counterpart to this one. Every address on it was checked by a person against the shop's own site, social account or the national business directory, and it names a handful of businesses rather than hundreds. Where the two pages disagree about a shop, that page is the one to believe
- The relevance filter, , run 11 September 2026. Scores every merged record on whether it plausibly sells aquarium or pet goods. The name carries the most weight, in Armenian, Russian and English, because a map database's category is often flatly wrong; the category is read as evidence and not as truth; and where a record has a website of its own, the homepage was read and outranks both. The verdicts are
relevant,relevant_hardscape,possibleandirrelevant, and each is written onto the record with the reason for it, so any call here can be found and reversed. Source of the 251, 509, 89 and 372 splits. The 644 cut-flower shops are the one thing removed rather than hidden, and each of them is still in that city's three per-database files
Continue
Where to go next.
Community and shops
The doors somebody has already knocked on: one Facebook group of about six thousand people.
The Armenian scene
The scene the directory sits in: one specialist shop deep, no distributor, everything carried in.
Trade and geography
What actually enters the country, in dollars and kilograms, and from where.
Find a fish
What to ask for once you are through the door, with real minimum volumes attached.
The club
What the same list of doors could be used for, other than shopping.