Saturday, March 24, 2007

Team buying for higher discounts

Interesting find this on Springwise.com. It has generally been seen that groups are more powerful than the individual, and in retail it's even more so. Consumers are forming groups to combine buying power and increase their chances of getting a bargain. Even strangers can take part in this exercise of team buying. How it works is that groups of customers wanting to buy similiar products meet at designated shops and mob the seller into giving them a bulk discount. The trend is especially popular in China where there are several such sites such as TeamBuy, Taoboa and Liba, which already have hundreds of thousands of members and even earning money from ad revenue and commission from supplers.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Shalini,

StoreMob.com launched today to introduce the team buying / tuangou concept to the English speaking world, which up until now hasn't really embraced the idea. I'm hoping thats going to change (basically because I run StoreMob :-) ).

Its important that the team buying community reaches critical mass otherwise it will be hard for people to find team buying events in their area.

(I hope you don't mind me posting this news and plugging the web site on your blog)

Shalini said...

Thanks for stopping by and letting me know about StoreMob. I'll defintely be writing more about it, since I think it's an absolutely superb concept. Good luck with your new endeavour!

Anonymous said...

Thanks for allowing me to plug the site, Shalini, its very much appreciated!

When you write more about it, feel free to drop me an email if you want any news from the inside.