The Problem: Shopping is a pain. It is a hassle to find a good product at a reasonable price. Unfortunately, bad transactions happen more frequently than most of us prefer. As a result, savvy shoppers sift for diamonds* through a rough of outlets, coupons, websites, and daily-deal emails.
Because sellers initiate pricing without negotiation, consumers must hope and wait for the perfect product at a suitable price. Rather than paying too much or buying another Groupon that will go unused, don’t you wish you could set price notifications for any merchandise just like you can for airplane tickets.
The Product: Starting by crawling online merchants, this website could track prices and deliver alerts to members. Like crowdbuy.com or this chrome plugin, the proposed site would also allow members to input pricing data and look at product analytics, such as max, min, mean, and mode demand prices.
In essence, this site and its membership aspires to be a “reverse groupon” whereby consumers assemble online in search of the best deals. Bypassing the middle-man would afford much more transparency and insight into consumer demand, more product variety, and no more 50% revenue sharing requirements for businesses. The goal of this site is not to maximize profit for a corporation but to create value for the mutual benefit of its members. With an internet-scale network, this anonymous consumer data might even put upward pricing pressure on merchants looking to unload overstock to a targeted group of eager buyers.
The Model: Groupon’s greatest asset was its network - rather, its networks. The first: a mailing list of eager buyers has obvious clue, but the other network also scaled to a $10 billion valuation (n.b. with barely any profit). Specifically, Groupon’s growth required constant hiring of salespeople, coders, business developers, managers, and executives at a cost always beyond last quarter’s revenue.
It’s a shame that billion dollar IPOs prevent companies without a hope for longterm profitability from instead forming non-profit, crowd-sourced, online communities on the scale of Wikipedia.
Assembling for the mutual benefit of its members, this crowd-up would be a consumer cooperative rather than provide boat payments for VCs or CEOs. Owned by its members alone rather than founders or stock-holders, it would function like any credit union or insurance co-op (see the success of State Farm Insurance) but with the added organizational leverage of the Internet.
By crowdsourcing the tedious task of tracking prices, the rest of us can benefit from more efficient markets, cheaper goods, and more free time.
*substitute your particular consumer vice: shoes, electronics, sweaters, hardware, etc..