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How does it work?
Collective Buying Power
Collective buying power is a cooperative approach to leveraging group size to benefit the consumer by offering savings on products and services. Obviously the more people that are interested in buying something, the more likely it will be that a discount can be negotiated. Product suppliers may be prepared to reduce their cost price with a guaranteed high volume order, or through buying directly from the factory. Service providers such as restaurants, leisure facilities etc. are interested in providing opportunities for new customers to try out what they have on offer, and may be prepared to do this at a significantly lower price than they normally charge.
fipster
fipster is a service provided to groups to facilitate the possibility of collective buying power. We work together with the group to find out what products and services you are most interested in, and then we go out and source, and negotiate those deals on your behalf.
We offer a flexible and tailored service, which is specific to each group or community, with the aim of securing the maximum benefits from group power!
The tuangou phenomenon has been most successful in mainland China, where buyers have leveraged the power of group buying, which has led to English language media, such as msn.com, profiling the tuangou buying process.[2] The popularity of the strategy in China is often attributed to the Chinese tradition of bargaining for the purchase of goods of all types. Tuangou buying also ameliorates a traditional distrust of goods purchased from unknown sellers as individual members of the buying group can vouch for a particular seller's quality to the rest of the group.
Group buys are a variation of tuangou buying that also occurs in China, in which an item must be bought in a minimum quantity or dollar amount, otherwise, the seller will not allow the purchase. Since individuals typically do not need multiples of one item or do not have the resources to buy in bulk, tuangou group buys allow people to invite others to purchase in bulk jointly. These group buys often result in better prices for the individual buyers or ensure that a scarce or obscure item is available for sale. Group buys usually happen when dealing with industrial items, such as single-board computers.[3] Group buys are often organized by like-minded people through Internet forums. There have also been recent attempts at creating more focused online forums such as GroupBuyCenter.com.[4] and Tippr.com The vast majority of the users tend to focus on after market autoparts and have now also started to leverage the group buying model for purposes of buying other consumer durables.
In Europe and North America....
Although initially a Chinese concept, recent developments led to a wide increase of appearances of similar phenomena, in Europe and North America. While the original strategy was self organized and executed, most of the group buying in this part of the world is done through online intermediaries. Interested buyers are, most often, asked for credit card details, which will be charged only when a required number of buyers registers. Almost without an exception, intermediaries charge vendors a percentage fee in the range of up to 50% of the total value of the whole deal. Due to such a business model, group buying remains limited to the physical services sector, and is not seeing growth as the original strategy in the People's Republic of China. Nevertheless, intermediaries with fairly identical business models are appearing daily, especially across the United Kingdom and Germany. The most notable characteristic of all those intermediaries is the selected deals' orientation towards local markets, bound to cities and towns.