Who like to get their monthly groceries to be free? | Hacker News Reader

Who like to get their monthly groceries to be free?

1 pointbibinmohan7 comments

Hey, We are building a grocery delivery platform (Glist), where you could get up to 100% discount on groceries, vegetables, meat & fish.

But when I talk this, that we can provide up to 100% discounts (I mean free), no one is ready to believe it.

We do that through invitations (referral marketing). When you invite your friends and when they make a purchase through us, you get a percentage of the sale, as wallet balance. It's not 1 time, but whenever they purchase you get a referral percentage for the sale. We provide 1% of the total sales as referral commission, which is not huge at all. But when the volume increases, that becomes big for the customer.

For example: let's say you buy $400 worth of groceries every month. So when you refer, one of your friends, who also buy $400 worth of products through us, you get a $4 (1%) instant discount on your next purchase.

If you were able to refer, 100 such customers who buy $400 worth of groceries every month, you will be able to get $400 discounts every month, that's a 100% discount for your monthly groceries.

100 referrals might seem hard to reach. But we help our customers through educational content/videos to reach that level using simple social media and online marketing techniques, by providing all their customized marketing materials.

------------------ I would like to know what's your take on this idea. It's a simple idea.

So, convincing people to subsidize my spending? the sell is that they too might convince others to subsidize their spending?

Or, a pyramid scheme with a product to make it legal, la Multi Level Marketing?

Except even MLM people might see a payout, with this it only goes into discounts

Considering the further legal issues on that, and the relative lack of innovation, hard pass.

Thank you for the reply. It's not at all MLM or a pyramid scheme with levels. This is kind of bringing the online affiliate marketing into the local grocery stores.

We believe, faster deliveries and higher discounts are the future of retail. And with our solution, we help our customers to get that.

We do this by creating dark stores between 10 kilometers, so that we can deliver every order in less than 30 minutes, by optimizing the operations inside the ware house. That, also increases our purchase power, so we can provide more discounts to the customers.

Also the inbuilt invitation system help customers to get up to 100% discount. It's like the normal invite in every grocery delivery solutions like instacart (nothing grey here). But the difference is they only provide you the incentive just one time. But through us you get the incentive whenever your referral buys through us.

Innovations not just happens in the tech side, but also in the operation side of businesses too.

> Who like to get their monthly groceries to be free?

Your typical pyramid scheme victim, I guess.

I will tell you who and why?

During the start of Covid, a lot of people in our country lost their jobs. It includes, IT professionals to even bankers. The governments and charity organizations all over the world even give free groceries and supplies too during those times.

I was one of the hard hit at those time. Being an affiliate marketer myself, I thought, why not, add the online affiliate marketing to the local grocery stores, so we can get the required groceries for our families for a low price or even free.

I talked this with around 34 local grocers, and all of them told the same way as you said.

They told it's not possible to give up to 100% discounts. That's true! Being a low margin business, grocers won't be able to give the discounts.

But with a connected system, they can provide discounts and increase their sales. That's what we are trying to do.

Please let me know your feedback.

So MLM and standard referral marketing? With limitation that money can only be used with you? Also isn't 1% pretty weak?

Yeah, typical referral marketing integrated into the local stores. So when you buy through us, you can get discounts from your favorite local stores. And we deliver those faster.

This sounds very much like multi-level marketing.

I don't have 100 friends. (I mean real friends, not Facebook connections labelled 'friend's.)

Assuming they could also recruit their friends, we would compete for the same referral base, lowering the available pool, making it harder for me.

I don't see why my friends would want to pay an extra $4 to use a service when local grocery stores are already offering delivery (eg, Aldi via Instacart - https://www.aldi.us/en/pickup-delivery/grocery-delivery/ ).

I see no reason to believe my friends won't use existing services like Instacart with a much longer track record.

The fact that you're saying "100 referrals might seem hard to reach", and offering marketing advice, means it's not easy, and likely means it's cheaper for you to outsource your sales force than it is to hire sales staff.

Retail-level sales staff earn less per hour then I do as a programmer, so why would I do this?

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