Ask HN: A new way of online buying and selling. Viable?
coffeemoment.weebly.com
It sort of reads like "A customer comes to my website and asks me what's the best price I can do on a pair of Beats Headphones." Is that right?
Why would a customer enter a bartering phase with you, rather than just seeing that Amazon sells them for £x?
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/flubit-london-start-up-aiming-next-...
It's a little odd that they've gone invite only
Why should this remove the bartering phase and not transform it to a "hey lets look what prices my friends would get" or alternative services, where people post their personal prices for products to compare them?
So... a worse version of a price comparison website? Instead of showing the best price, you want to show only a price better than customer's previous? Why wouldn't people just use a normal price comparison website which shows the cheapest offer?
If a supplier has the best price in the market, it makes sense for him to advertise this fact. So either a supplier is losing potential money by listing minimum price only with you, which is extremely unlikely, or your lowest price will be equal or higher than the lowest on price comparison websites, thus making your website useless. The same people who may use your site are already using price comparison websites.
I can see your idea working if you could somehow display your offer to people who aren't shopping for lowest price while they're buying somewhere else, but how? I think some adware did exactly that...
An another existing variation of that idea is decreasing the price when customer changes his mind at the last moment.
There is a company in Australia called bing lee (http://www.binglee.com.au) that allows you to do this. You can either barter in store or via their chat on their website.
I don't see this idea being successful easily. Driving people to your site and making them interact with you would be difficult. I personally couldn't bother with such a site, too much effort. I'd rather see whatever is cheapest on a few different sites and go from there.
N.B. Amazon has never really made profit because Bezos keeps pouring profit back into Amazon to make prices lower and to keep customers happier.
The author will just delete your email, why would he spend one minute on confirming the deal for a lousy 9 dollar, he doesn't care and he already has his lowest price on Amazon. If he agrees with you, then Amazon will also want a lower price (and then it will cost him a lot of money)
Despite the strong competition, no merchant/supplier will publicly advertise his lowest possible price because that would be incredibly short-sighted. They advertise the lowest price they can offer OR the highest price sufficient to undercut the competition, whichever of these is higher. So it's effectively 1 cent below the second cheapest offer for merchants who can go (sometimes much) lower.
Therefore, it's reasonable to expect them to accept lower priced offers made to them directly in some cases.
In cases where there is no direct competition (i.e. authors who are the sole providers of said product), prices are strategically chosen (not dictated by competition) and therefore direct sales at lower prices are much more likely.
(Amazon will never know the lower price, I presume)
That said, I think the idea of keeping prices personal and private is great for boutique services, but generally sucks otherwise. When searching for products and services, I'm usually looking for price first and reputation, etc. later, since that's nearly impossible to prove in a depersonalized internet service.
In other words, anyone can put up a website proclaiming that they are the most awesome at whatever they do so they can justify a price point, but there's no way to prove it objectively.
So, we're left with cost. The rest is just what you can stomach.
Amazon monitors the trend and has the purchasing power to buy trending items and sell at a low price. Amazon does not allow you to set your prices lower than theirs.
There already is price competition. Anyone who can Google for 5 minutes can find the lowest price, and that's probably fulfilled by Amazon or another large retailer. The idea that you'll carry every product, offer a lower price than Amazon, and convince people to participate in this weird pricing scheme is pretty absurd.