I would be interested in getting in on some of these BMW forums. Which ones specifically?

And it works. It’s a mess to organize because you have to keep track of who joined, how many joined, sending invoices, tracking payments, printing shipping labels, … if there was a website or a vBulletin or phpBB widget that could help them organise the group buy, I’m sure they would jump on it.

I have personnaly participated in group buys and I have also organized one myself. I’m thinking about developping my own group buy app and releasing it for the forums community.

People don’t BUY based on “swarming.” That’s the dumbest thing I have ever heard. If I want a chocolate bar, I buy a chocolate bar. 10 cents isn’t going to sway me. If I’m buying a TV, I want the best price possible and I have a TOLERANCE for how long this transaction must occur. I’m not waiting for a month before there’s enough of a storm to buy something. With product differentiation there’s going to be so much trouble gathering up momentum for this. I want a Sony but everyone else wants a Panasonic, boohoo.

This also doesn’t work for products that are decentralized. Retailers won’t want to ship out fridges or washers or CARS to multiple points for razor thin or zero margins. There’s no incentive!

In fact, you idiots must have never worked in a small retailer store. I spent two years doing online retailing, specifically IT products in Silicon Valley. Let me tell you first off what we use to compete: NOT PRICE. Yeah, price is never configured into our mode of thought BECAUSE IT DOESN’T WORK OUT. We don’t have the luxury of getting into protracted price wars. We don’t have the luxury of stocking insane amount of products. We don’t have the luxury of saying “hmm, let’s get some losses in hopes of people returning for another buy” because quite simply we lack the money, time, and resources to do that. Rather we concentrated on service. And service costs money people. Services makes it so that someone has to be at the phone. At the store. At the warehouse. With software to manage all this and figure out what’s wrong and how to proceed.

God you people will rah rah cheer for anything stupid as long as it sounds alright on paper. Then the next best thing is you stupid idiots just keep saying “oh good luck here’s my best” as if that’s going to be suddenly make bottom lines appear magically.

Ugh.

Avoid these people at all costs. I tried using them. When the swarm I was part of did not get the product, they proceeded to email me over 1000 times to tell me that the swarm had failed. Actually they are still emailing me now.

I’ve emailed them multiple times to no avail.

eSwarm: Compras en grupo online.
Después de leer la noticia en Techcrunch sobre el nuevo sitio eSwarm, no puedo dejar de pensar que a veces el auge por la web 2.0 da vida a proyectos con pocas perspectivas de éxito, quizás por demasiado ambiciosos,…

Grumpy

Imagine you take part in a swarm to buy a car.

At the beginning, with the ‘heat’ of the moment -a new website, a great idea, impressive expectations, ‘I need this car!!’,…- you think a car worth $18,000 will cost you $15,000 (maybe over expectation, but no one gives you a clue on the “discount” you’ll have). Then, it turns out that the maximal offer by sellers is $17,500 (far from what you thought and far from what you want to pay).

Will you HAVE to buy it or you can say.. “oh, no.. that’s not what I thought..” and abandon the swarm? I think it’s difficult to have suppliers offering a competitive price if they don’t have a guaranteed volume and it’s also difficult to have an interesting size of swarm without a guaranteed discount or with the “you will pay whatever it’s offered” obligation.

Do you really think that on-line “swarming” can be based on the same rules of common interest and “morality” as real life “swarming”? How would you control it? Wouldn’t this control turn into a very low volume of successful “swarm buy” activities?

I know up front how many widgets (swarmed units) I know my shipping / distribution costs (presumably eSwarm will provide the recipeint / swarmes location to suppliers) — I know my fees (eSwarm collection and sometimes the donation to a cause percentage) and I know my costs.

It could work if every mom and pop organization uses it for their day to day needs — if the local softball team needs equipmen, swarm for it.

In sum, this has potential regardless if its an old idea — lots of recycled ideas make money when a different twist or spin is put in place or when sheer market dynamics (read number of interent users) change.

Look at wall street — investment bankers make money building conglomerates; then they make money breaking the conglomerates apart –and this repeats.