obazis short for online bazaar, and like that famously fluid market environment, it’s all about haggling to get what you want. Think of it as aGrouponin reverse: Advertisers go to Groupon with a deal offering, and if enough punters sign up the deal’s a go. At oBaz, a community of similarly desiring consumers form a group and then oBaz’s team goes to work trying to arrange a deal from the supplier, based on the product or service the group wants. It’s like a souk without the sensory saturation.
obazhas been running in beta for a while, but today it officially unveils its services to the larger world. Founder Brian Ficho spoke to德赢提款to highlight exactly how back-to-front oBaz is compared to some of its peers, which are motivated by marketing and advertising–essentially selling loss-leading deals in the hope of earning instant income from lower margins than may typically have been won, and hoping for ongoing business. That’s not for oBaz, which is “100% buyer-driven,” says Ficho.
在过程结束时，Obaz的用户获得了一笔可爱的交易，“业务将获得客户，我们不会向业务收取任何费用，” Ficho指出。“We just say ‘here’s this group of like-minded people who all want to buy a product that you have, and while you do sales all the time here’s a chance to reach them at a point where they’re ready to buy’.” Ficho summarized it by saying while other deals sites capture marketing, oBaz “captures intent” in the same way Google does–when it garners data on what people are looking for.
The business model is centered on a social grouping idea: On the site you join or form a group asking for a particular item, and other interested parties join up, too–the group expires after seven days so the deals have a definite timeline. When it gets to a useful size, oBaz’s team kicks into action: “We haggle and we call a bunch of different merchants to ensure we have the best possible offer” and when they reach a deal they think is as good as they can get, they secure a unique money-off code from the firm. The deal is then shared with the group, and members of the group who think it’s a fair deal that meets their needs hand over a fee to oBaz to buy the code–which is where oBaz’s revenues come from. There’s no obligation to buy at this last stage, although there’s some incentive because the coupon expires within 24 hours.
从奥巴兹（Obaz）的角度来看，这一切的困难部分是达成交易。Early efforts during the beta phase saw dozens of calls over several days to a hot-label shoe firm’s marketing department in an attempt to organize a deal, only to fall flat–the deal, for 120 people, was finally achieved by sealing a 20% off deal with an online shoe store that was willing to discount the shoes because it was a private sale. Another deal involved $300 off a $900 Nikon camera kit, but Ficho found that doing a deal on a Nikon camera alone was hard, because the stores make slim margins and were reluctant to discount. Instead they found a retailer with a kit containing a camera, lenses, and other equipment that normally retailed for $900, and having persuaded the retailer to sell the kit at a $300 discount, “we then sold that promo code to the group for $20.”
这都是关于顽强的。“我们在LinkedIn上追踪人们，我们会尽一切努力。这是大多数人没有时间的事情，而且很难作为一个人做，因此我们利用团队获得很多交易。” Ficho说。这一切都是关于网络的力量 - “社区越大，利益越大” - 交易的陪伴，核心的谈判者的专业知识只会变得更好。根据OBAZ的新闻稿，这些小组在Beta中已经有创造力地扩大他们的数字以获得更好的交易 - 他们一直通过Facebook，Twitter和Email邀请其他成员。
The company just secured seed funding fromLightbank并自称为“基于网络的第一个社区，使用众包和游戏机制来建立集体购买力”。它会起作用，并与Groupon和LivingSocial等网站的受欢迎程度相抗衡吗？There’s certainly a spark of intrigue here: One of the downsides of Groupon is that though it’s a little addictive, you simply have to wait to see what offers pop up (in my case, local deals tend to be centered on skin care and beauty products, and there’s only so many manicures a person can get). This is not a problem for oBaz, and it’s got the same excitement factor, and probably the same addictiveness, because you can sign up in as many groups as you want, with no pressure to actually buy. From the vendor’s perspective there’s also much less exposure to risk: Since the deal size is defined during the haggling process a business can decide exaclty how much cash it wants to put on the table–unlike Groupon’s deals which have, in the past,逃跑and caused problems.
[图片：Flickr用户dynamosquito这是给出的
与此消息聊天Kit Eaton on Twitterand德赢提款也。