Why another E-com venture? Be-coz its GroupShoppy

Do you even need to waste time reading this post about another wannabe E-Com venture? My biased advice is yes, because you might just like it.

This “yet-another” product is called GroupShoppy – why Shop Alone. Among all other things, it helps you Shop the way you you did, before the internet era. Lets revisit that golden era…

1) Its 3pm. You call your friend and ask him to join you for shopping. You need to buy a  phone. He asks you if he should call another mutual friend. You happily agree. You decide the place and time.

2) You reach there, find 3 mutual friends and a new face. You introduce each other and stroll along.

3) You have in mind to buy a phone, your unknown friend has similar thoughts, but other are there for window shopping.

4) You visit multiple stores, look at different phones, compare them, discuss among yourself, ditch the shop to see if you can get it cheaper somewhere else.

5) Finally you land at your destined shop. You get the phone at a good price. Your unknown friend is impressed by the pricing, checks for other phones. He chooses one too. 

6) Then you tell the shopkeeper – “Hey Bro, we are buying two phones, you should give more discount”. Reluctantly he gives you additional 5% discount.

7) Day’s good so far, but its getting late. As you walk back, you see a store with an awesome new handheld gaming console. How about we buy it by contribution and each one keeps for 7 days. Sounds good. 

8) Each one should pay 1/4th. But Rana doesn’t have enough cash now. So you pay 1/2, rest two pay 1/4 each.

What a great day of shopping.

Why this long story? Because GroupShoppy allows you to do all of these and much much more. Yes you read it correctly, all of these and lot more. That is why we say…why shop alone.

GroupShoppy is an unique platform which allows users to 

1) Shop alone or with Friends & Family with help of live shopping sessions. We give lot of control of how to lead the session or how to follow and it happens at click of simple buttons and is extremely intuitive. Shopping here implies leading or following a live session, chatting privately or with the whole group. Pausing, resuming, departing, rejoining. You can also schedule a session for later day. Your invitees get a direct link which they can join by clicking once you have started the session.

2) Get rewarded by contributing to quality. This includes sharing reviews, comments, helping other buyers. The more you are involved, the more Shopaholic you are, more rewards for you.

3) Create your own virtual image to get information about products and, stores you care. Tag products you own, wish products you want.

4) Shop in your favorite store or shop for products. Compare offerings by different stores and choose your store to buy from.

5) Get approached by Stores at real time for great offers for products you want. Ignore them you want to stay away.

6) Negotiate with Store owners at real time for best offering.

7) Buy as group and Get bulk deals.

8) Pay individually or pay deferentially in any ratio. Simply drag drop your friends in session into the payment boxes. Drag and drop items that you want to share, from cart to shared cart. You adjust payment amounts for you. They make their adjustments. Once total matches, proceed to payment. 

9) Get to know about your Friends’ birthdays or anniversaries and gift them. If they are as nice as you, then you get gifts too on your birthdays. If they have shared their wishlist, then you know what to gift.

I believe this platform is teaming with potential. To show its potential we needed to scale with more variety. so we built the platform for Stores as well. We allow businesses to create stores. There are dozens others who do it. So whats the big deal?

I will tell you the “Seal-the-deal” fact about our platform. Only we offer unobtrusive tools to sellers to approach potential buyers (our product calculate who are potential buyers) with great offers and convert them to buying customers. We provide tools to sellers to understand what they should stock for maximum sale. All this happens at real time on the platform itself.

I will not discuss here about dozens of other features for sellers like UI customization, FUNCTIONALITY CUSTOMIZATION, enriched dashboard, promotional mailing to Customers etc. etc.

Ironically within GroupShopy platform GroupShoppy is having a store on its own. But we play fair. On GroupShoppy platform GroupShoppy store is treated like any other store, with dignity, respect and importance.

One of my objectives of writing this is to raise awareness that there are lot more innovations pending in eCommerce and if not they, we will do it. The second being, I am looking to raise money to get this out faster and better. Looking to raise money for the following

1) Basic salary for core team members to help them meet their ends so that they can leave everything else and focus on GroupShoppy. Some money so that these people can get some kind of Medical insurance for them, pay off their monthly bills. 

2) Slightly more than basic salary to hire few world class and introvert Developers.

3) Some more money to pay our cloud hoster on days when we need to scale up.

4) And few more to get 3-4 laptops to help our field guys reach out to businesses ad demo them about Groupshoppy.

5) If you can give money for setting up office its fine else we don’t mind working from our drawing rooms (we don’t have garages).

6) A bit for spending on Facebook targeted ads (it works), creating two outstanding explainer videos.

7) and some more for outsourcing our accounting/tax/legal work.

8) Last but not the least, quite a bit to allow us for additional packaging with our custom branding, shipping and customer service.

My third objective to to let Users and businesses to know about it because its an Win-Win situation for all.

BTW all this is not cooked up, It exists for real behind https://www.groupshoppy.com . The real magic is in www.groupshoppy.com/Shopping, but I have restricted access to the /Shopping part and beyond. For those geeks,, who are going to fire up fiddler, I made sure you don’t get to know more than what I want to show 🙂

Hope someone sees this the way I view it.