Group buying for tea - Would you do it?
Anyone who reads updates to the miscellaneous sales thread knows I’m addicted to groupon-style deals for tea. When one comes up on Groupon or the like I almost always buy it, especially if it’s a tea company I haven’t tried. So I’d definitely be interested (though it sounds like it would be really bad for my wallet!)
I also am hooked on Groupon and others, I think this could actually be quite dangerous for me.
I would love to participate! So far we have done spring Long Jing group purchase for three years in a pre-order format. I think it’s a win-win strategy for both seller and buyer. I would love to participate in group purchase events to offer other teas, and probably combine our spring Long Jing offer with group buying of online community in future years!
Sounds fun, though isn’t this similar to what Steepster Select was before they stopped running it? I’d be curious if there’s anything that can be learned from the experience.
These are all great replies and we are glad about the support. I think we are on the path to something innovative here (we broke new ground with the Tea Trade Network – why stop there?)
While we love Steepster and the Steepster community, this new deals site is something we intend to deeply integrate with our established social networking setup. All of it to make it more interesting.
These are some of the features we are looking at offering (please tell us what you like or don’t like):
~ 2 or 3 tea deals a week
~ Deep integration with our social network. More activity on the various parts of the network (blog post writing, commenting, other types of general participation) = points and points = money/cash. Points earned through activity could be spent on tea deals. (spammers not welcome!)
~ Incentive sharing. Get other people to buy deals (increasing the likelihood of the deal and providing more profit to our vendor/clients and you earn points to spend on later deals.
~ Geographic sales. Initially we will service online companies, but will later on be able to break it down by geography, giving YLTS (Your Local Tea Shop) an opportunity to connect with you and offer you deals.
-—————————————-
We are still in the process of writing case studies of Groupon, LivingSocial and about a dozen other successful group deals site from around the world (yes, even a French one!) to learn about best practices and features. We are also looking to find out what you want. What do you expect? If you ordered a deal that was for an online company, would rather have to go place the order at that company’s website yourself using a voucher/coupon code, or would you rather all the order processing only take place once (ex. you buy the deal, it “tips”, and the next day the vendor ships your tea with no further action on your part).
Setting this up requires some substantial financial investment on our part, so we are being very deliberate and as efficient as possible with the process and part of that is finding out what people expect and want. If we mess something up, it can expensive to fix once we get going.
This generally sounds good, although I will say that I personally probably won’t take advantage of integration with social network or incentive sharing. But it doesn’t matter that they exist, as long as they don’t end up getting exclusive deals (i.e., deals you can only spend points on).
Also, I would probably want it to work like some of the other sites, so that I go to that company’s website to choose my teas instead of having the deal be for a set selection teas that ships immediately.
Good luck, I can’t wait to see it!
This is really good feedback, I’m making note of this.
One of the things we are able to do, depending on the type of software that a vendor uses, is to hook directly into their e-commerce system. Our system will generate the coupon codes and input them directly into the vendor’s system as they are generated (this, of course, requires that the vendor be using some of the more popular e-commerce systems). For the customer, this translates into being able to go immediately to the vendor’s website and start shopping for tea.
I think a lot of this functionality will vary from vendor to vendor. There are a good number of vendors that are using popular shopping packages, others are using proprietary, custom-built software, and even another group of vendors uses software that predates modern shopping cart systems. The challenges is going to be coming up with business processes that lets us serve the wide variety of vendors that that are out there.
I know that in some cases, it will be situation where the order is actually being placed at the deals website and then simply shipped to you from the vendor. We like this because it reduces the “double-shopping” that has to go on, but it also reduces the choice options that go along with your preference. This is what makes your feedback so valuable to us, this is something we have to be sure to spend time thinking about.
Thank you!
After much planning and research, this project is absolutely going to happen. We are in the early building phases now. You can sign up to keep track of our progress here:
To help us build our mailing list, everyone who shares their email address with us, will be entered to win a beautifully designed Eva Solo Tea Maker worth about $110 (details on the site). After you sign up, you’ll be given a unique URL to the site to share with others. For every person who signs up through your individualized link, you automatically get an additional entry in the giveaway!
To find out how many entries you’ve earned, just return to the site and enter your email address again. It will tell you how many people clicked your link and how many signed up.
I’m in! This sounds like a great – no, more like a kick-ass – opportunity. Can’t wait to get started! :)
Login or sign up to leave a comment.