Here is an idea inspired by Turkey, although I have had the concept before but never seen the full vision till now.
Basically I like haggling, normal shopping is just so boring. Haggling and joking around in markets in places like Turkey and China is so much more fun. Here are the things that I think I like:
- No risk: The items are cheap anyway, you know its a good deal, and you never really wanted it so it doesn't matter if you don't get it.
- Social interactions: Sometimes you make some jokes, sometimes you piss them off but its never neutral, which makes it fun.
- The challenge: It makes buying like a game, you are trying to get the cheapest possible price and ideally both you and the seller feel fulfilled at the end of it.
In the implementation of the grand bazaar website the selling may follow a sequence like this:
- You come in to a themed bazaar, browse around.
- Show your interest in an item, the website offers a ridiculously high price (if you accept you are a bit stupid but we wont complain)
- Then you are given several options, give a lower price, make some comment like "that's ridiculous" or "I found it cheaper the other day", or obviously walk away.
- The shop then either decides to lower the price, or gives some other comment. Take a lot of pictures of shop keepers from authentic bazaars so you can give some more character to the interactions.
Variable Pricing
In the Business to Business world quite a lot of pricing is variable but in the consumer world the trend has been to go towards fixed pricing in developed countries. This has the benefit that it reduces the perceived risk for the buyer and also decreases the hassle invovled in shopping. But this idea is about putting the pain and the fun back into shopping.
Economically fixed pricing is inefficient. Lets say we have variable pricing where some goods sell 20% below cost price and others sell 100% above. The people that have the money and value that good highly would haggle less and pay the higher price, the people that value it less and can afford less with haggle more and pay less. Assuming everyone is rational no one looses (big assumption). Obviously the possibility of getting it below cost price might be a good driving factor for people to take part.
Game Based Selling
I am not sure how you would do this without variable pricing but involving some kind of game to buy something might be a good idea outside the negotiation game.
Complications
There are some obvious ones, kind of boring to consider but I think there is an idea here even with them. a) Not sure what percentage of people like haggling, might be small in the UK. b) Hard/Impossible to use this idea for goods that are sold in a normal way on other websites, because all rational users would try to at least undercut that price. c) Unlike in real life there are no pressures for someone to close the deal and buy a product, in real bazaars you cant walk away after you say you want something (even though sometimes you want to), this means people can test out the system for ever and get the best price. d) Because of b) you will have to solve 2 problems, firstly find goods to sell and then try to sell them in this interesting way, however I think just going for a few weeks in Turkey or China (or other places) will get you more than enough relatively unique goods.
Does it already exist?
Since last time I should have really checked, I did a quick Google search. There seems to be a lot of academic papers on it, so its obviously a good idea ;-). As far as I saw there were no good implementations of it.
Extention
Kind off obvious: you could make an ebay, peer to peer product exchange using this mechanism. This has a big chicken/egg, double network problem so would be crazy to go down from the offset but maybe it has potential.
Alternatively you could make the algorithm and sell it as an ecommerce solution to other websites, assuming it actually generates more profit for the seller.
3 comments:
Immad, this is an awesome idea.
I'm digging where you're coming from, but I think maybe you're imagining the wrong aspects of the bazaar experience into the virtual world.
What makes it exciting to buy from strangers in a marketplace is the genuine social interaction. And it's something more than just the fact that there's a real person there with you-- telemarketers and tech support are real people, and it's common to joke around with them, but it's still generally not considered a very enjoyable activity to be sold something on the phone.
I think the most essential aspect of a real marketplace that makes it a fundamentally different experience is its real freedom. You're haggling with a person over a price, and it's just up to you two humans to construct that relationship & find what fruits you can in it. You could never reproduce that feeling with a Corporation standing right there dictating the terms.
I don't think that means that the bazaar can't be brought to the internet. In fact I'll give you an example of how it's being brought here: Second Life. I'm not into SL personally, but hundreds of thousands of people are, and it seems like most of what they do with themselves there (besides sex) is sell each other things, for fun. The things are mostly virtual objects, which is a bit strange, but I'll opine that the main reason that people are willing not just to spend money on these things, but to spend so much time buying and selling them to each other, is that Second Life has been able to capture some of that genuine freedom of the bazaar.
I see your point mugojelly. If the negotiations were constructed well enough and the automated process given a personality it might achieve some of the person to person relationship feeling.
SL is a good example, I am not sure how it would scale if we had the seller as a real person responding over IM or something. Anyway, worth considering whether something could be made of it, it would be more fun then normal ecommerce though.
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