eCommerce 2.0, Now With Haggling

Do you love eCommerce, but feel that the experience lacks something? A human touch, the thrill of victory, the experience of purchasing  a car — at the end of the day, eCommerce generally isn’t about the art of striking a bargain with a merchant. Finding a bargain? No problem, but actually getting down in it and negotiating the best price? Yeah, that was less available.

Until now anyway, since Greentoe has launched and wants to make more purchases online just a little better negotiated.

Founders Andrew Kurland and Joe Marrapodi created their eCommerce negotiation out of frustration, reports TechCrunch, after spending too much time trying to hunt down online deals.

Here’s how it works. A consumer wants to buy a product, and Greentoe recruits a bunch of prescreened online merchants to sell the consumer that product. The site then shows the user the average price and the lowest price for each product currently available online. At this point, the user enters what they are willing to pay.

The Greentoe meter than ranks how likely users are to get their price.

“Retailers go through a cycle of inventory they need to sell and when you send in your price you could hit them at the right time to make a good deal out of it. We try to make that a more likely possibility,” explains co-founder Joe Marrapodi .

The retailer one is buying from, though guaranteed to be reputable, remains behind the proverbial curtain until the end of the transaction.

The deal between both buyer and seller also needs to be reasonable.

“About 20 percent of our customers bid too low. They think it’s a crazy deal site and they’re just going to get whatever price they name. That’s not how it works,”  says Marrapodi.

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