Why did the online buyer aggregators fail?

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Andy Euroman asked:


In 2000, when the dotcom craze was still ongoing, I purchased a PalmPilot online, for a price that was unbeatable on the market at that time. I don’t remember the name of the site, but I do remember the concept: the company was aggregating buyers for pre-selected products. The more people committed to buying a certain item, the lower the price went. As for my Palm V, the site has registered the
maximum number of 1000 committed buyers in a matter of two days or so.

But then the problems started. The company sent me an e-mail saying that it hasn’t received the shipment of Palms yet and asked me to wait. Eventually I did receive my Palm. But the company went out of business pretty soon afterwards and I have never seen the same idea been implemented successfully.

The concept still seems very smart to me so I am curious: why did the online buyer aggregators fail?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 7:11 am and is filed under Other - Business & Finance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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One Response to “Why did the online buyer aggregators fail?”

  1. Kermit Says:
    May 15th, 2009 at 5:56 pm

    I remember reading an article somewhere, here is what I recollect…

    (1) I think they struggled to get people to commit to a purchase without knowing the final prices. So they didn’t prove incredibly popular, despite being an exciting idea.

    (2) The other issue was that for the kind of items that did create interest, sellers were selling anyway and had no desire to offer a better price.