Amazon should be happy, because Luupo (on sale now, previously announced period has been extended), has generated a flood of similarly themed websites and almost all of them use Amazon as their merchant of choice.
Recently the inventor of Telebid/Swoopo Manfred Hasseler has joined the club and has fashioned his successor project Cooni around the hidden price concept:
Other German language examples are (amongst others): McEuro, x-gewinnt, Preis-zeigen.de and Rabattschlacht.
Maybe the fixation on the price model distracts away from the other downsides of the concept. In any case it is sobering to see how other sites are falling into the same conceptual traps:
- It’s apparently pretty difficult for a site such as Luupo and the like to build up the momentum of a standalone portal. Very deep marketing pockets could be required.
- The startup phase is a particular challenge, since the concept is not attractive when only a small number of users are available to drive the price downwards (according to research from Professor Skiera of the University of Frankfurt)
- From the point of view of Exciting Commerce, the sinking price game would be best implemented with 2.0 applications. But apparently there doesn’t seem to be any web gurus here in Germany who are willing to take on the idea.
If anyone happens to be working on a shopping tool which works on hidden prices or other sort of dynamic price mechanism - be it a widget, web service or social app – Exciting Commerce would be happy to get a tip about it.
For now, our favourite remains Rabattschlacht which seems to be on the right track as a user driven portal.
The Luupo model is one of the few live shopping models which does not eat away at the margins of the merchant partners. For that reason we are fascinated with the ongoing developments and remain excited to see who will be the first to find the magic formula (including the requisite marketing ideas), which will lead to serious chance at succeeding with both the merchant and user groups.
Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.
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