Join the Mob… Mobshop!!
Written: Jun 29 '00
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Are you looking to make a purchase on the internet, but not sure that you’re getting the best possible price? Then look no further than Mobshop, a site that will keep you coming back for more and more…
What is Mobshop, you ask? It is an ecommerce site who’s purpose is simple. Get a group of people (or a Mob) to buy the same item, and watch the price go down. It’s a concept commonly referred to as aggregate buying. The more people that buy a certain item, the lower the price goes.
One of the funnest things about Mobshop is that, as a consumer, you are told the whole story (unlike Mercata, where you have no idea why the price drops to the level that it does): what the current price of the item is, how many people have already bought the item you’re interested in, how many more need to buy the item for the price to go down further, and how much lower the price can go as more and more people buy. Mobshop shows you all of this information by use of an easy to read bar graph, with each subsequent bar to the right indicating more buyers at a lower price. It also tells you exactly how much time is remaining in the Buy Cycle, a term that Mobshop uses to describe the period of time between when an item is first available to when the sale of the item closes.
As an example, if you were interested in buying a GoType keyboard for your Palm V on Mobshop, you would first be taken to a screen that shows you a picture of the product with a description of it (you can click to learn more about it). Below the description is the bar graph. In the case of the Palm V keyboard, you are told that the MSRP is $79.95 but when the buyer number is 0-5, the price immediately drops to $59.95. When the buyer number is 6-25, the price drops even lower to $56.95. And finally, the last bar on the far right shows you that when there are 26-51 buyers, the price drops to $53.95. And the great part is that everyone in the buyer cycle enjoys the lowest price together! It doesn’t matter if you got in to the deal when the price was $59.95, you still get the lowest price that everyone else gets!!
Mobshop makes it fun to keep checking back to the site to see how many more people have bought the item you like, and how much further the price has dropped. Unlike auctions, where the price goes up with each subsequent bid and you hope that the item you are bidding on will remain a secret, with items on Mobshop, there is an incentive for you to tell as many people about it so that they too will purchase one and lower the price.
Items on Mobshop also have very reasonable buy cycles of about a week so that users have plenty of time to bid and drive the price down. If we were talking about cycles that were only open for several days, you probably would not realize huge savings as a consumer. But Mobshop’s week long cycles give you plenty of time to buy an item, tell others about it, and monitor its status as much as you like!
Lets say you don’t want to commit to a certain price at this time. Is there something you can do? Sure!! Mobshop gives you two different choices, referred to as Save a Spot, and Buyer Flash, respectively. With Save a Spot, you can tell Mobshop that you are not interested in joining the mob that has bought an item until it reaches a certain price. In the keyboard example above, if you didn’t want to commit to buying until the price hit $53.95, you can tell Mobshop to wait until the price hits that level. Once it does, and only once it hits the low price of your choice, do you commit to buying the good. The Buyer Flash function allows you to be notified by Mobshop via e-mail either when the item you are interested in has hit a certain price or when the closing time of the cycle is either 1 hour or 30 minutes away. This is convenient for users that do not want to commit to buying with the Save a Spot function and would rather just be told when an item hits a certain price so that they can make a decision at that time whether or not to buy.
On top of everything mentioned above, Mobshop is very easy to navigate through and will draw you in with its colorful, energetic page designs. If you have any questions, the "how it works" link at the top of the page will explain everything you need to know about how the site functions.
If all this isn’t enough for you to get excited, consider these other great things about Mobshop:
1. Typically, their first tier on the bar graph offers you excellent savings. Thus, even if there isn’t a mob of people rushing to buy a certain item, you are still getting a great deal!
2. Mobshop boasts an anti-sweepstakes in which the more people that enter to win a certain prize, the more goods they give away! What can be better than that?
3. Free shipping in the continental U.S. on all goods purchased!
4. A wide variety of items from golf clubs, to Playstation games to DVDs to Palm pilots to digital cameras!
5. Live online chat customer service. Get your questions answered right away!
So give it a shot! Join the mob like the rest of us and get yourself a great deal on whatever it is you are looking for.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
Oren.Jay
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Reviews written: 24
Trusted by: 20 members
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