An E-Commerce Site Where You Can Haggle Down the Price

An E-Commerce Site Where You Can Haggle Down the Price

Andrew Kurland and Joe Marrapodi decided to found Greentoe, a new e-commerce site which they found it to be too time-consuming to look for the best deals online.

It works like this: if you want to buy a product, you want the best price you can get. You also don’t want to spend a long time looking. Greentoe recruits a bunch of researched online retailers in order to show the average and the lowest price for each product available. Tthe user is then able to decide how much they are willing to pay.

Say you found a camera you want that costs $549, but you’d like to buy it for a lower price of $460. The meter on Greentoe’s website will let you know whether you have a good chance to get a camera for that price. If the seller agrees to the price, then congratulations—you’ve made a great deal.

This can work with a whole slew of different products on the site. Folks are already haggling down anything from baby cribs to washers and dryers. While the two founders are working on getting more products in, a major hole in the e-commerce site is women’s designer fashion. Women’s clothing is the largest market segment in terms of sales, accounting for nearly half of all industry revenue in 2013.

The deal between both buyer and seller also needs to be reasonable, says Marrapodi. “About 20% 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.” he says.  So bottom line is be reasonable when negotiating here.

While this scheme has proven to be wildly successful in its early inception, Marrapodi acknowledges that he and Kurland have a long way to go with their business.

“We just started with Y Combinator and have only been live online for a short while here.”