Show HN: Yova – Groupon for small businesses • Hacker News Board

We've built the first collective procurement application for businesses making it possible for a group of businesses to combine their purchase orders in order to unlock volume based discounts. The concept was created to support high volume low margin products and services where buying together makes sense. So think paper cups and utensils for a restaurant business or sugar packets for a coffee business. The beautiful part is that your purchase requests is aggregated with other businesses without you having to expose any competitive information to your peers. The entire platform is designed around what we call transactional group buying. Essentially, a group deal/promotion is created not based on location or region of the buyers but instead the actual product itself. Once a deal is unlocked through a predefined discount tier set by the seller, the entire procurement process is handled at an individual business level. In other words, we procure our requests together to unlock a discount but we actually order the products individually! So shipping, handling, tax, etc. is handled separately for each business giving you your own personal order but for a cheaper price!

Check us out! Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

Re: Show HN: Yova – Groupon for small businesses

#6

Post by canadianwriter » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 2:33 PM UTC

bashirbashir wrote: post #5

fiatjaf wrote: post #2

Honest feedback: I don't like videos, I prefer textual explanation!

We've built the first collective procurement application for businesses making it possible for a group of businesses to combine their purchase orders in order to unlock volume based discounts. The concept was created to support high volume low margin products and services where buying together makes sense. So think paper cups and utensils for a restaurant business or sugar packets for a coffee business. The beautiful…

It sounds a lot like groupon as described. The main issue with groupon is it didn't offer much value to the supplier - in this case the knife and plate maker - what have you done to help with that issue? Is it simply because the nature of these kind of purchases means they happen more often? Wouldn't a small business just choose whichever is cheapest each time, meaning the supplier doesn't get a loyal buyer but just loses money in a fight to the bottom price?

Re: Show HN: Yova – Groupon for small businesses

#7

Post by mrbashbash » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 2:30 PM UTC

canadianwriter wrote: post #6

bashirbashir wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've built the first collective procurement application for businesses making it possible for a group of businesses to combine their purchase orders in order to unlock volume based discounts. The concept was created to support high volume low margin products and services where buying together makes sense. So think paper cups and utensils for a restaurant business or sugar packets for a coffee business. The beautiful…

It sounds a lot like groupon as described. The main issue with groupon is it didn't offer much value to the supplier - in this case the knife and plate maker - what have you done to help with that issue? Is it simply because the nature of these kind of purchases means they happen more often? Wouldn't a small business just choose whichever is cheapest each time, meaning the supplier doesn't get a loyal buyer but just…

That’s a valid point. Unlike Groupon, we focus on helping suppliers reach a broader group of businesses who are looking to unlock volume discounts but can’t individually meet the minimum purchase requirements set by the supplier. Through bulk selling, they can offer the advantage of basic economies of scale to a set of new customers that are on our platform. As you mentioned, Groupon hasn’t really brought much of new sales to suppliers through bulk discounting at the B2C level. We instead target B2B reducing purchase costs for small businesses by combining their discount requests at the product level and making the data available to suppliers who can use the information to run customized tiered based promotions.