Introducing flubit
A new platform, flubit, has launched to offer UK shoppers an opportunity to get better prices for all their online product purchases.
What’s in it for consumers?
flubit acts as a marketplace, connecting buyers and sellers – but without the use of product listings. Rather than browsing products and comparing prices, flubit users nominate the product they want to buy, and where they found the best price.
A short while later, flubit comes back to them with a better offer on that exact product on behalf of one of flubit’s integrated merchants
During beta testing on over 1,000 demands, a discount of no more than 10 per cent saw an offer-to-purchase conversion rate of 72%.
CEO and founder Bertie Stephens says flubit isn’t for people pondering what to buy, or who want to compare prices. Instead, it’s a one-stop-shop to get better, personal prices for all their online product purchases.
“We live in age where lots of people know how to find what they want on the Internet, and to hunt for good deals,” says Stephens. “We exist to create even better offers for those people once they’ve decided what they want.”
After telling flubit exactly what they want, the user is free to go about their day while flubit goes about creating a better offer for them.
Once flubit creates their offer, users can pay for their product on the flubit site (securely through PayPal), and their order is despatched from the merchant directly.
If you want to buy at the best price go to flubit today and ask for an offer!
What’s in it for sellers?
Despite having quite a different buying journey to other ecommerce platforms, flubit have designed the merchant experience to be almost identical to selling in other marketplaces, and the integration process as simple as possible.
It’s just a case of sending them your inventory data, and waiting for the orders to come in. This means sellers can easily add flubit as a new channel without needing to alter their internal processes.
flubit aims to deliver sustainable sales to merchants. By having no fixed channel fees (and thus access to the best prices), flubit can offer merchants the same or higher net return from sales than other marketplaces.
Because merchants set the minimum return required for each product, they control what they’ll receive when their products sell. Because flubit users nominate the price they were willing to pay when they demand products, flubit earns revenue by selling below that price but above the merchant minimum.
The flubit platform has other key features for merchants:
• Instant payment via PayPal once an order has been shipped
• Opportunity to earn additional credit through revenue sharing, based on performance
• Access to a merchant activity portal at weflubit.com
• No monthly or insertion fees.
The platform has already signed up some big merchants, including ASK Direct, Prepaymania, In2digital, Electricshopping, Scent Warehouse, Bamford Trading and Luzern Solutions.
Integration with flubit is something which will work for most medium to large sellers. Companies most suitable for integration will have:
• the ability to sell through multiple channels
• fully automated inventory/order management systems
• a large inventory in fast-moving product categories
The cost of integrating with flubit is £199, but this fee has been waived for merchants signing up in 2012. They have existing integration solutions for all the major channel management software providers (eSellerPro, ChannelAdvisor, Linnworks etc) and can build bespoke middleware for other platforms.
If you would like to offer your inventory on flubit then register your interest at weflubit whilst registration is free!
The challenges
In summary, flubit offers a compelling proposition to the consumer, and a channel for merchants to achieve incremental sales and win sales from competitors.
The real challenge for flubit will be gaining visibility and traction among consumers – bringing enough customers to the market. It’s a challenge for every new entrant, and flubit is tackling it with a large marketing budget and up-tempo social media strategy. They’ve commissioned a series of videos to establish their brand identity:
20 Responses
Clever. Good stuff.
This is all very interesting. Will you know before accepting it which seller is making the offer?
I know that there are some retailers who I don’t want to deal with, for example, because their previous service has been so poor.
Payment Method Paypal? Huh!!!
Sounds like a race to the bottom to me.
some sort of bug ?
i tried to use for first time. i entered email and password
but no proceed button. i hit enter, and came up with error message that i need to reconfirm password and agree to terms, but those boxes not appearing !
so cannot currently use it
early days i guess
im on windows 7
How automated is the price matching process?
The system does not seem to automatically get the price from the submitted website.
If staff have to manually match up the products then this will dramatically increase the cost of the operation (unless they charge a substantial amount to the seller).