Magento Group Buys – All You Need to Know

Magento is undoubtedly one of the world’s most popular eCommerce platforms. Developers love it because it’s open source, so they can customize it as per their requirements. Big businesses love it because it’s powerful and can support all of their workflows and processes.

As such, the Magento platform is perfect for big brands looking to develop a bespoke eCommerce store that not only offers top quality user experience but also fits their business needs precisely. Even for small businesses on a limited budget, Magento is the top choice as an ecommerce platform, since it also offers a Community edition/version which is completely free to use (except for design themes and extensions, the majority of which you need to pay for).

As a web development company specializing in ecommerce solutions we’ve worked quite extensively with the Magento platform, not just for regular implementations (deployments) of ecommerce sites but on various customization and integration projects as well. An interesting Magneto customization project we worked on for Apex Race Parts involved the addition of a group buying feature to their Magento web store that would enable them to sell their products at mass scale.

As most of you know, group buying or collective buying, offers products and services at significantly reduced prices to customers, on the condition that a minimum number of buyers make the purchase. Based on this concept, we customized Apex Race Parts’ Magento Community edition web store to add the group buying capability, which is not supported in Magento by default.

The way it works is that for every group buying deal, there are multiple discount tiers that are tied to number of interested buyers. For example, if the original base price for a pair of alloy wheels (say 18” EC7) was $1000, it would cost $950 if 10 users show their interest and commitment in buying that product. And the discount offered keeps increasing, based on the number of interested and committed buyers.

Once there are enough buyers interested, the group buying deal goes into round two, where each buyer then has to show their commitment to buying the product, in order to unlock the first discount tier (as depicted in the illustration below). Once that’s done, then after a pre-set time period, the deal becomes live and the interested buyers can then make their payments and place their purchase/sales orders.

This was a unique case, as it involved the implementation of custom functionality to the Magento platform, which has greatly extended the functionality of our client’s Magento web store.

If you have a Magento customization, migration or development requirement you would like to discuss or would like to know more about our Magento development services, please get in touch with us.

Blog Post