Make an Offer service integration with nopCommerce

Hi All,

We've just wrapped up a basic integration of our automated price negotiation service, Make an Offer, with nopCommerce 1.30.  We'd love to hear everyone's feedback on the integration as well as the service in general. This site is our interactive demo for the service and will continue to be updated with more features over the coming weeks. We're excited to be offering such a high quality e-commerce software package to our subscribers.

Many thanks to the nopCommerce team for delivering an outstanding piece of software!

http://demo.eneksis.com/

I think this make an offer is an excellent feature.  Good job! I would be interested in it in Nopcommerce future release.

Thanks for the support! We'd love for Make an Offer to be included as a native feature of nopCommerce, and would be happy to make available the minimal code we added to help facilitate this. However, I don't know how open the nopCommerce team would be to including an add-on feature that relies on a proprietary component. Our XML web service, which communicates with an e-commerce site to handle offer processing, resides on our servers and is accessed on a monthly subscription basis.

If the above is a possibility, can someone tell me what steps I should take? If not, we'll be distributing the integrated version we now have to our interested subscribers. I'd be interested in hearing anyone's thoughts on this as I don't know how/if similar situations have been handled in the past.

Thanks again for the feedback!

Jason

I am probably missing something but I can't see any point having the feature. I had a play with your demo site and all it does is rejects the offers untill it reaches the level when it's accepted. So basically instead of having a fixed price on the website customers will make the lowest accepted offer to buy a product?

Thanks for the comment. That's sure to be a common concern.

The seller has control over many aspects of the offer process, including how many offers a potential buyer can submit within a seller-specified amount of time. For the demo, I have the limits set at 4 offers within a 15 minute window. This is tracked per product variant. If you exceed the allowed offer limit, you're informed that you need to wait before making further offers. This is in place to discourage buyers grinding down the price to the minimum allowed. Although the seller could extend the time limit and/or decrease the offer limit so that it would take a buyer longer to determine the minimum accepted amount, a determined haggler could still accomplish this. The goal is, however, to attract the attention of the buyer and keep them on your site to purchase the product versus shopping around at your competitors' sites, by giving them a more interactive buying experience.

In the end, even if the buyer does successfully reach the minimum accepted amount, isn't the sale a win for the seller as well? The idea is that if you simply advertised a 20% off sale you could be giving away profit that might have otherwise been paid by customers who weren't concerned with haggling for an hour or more over a few dollars.

The Make an Offer service also allows the seller to specify discounts by percentage or auto-accept and auto-decline amounts on a per-product variant basis, which also allows for the possibility of leaving a gap between the high and low limit. In this case, the system would ask the buyer to either submit the offer to the buyer for them to personally review, or increase their offer to try for an immediate approval. Support for this manual intervention by the seller was included in case a seller might be more flexible with an acceptable amount based on current circumstances (e.g. slow sales period, clearing out old inventory, etc.). Again, the value is in the control afforded to the seller.

Thanks again for the comment! You may also be able to get more information from our web site (http://www.eneksis.com)

Regards,

Jason

While this may be attractive to some, I would not be interested in having an add-on with a proprietary control component AND another eCommerce site handling transactions.

Your company may be here today and gone tomorrow and then what.

Yes I know that can apply to all companies but at least with open source we have some options should it come to that.

I understand your point completely - hence my previous response about the integration.

As many are aware, there are plenty of eBay sellers leaving to create their own web sites. Those sellers are used to targeting bargain shoppers. And the funniest thing is that Make an Offer started on the eBay platform until it was forced off. Where do you think "Best Offer" came from? :) So there is definitely a market. We offer the service to sellers who want customers who want to save money. And those are in no short supply. We expand our market by working with platforms and developers who want to attract the sellers who want those buyers.

Our goal in performing this integration ourselves was to identify and redistribute a high-quality shopping cart solution that we could use as a vehicle to deliver our service to sellers who want to take advantage of it now. While we're currently in negotiation with some of the all-in-one hosted e-commerce providers, there are sellers who don't want to wait for that. This fills that need.

But here's to hoping we're not gone tomorrow! :)

Jason