Group orders: collective buying for associations, clubs, parents' associations and companies

The club coordinator writes: they need kits for three teams, each family pays for its own and they want to know what price you will give them if they reach forty. You send them a quantity price table, they forward it to the WhatsApp group, collect sizes in a spreadsheet and get each family to pay by Bizum. Two weeks later you receive an order with size errors, a missing payment and an invoice nobody knows whose name to put on.

Organised collective buying —a group with someone coordinating it and many people paying— is a very common sales channel, and it is almost always managed by hand. It can be brought into the online store, but it is worth thinking first about how it will operate.

Two types of collective buying

• Open and viral. A customer opens a group around a product, shares it with their contacts and the price drops as buyers join. The aim is to win new customers through the ones you already have.
• Organised. An existing group (a club, an association, a school, a network of businesses) buys together to get a better price. There is a coordinator, a deadline and a common destination.

This article is about the second type, which is where operational problems tend to arise.

Cases where it works

Setting the tiers without losing margin

The appeal of collective buying is that the price drops the more people take part. For it to be worthwhile, each tier has to be based on your real costs:

1. Calculate what you save through volume: a better purchase price, a single shipment instead of many, a single preparation.
2. Pass part of that saving on through the tiers, and keep the rest.
3. Set a minimum below which the group does not go ahead, because there is no saving.
4. Set a maximum if your stock or production capacity limits it.
5. Decide whether the coordinator gets a perk of their own for organising the group. It is a reasonable incentive, and cheaper than an acquisition campaign.

Payment: everyone pays their own

A coordinator who collects from everyone and pays for a single order takes on a risk that is not theirs: non-payment, refunds, other people's payment details. It is much cleaner for each participant to pay their share in the store, with their own payment method.

That leaves deciding what happens if the group does not reach the minimum:

• Authorise the payment and capture it when the group closes, if your gateway allows it and the deadline is short, because card authorisations expire within a few days.
• Charge on joining and refund if it does not go ahead, which works with any payment method.
• Let the group go ahead anyway at the price of the tier reached.

Delivery: one address or many

A single shipment to the club or school greatly reduces shipping costs, but shifts distribution onto the coordinator. If you choose that route, prepare the order separated by participant (bags with names, a distribution sheet) and agree who collects it. If each person receives their own, the group price has to be able to absorb the individual shipments.

Invoicing

• If each participant pays, each receives their own invoice, and the store works as usual.
• If the association or company pays, the invoice goes in its name, with its tax ID (NIF), and it must be a full invoice.
• If the two are mixed, split them into separate orders. Nobody wants an invoice in the club's name for what the families have paid.

Personal data

When the coordinator collects names, sizes and phone numbers in a shared spreadsheet, that information circulates without control. If each participant signs up and pays in the store, they provide their own data, for their own purchase, under your privacy policy. The coordinator only needs to know who has joined, not their payment details.

Common mistakes

1. Quantity price tables forwarded with no deadline, still circulating months later.
2. Orders with sizes or variants collected by hand and copied with errors.
3. The coordinator acting as everyone's collector.
4. Groups with no closing date.
5. Not warning participants that the group is about to close or that it has not gone ahead.

Checklist

• Tiers calculated from your costs, with minimum and maximum.
• A clear rule on what price each participant pays.
• Individual payment in the store.
• What happens if the minimum is not reached, stated before starting.
• Single or individual delivery decided, with its cost.
• Invoicing in the name of whoever pays.
• Closing date and notifications to participants.

How to solve it in PrestaShop

RKR Group Buying brings collective buying into your store. You set up a campaign on a product with discount tiers according to the number of buyers, group duration, minimum and maximum participants and, if you wish, a reward for whoever opens it. The coordinator shares the group page, with current price, progress bar and countdown, and each participant buys through the usual checkout with a single-use discount in their name. At closing, if the group goes ahead, the module requests the capture from your payment module; if not, it cancels the orders and requests the refund. Bear in mind that it does not collect payment itself: your payment module must be able to authorise without capturing, or hook into its hooks, and if a refund is not confirmed the credit slip is left for you to do it by hand. Six email notifications keep participants informed, and the statistics tell you which campaigns work.