Blog . Jiboneus

It is no secret that whenever you buy something in bulk you get a discount in price. Savvy shoppers who want to take advantage of this will find other savvy shoppers who are looking for the same thing to band together and purchase the item in bulk price.

The recently launched Tumpang.com tries to take the concept online. Tumpang.com is Malaysia’s first online bulk discount store, creating a community where buyers band together to get an item in a discounted bulk pricing.

The metaphor used in Tumpang is a little bit different, which makes it more interesting. The word ‘tumpang’ is actually a Malay word for ‘pooling’ as in ‘car-pooling’. The website helps its users to pool their resources to qualify for a bulk discount.

Initially, there will be one ‘driver’ to post an item up and set the discounted price with the number of item needed in order to get the bulk price. Other interested users could then ‘ride’ on this bulk buy. Once there is enough number of buyers for that item the deal is made. Buyers are called ‘passengers’.

This type of web based online services has been done before during the early dot com bubble, not locally but I’ve read several website offering such services at time when ‘e-commerce’ was all the hype. They try to get revenue from sells and transactions made through the website.

Tumpang.com on the other hand is making their revenue from retailer or a distributor (or just an interested buyer looking for others to share the bulk buy). As a seller to post an item you will need ‘Toints’, which are points in Tumpang land. Toints will act as a virtual currency for transactions conducted on Tumpang.

There are two ways to get Toints. You could buy them with actual money, credit card online payment or you could accumulate Toints for free as a buyer. Whenever you make a purchase at Tumpang, the savings you receive will be converted to Toints. So if you are an active ‘passanger’ you could accumulate enough ‘Toints’ to post an item every now and then.

For a retailer or a distributor who will be using the site to sell their items in bulk as often, will then need to buy ‘Toints’ from Tumpang.

Upon signing up and filling my personal details I already have 10,000 Toints. You could start posting item right away.

Apart from just selling and buying things in bulk, Tumpang.com could also be a tool to organize group outing. If you wanted to organize a futsal game and are looking for extra players, you could post it on Tumpang and split the cost up between you and other interested users who want to join the game.

Overall it is an interesting concept and I hope it will get popular. It needs to get popular. The site design looks very friendly and fun, unlike some e-commerce sites out there. It also looks like it has some good tools in place for organizing bulk buys, not just another glorified webshop.

It is good to see some interesting web projects taking of here in Malaysian. If you do know of a web project, or are developing one drop me a line, I would like to write about it.

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