BUSINESS MODELS
You've heard of the one-to-many past. You've heard of the one-to-one future. How about many-to-one? According to the founders of the San Francisco-based outfit Accompany (www.accompany.com), true consumer empowerment lies in individuals banding together to buy as a group - many-to-one.
That, in short, is the idea behind Accompany's bulk buying scheme, an idea so deceptively simple that its originators spent several weeks convinced that they were late to the party. "It seemed that someone would be doing it already," says CEO Jim Rose. "But we looked around and no one was."
Here's how the new world of communal purchasing works: You place an order for a Palm V, say, and give Accompany 72 hours to assemble a group of buyers. Accompany will bundle you with other Palm V seekers - 25, 100, 500 at a time - and negotiate a purchase in bulk, so you can share in the kinds of stepped discounts usually reserved for larger corporate buyers. Of course, Accompany has a viral marketing strategy that encourages you to recruit friends, family, and perfect strangers to share in all the bargains.
So far, Accompany gets a cut of merchandise sold at Home Office Computing, Digital River, Small Business Computing, and MySoftware. But the company is also eyeing another revenue stream: Following the lead of Cybergold and priceline.com, Rose and cofounders Jonathan Ehrlich and Salim Teja filed for a patent on the many-to-one business model. "We don't know the value of it," admits Teja, "but it was something we needed to do."
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