How to Organise a Group-Buy

If you are one of the hero-members of CPF who have organised a group buy and yet, miraculously survived:

What advice would you give to anyone else thinking about running a Group-Buy ?
Please post any suggestions or recommended procedures, and of course, what not to do too.

remuen's innovation of making a topic up specially for a list of participants seems to be accepted. As far as I can see it's the most efficient way of tracking the members involved. Any comments René ? Jollyroger ?

MR Bulk™, you also have coordinated a large buy recently - I believe it wasn't that easy ?

My only tip is don't do a lot of work before you have some serious expressions of interest from people ......

lightlover

Some possible ideas.

The initial posting should have all the pertinent detail in the initial posting.

Details such as:

Qty:
Price:
Availability:
How many per person:

And maybe a canned instruction of how to start the list, add you name to the list etc... (if we use the list method) The canned instructions could be posted somewhere and the originator could link to it.

A dummy example would look something like:
Buyer/Seller Instructions and guidelines


One thing that I'm personally struggling with is how to post it in the buy/sell and yet still make it visible. Many frequent visitors visit one area and not many others like the buy/sell area.

So, posting a cool mod'd flashlight in the buy/sell would get overlooked by many who might be interested.

It seems rather obtuse but natural to post the mod'd flashlight for example in the mod forum and or cross post pointing to the buy/sell. just an idea.

I highly recommend to anyone who is building something completely build all the units or kits before posting.

The best piece of advice I can offer in this area would be to make it manadatory to have any potential buyer contact you via e-mail PRIOR to them sending you payment for an item...

When you're not a retailer, it's easy at times to get too many requests for sales of a popular item. The frustration comes from having to spend your own hard-earned cash on postage to send peoples payments back to them when there isn't enough product to go around

This also helps avoid disappointment to the potential buyer and any possible problems that could be incurred in trying to cash out the money order that was made payable to the "seller".