Vlume.com - Crowdsourced Bargaining

June 20th, 2008 by Steve Frost

This is an amazing idea! I think you’ll like it too.

It has been set up by some people who felt they were getting ripped off by their mobile and broadband suppliers. They decided to pool the amount they were spending to use this collective amount to try to bargain for better deals. Its quite compelling: the more people we can get to join, the larger our buying power and thus negotiating power.

Vlume is an experiment. It stands for ‘Value Me’ - an exercise in community building which aims to empower people to act collectively to take control of their value and use this to improve the terms of contracts they enter into. Vlume believes that people acting collectively can develop the power to influence markets and thus gain real value for the money they spend.

If you are struck by the idea as I was, register and invite others to join as well.

Said the email, so I thought I’d have a look.

Vlume is to telecommunications as euronics is to washing machines. It’s about buying power. The theory is that if they can build a community of buyers who all want better value broadband, TV, telephone or mobile, they can then become the “voice of the consumer” and get it’s members better deals, which I am all up for.

Sign up is quick and painless, but you’ll need to know your monthly telecommunication spendings.

Once you are in the site, there’s not really that much to do, there’s a who and why page, a blog and some data pages showing you how much your personal business is worth and how much the community is worth
to prospective service providers, it’s well coded and makes subtle use of the jquery library. I assume extra functionality will be added as the comvmunity grows.

At the time of going to press the community stood at 34 members, but as the saying goes “mighty oaks from little acorns grow”.

I like to bargain as much as the next northerner, so this a site I will be keeping an eye on.

Vlume is currently an invite only service, and we have been given a limited amount of invites, drop a comment if you would like an invite.

Steve