Here at Manage My Co-op our mission is to build communities by putting you in charge of what you pay. It is at the core of what aggregating demand does by allowing you to drive prices down. To enable you to do that we charge a 2% fee that is added to each order. We believe our software will save you time, money, and effort and your members will see that.
What is this? Manage My Co-op is a platform to help you manage group buys. Use your community to buy goods at a discount. We make the process easy and streamlined.
I have a buying club. What can you do for me? Awesome! Congrats! We have a great system that will save you hours of work and reduce errors. Contact us and we can walk you through your first order set up. Heck we can even do it for you!
I am a member of a buying club. What can you do for me? Only make your life so much easier. Rather than keeping track of all of your co-ops and buys all over the place you can now find them in one convenience place. That is once they start using us. Put your host or manager in touch with us!
Ok back up. What’s a co-op or a buying club? Co-ops are also known as cooperatives. Essentially it is people coming together to make a bulk purchase to get goods at lower costs. Many co-ops started in the 70s and are now store front grocery stores. Most started as simple buying clubs— as in “hey we should all go in together and get this box of apples for super cheap! How many do you want?”. Buying clubs and co-ops are on the rise again. Instead of using pen and paper, google docs, or email you can use Manage My Co-op to make the process super easy. I promise. More questions? Contact us.
I still dont get it. Get your community together. Find a great deal. Set up your order on our sytem. Get everyone to buy in. Collect money. Buy deal. Distribute your deal. Bask in your awesomeness.
How do I start my own club? I am working on writing up a how to but in the mean time email me and I can walk you through it.
Can I/we message in Manage My Co-op? Yes! Each order has a message board and an option to send email notifications to the members participating in the buy. This enables you to send notifications when orders are closing soon, have closed or when payments are called for.
What other ways should we communicate with each other? In addition to our order message boards, we encourage groups to communicate through either a facebook group, email list, or yahoo group (or whatever workds for you). We are working on building in user messaging, but in the meantime, the system is designed to work side by side with one of these other platforms. We can talk you through this process if you need help.
How do I pay as a member? Your host or manager will let you know. We don’t handle payments through Manage My Co-op yet. It will most likely be something like PayPal or Dwolla. Some co-ops or buying clubs can even do check or cash in person but that is up to your group.
How do I as a host/manager collect payments? Manage My Co-op does not handle user payments yet. Eventually we will. Right now keep using whatever it is that you are using (PayPal, Dwolla, WePay, cash, or check for example). It does however give you a place to keep track of who has paid what. We will be integrating paypal and dwolla and are in the process of developing user account balances so that co-ops can track overages and underages order to order for each member.
Starting a new a group and need to figure out to how to handle payments? Contact us and we can walk you through it! We have lots of great suggestions.
What’s this margins business? When ordering in bulk you often buy in cases. Lets use a box of 70 apples for example. No one needs all 70 apples (ok maybe they do but for this example lets imagine they don’t). Five people are ordering and all pick how many they want. To make the host's or manager's life easier someone can order, for example, 10 apples but then put a margin of 5 meaning they will take up to 15. If they are ordering 10 but are happy with 5 they can set their margin to -5. When the order is set to add/drop it will automatically consider everyone’s margins and fill the case.
How does it really work? Manage My Co-op has developed a proprietary algorithm that auto-balances each item in an order to handle situations where items must be ordered in set cases. Yep. We are that cool. To support this technology, members have the ability to enter a desired range by setting an ideal quantity and a positive or negative margin. Encouraging your members to enter margins will make auto balancing a snap.
Lets walk you through what a typical order timeline looks like. Most groups go through the same steps so we have designed our software to work that way. Typically orders go as follow: