What Does “Community Buying” Mean?

If you haven't read the "Gini Store: Ship with Purpose" article yet, please read that to appreciate why the Gini Store is different from all other shopping platforms. Reading that article first will provide useful context for the answer below.

For many (not all) products in the Gini Store, there is a feature that we call "Community Buying". Functionally, this feature works similarly to GroupOn, but Community Buying serves a deeper purpose for the Gini Community and corresponding Gini monetary system. Specifically, for other shopping platforms like Amazon, Alibaba, Walmart, eBay, etc., the shopping experience is very different because the companies running those platforms fundamentally only care about one thing: Transforming large human populations into mindless consumption zombies to extract as much money from them as possible. Gini is different.

Like everything we do at Gini, we build our technologies to achieve ecosystem stability, equity and sustainability. With that in mind, it's easy to understand why Community Buying is such a core principle in the Gini Store shopping experience.

Additionally, there is an economic incentive for the Gini community to come together around the shopping experience: buying power. The Community Buying process increases the community's buying power. This means the community is essentially negotiating with the suppliers that provide their products to the Gini Store and implicitly saying, "Hey suppliers, we will buy your products in large quantities if you give us the best prices possible!" Thus, the Community Buying process enables the Gini Store to compete on price with much larger shopping companies.

See also the article on the Community Buying count-down timer.