How it Works

SyncFu documentation is organized as a list of questions and answers. If you have a question not covered here, please email me, and I'll try to reply as soon as possible, thus I might update this list.

The questions are divided in the domains listed below.

SyncFu is a free add-on for your existing web shop that provides the ability to make more reliable group purchases through a form of reservations. If you are not so familiar with the concept of group purchases, please take a look at the Wikipedia's page on Group buying.

SyncFu helps you leverage the economies of scale in your web store, with the assumption that there are at least two persons interested in your product(s), and both consider the price a deciding factor.

When you make an offer, reservations are aggregated together until the maximum quantity or item's deadline is met. The price adjusts proportionally according to the quantity-price ratio you've set, making the offer more and more attractive with each new reservation. Consequently, the buyers are inclined to share the offer since they are entitled to the lowest achieved price.

Once someone makes a reservation on you website using SyncFu, two codes are provided.

• An item discount code, same for all reservations, but unique per item
• A reservation discount code, unique per each reservation

The item code may be simpler to use in your existing shopping cart software, as it is the same for everyone. Generally, this is the best way to go. However, if you wish to explicitly provide only those persons that made reservations with a discount, use the reservation discount codes. This might be painful if you need to enter all in your existing shopping cart software.

These codes are available in a list when you export items' data.

SyncFu was built from own need. I wanted to build a website where volume discounting can be achieved between people that haven't met before, a true web demand aggregation. Thinking about the problem and discussing about it with people, I decided to build a separate, one feature web application that will do just this, and do it well. No Swiss knife imitation, just one feature, and for sure it will keep this direction.

As for consumer websites, there are a lot of them there already. Among the most popular are BuyWithMe.com & Groupon.com. However, I doubt a lot of people go searching exactly for "group" shopping on the web. They simply search for the thing they need, and once found, they may be interested in purchasing options.

That said, SyncFu is made not to compete against web retailers, but to enhance them with a selective, flexible feature.

Absolutely nobody can promise that. However, the chances are that, due to the micropayments as a discriminatory filter, SyncFu reservations are far more reliable than free promises. For the customers, it does cost to make a promise, but the returns are much more substantial, so the reservation fee may be negligible.

Through SyncFu, the seller is creating a timed offer, which is materialized only after the closure with real payments. With previous experience and an assumption that not all reservations will be converted into purchases, but a fairly high percentage of the same, the seller may anticipate the real numbers which can be used to adjust the offer. The real number will depend on the seller's popularity, item offered, duration of the offer, terms and conditions, competitiveness to other retailers' prices etc.

SyncFu is a free web application and you can setup it up on your website(s) with as many items you wish at no cost. There are no restrictions and limits.

SyncFu generates income through the micropayments of the reservation fee that serves you as reliability factor. This fee is charged through a third party payment processor, in most cases through a mobile phone, and only a fraction remains to SyncFu.

You can find out more about micropayments below.

To use SyncFu as a seller, you need a website, or more specifically a publicly visible web page which you can edit.

To make a reservation, buyers need either a mobile phone in some of the 50 countries supported or a valid credit card to complete the micropayment through the payment processor.

Once you register an account on SyncFu, you need to copy and paste the few lines of code given into your desired webpages, and you can immediately start offering items for group reservations. Approximate time to production is between 2 to 15 minutes, dependent on your skills.

As a seller, you are aware that there are different kinds of customers. Some customers consider the price as a deciding factor for placing a purchase, while others value different ones such as delivery time and brand name. Since the Internet provided a great platform for products and services comparison, that niche market of price-aware customers is more difficult to attract and retain. Practically, customer loyalty doesn't exist in this niche, but only a better offer.

SyncFu opens this market opportunity for your by letting you make a better offer to customers that are willing to wait for a better price.

Instead of leaving the sales volume to the random case of attracting visitors, SyncFu proposes an add-on for a different model of purchasing.

The chances are there are many visitors browsing the very same product page on your web shop. Some of them are interested in getting the item as soon as possible, and those will proceed directly to checkout. Great! However, some of them are just comparing your prices with another browser window opened in the background, or with a price tag they've seen in the shop around the corner. How to win those? Fortunately, the Internet allows for new, amazing social processes.

By synchronizing those price-aware customers, with a certain level of reliability of micropayments, you can offer a better, dynamical, propagating price tag that keeps getting better with each customer. SyncFu lets you do exactly that, and in a very simplistic manner.

• Leverage volume discounts with your suppliers
• Sell higher volumes at a time, with lower margins
• Estimate demand for purchasing/manufacturing purposes
• Shorten customer acquisition time
• Bump up your turnover by selling more in less time
• Let your customers spread the word virally about your offer

No one can guarantee that all reservations will result in purchase, but SyncFu is providing you with some certain reliability by requiring a micropayment for completing a reservation.

SyncFu can be used in many ways as a catalyst of volume transactions. However, using SyncFu makes sense only on items where the reservation fee is negligible, likely on values above $15.

Here are some ideas on where SyncFu can be used. are welcome too.

Example: Group/Volume Discounting

You have a store in which you are selling a single product, let's say a digital camera. Regular price of the product is $300. You make a group offer with SyncFu for a quantity of 10 units where the unit price goes down to $280, and for the quantity of 20 the unit price is $250. By aggregating the reservations, the price goes proportionally towards the lowest. The buyers are encouraged to spread the word since they pay only the lowest achieved price.

After the item closes, you provide the customers with payment information and a deadline, whether through a custom invoice or through the usage of discount codes that SyncFu generates for you. If you are using shopping cart software, you can adjust this discount per item or even per person.

With SyncFu, you can lower your margins but shorten the sale time. Moreover, as a seller, you most likely are entitles to a volume discount from the supplier, so you can adjust the prices better.

Example: Promotions

You are a provider of some service or product. You wish to make a promotion but only to a limited number of customers. You go from your regular price to the lowest price of $0 (or custom) for a quantity of 100 people. The offer can be valid for either the achieved price, where you gut customers in bulk, or only if the maximum quantity is reached. You set your own terms and conditions, which users accept before making the reservation.

After the item closes, use the discount code during the signup process.

Example: Pre-Ordering (Manufactured things, Books, Movies etc.)

You want to provide with an on-demand product or service, but are unsure of the quantity that you can expect. It might also be more cost-effective for you to produce higher volumes, so you want to aggregate the demand. You can use SyncFu to estimate this demand while accepting pre-orders. At the same time you can experiment with the price.

Your email address serves three purposes:

• To sign into and control your SyncFu account
• To receive notifications about your items; Besides the activities provoked by you, you won't hear from SyncFu, unless it is WWIII important
• To provide the people that made reservations on your items with a direct contact to you, have they additional questions. We are very wary about this one, but hey, you aren't using your family email to do customer support. Are you?

Your email address is shown only in the notifications sent to the people that are making reservations. They are not available publicly anywhere on this web application, and therefore can't be harvested by spam bots or search engines.

SyncFu, of course, legally promises not to give away, trade or sell your account information.

An item is a product/service you are opening for group reservations to the public. Since SyncFu works with one product per webpage/url, this is most likely the what is described on that page.

Once you are registered and signed in, click on the Open New Item in the menu below the logo in the upper left corner.

The form presented asks for the bare minimal and essential information. Required data is presented on a gray, while the optional one is on a white background. All the fields contain inline instructions.

Of course, just set the proper time window by selecting and customizing the Open/Close Precisely at... fields in the Time Frame section.

A bypass code is a custom code, chosen by the seller, that allows making reservations without going through the actual micropayment process of the reservation fee. This code can be, for example, be given to trusted persons, valuable customers, or it can be used to get the item going by dropping the price.

Although having a bypass code may seem at first as fraudulent feature (towards customers), having it and using it is completely ethical and reasonable. Its usage benefits the customers as it will automatically lower the price down, just like any other reservation.

It is recommended that, if reasonable, the seller creates the first reservation using the bypass code. This will ensure that all is in place, yet will place the seller in the same batch for item notifications.

When an item is awaiting and it opens, you will receive a notification email. The same goes when an item closes, either due to deadline expiration or maximum quantity reach.

In some special, rare cases, your notification emails may be delayed for some hours, but if your product page has at least a few daily visits, you will be notified as it happens.

You can always check the current state of your items either by signing into your SyncFu account, or visiting your own webpage and clicking the SyncFu button.

For obvious reasons, you can cancel/close only an opened item, and open only an awaiting one.

To do so, in the items listing, edit the item by clicking on its title or selecting Edit in its menu. Once in the item's form, in the section Time Frame, right to the opening/closing times, there is a command 'Right Now'. Use this command to manually change the state of the item.

Only awaiting and archived items can be deleted immediately from the items listings. Opened items must be closed or canceled before they can be archived.

This simple workflow is in place to ensure that important data isn't lost before necessary, but only put aside for some later housekeeping.

Congratulations! You can download the reservations data as a CSV (comma separated values) for processing in your custom applications, spreadsheet/database software or emailing tool.

You can also directly email all the participants within the SyncFu items listing, through the item's menu command Email All.

You will now most likely want to provide the participants with a payment link, instructions and a short deadline to complete the payment.

Sure. From the item's menu in the items listing, choose the Download CSV command. This is a Comma Separated Values format, which is common, and may be used in a spreadsheet software.

Once the seller has made the SyncFu button available on his webpage, the customers go through the following reservation flow.

• Interested visitor clicks the button and a pop-under window shows up
• Item's price movement, chart, terms and conditions are displayed
• If interested, in the next step an email address is required
• A micropayment/bypass code is now required
• Upon payment completion (mobile phone / credit card), obtained payment code is entered
• Reservation is made and reservation codes are given
• The reservation data is emailed to the address entered before

Email addresses are required for the obvious reasons of providing a communication channel between the customers and the seller. Moreover, the same are used to deliver a reservation receipt as a confirmation.

SyncFu is practically available around the globe due to the wide coverage of the micropayment system in use - Allopass. Mobile phone payments are available in around 50 countries, while the others may utilize credit cards to create a SyncFu reservation.

You can see the complete list of countries supported on the Allopass website.

If you trust a person, you can give them the bypass code, chosen while editing the item.
Be careful, leaked bypass codes may ruin the reliability of your item and offer. Just keep it safe.

Charging a small reservation fee by a third party provides you, the seller, with an assurance and certain reliability that the customer is ready to participate in the offer you are making.

Making reservations without such paid assurances, can't be as reliable, for the obvious reason of lacking the friction costs of making such reservation. Free reservations are prone to pranks, sabotage and frauds.

On the other side, the customers may consider the seller's offer more realistic if it embraces some means of controlling the promise. If the seller doesn't have a reliable demand estimation, the price offered may not be as sustainable.

The out-of-process reason is sustaining this service with income. Charging these minimal fees will ensure that SyncFu will be able to provide with a continuous and an improving service.

Unfortunately, SyncFu does not set own pricing. Pricing is dictated by the network carriers, and varies dependent on the country and operator. In most cases the fee is below $3 USD, and on average around $1.5 USD. SyncFu uses a third party payment processor - Allopass to leverage global coverage.

The reservation fee is charged either through a mobile phone or a credit card. Payment provides the customer with a unique code, which when entered during the reservation process allows the reservation to take place.

You can see the complete price list per country on the Allopass website.

The reservation fee, charged to the end customer, is at first taxed by the mobile companies, after which the payment processor takes a share. The remainder is kept by SyncFu.

You can see the complete earnings list per country on the Allopass website.

Aren't you too busy with that volume? If not, and we'll think of something together.

SyncFu is composed of two parts.

• This web application
• The Javascript widget

To setup SyncFu on a desired page, the seller installs a small javascript code, that pulls the SyncFu widget from this server, after the seller's page is completely loaded.

The SyncFu widget is a bridge between the page it's embedded in, and this web application.

Upon loading, this widget will scan the DOM for SyncFu buttons, with ids in "syncfu", "syncfu-0", "syncfu-1" etc. All button anchors will be made invisible at first, while in the background a JSON request is made to this web application.

This request will query for any items on the page from which this request is made from, by using its url and the seller key. This key is uniquely specified in the small javascript code initially put on the page by the seller.

If there is no item available on the page's address, SyncFu is terminated, but if a containing response is given back, buttons are styled and captions are constructed, replacing variables within their inner html. Each SyncFu button will be connected to trigger the SyncFu pop-under box.

When any of the buttons get clicked, SyncFu box shows up, opening an iframe with the item's details and the reservation making form.

The SyncFu box autosizes to the iframe contents in a cool way. If the browser is newer, and supports javascript cross-domain message passing, it uses the browser's postMessage to achieve so. If this isn't supported, most likely on IE6/7, it sets the parents' url hash tag with the box's height, activity indicator or closing trigger, which is then polled by the box.

SyncFu widget has been tested on all major browsers (IE6+, Firefox 2/3, Safari, Chrome, Opera) on Mac, Windows and Linux. Most of the code and time spent on it is for compatibility issues, so you can be sure you're covered.

If you experience any issue, please let us know.

This function is going through some design changes, and documentation will be updated soon. Have you immediate needs, write to us please.

An auto-trigger url is simply your webpage's url that has SyncFu installed on, with the hash '#dosyncfu' added at the end. Presence of this hash on active SyncFu items will automatically bring the reservations box.

With this auto-triggered url, sellers and customers don't have to explain to others which button to click to start SyncFu (although that should be fairly obvious).

Since each setup involves a different seller key, all instructions are given per seller. Once you have registered an account, just follow the Setup Instructions, shown as a link in your left menu under the SyncFu logo.

Setting up SyncFu involves adding a few lines of Javascript at the end of your webpage (last item within the body tag). After that, all control is done from this web app.

Not at all. The widget is loaded only after all of your page is loaded. Installing the small SyncFu bootstrap code as last within the body tag, further ensures that.

The same loading technique is used by Google Analytics, found on millions of pages.

If you are interested in the code, please find it below.
Note: this is an example, a non functioning code, due to missing seller key. Do not use!

As far the performances are concerned, SyncFu is proudly hosted on the awesome Heroku, the rock solid Ruby platform, focused on performance and scalability.

Yes it does, as seen from the small javascript loader shown above.

The SyncFu buttons are regular anchor links. You can customize them with your own CSS classes, inline styles and even images within. Besides styling, we also provide variables so you can have dynamic information within the button, such as the current price or the number of participants.

Once you create an item, you will be presented with the simple one line button code. Check out the advanced stuff on the same page for all instructions and examples.