Social buying is collective bargaining in the Internet age. The advantage that group formation brought workers in the industrial age was greater power to represent and achieve their demands vis-à-vis employers in terms of wages, working hours, and benefits. The advantage that individual e-commerce participants have in joining a group — i.e. using a social-buying website — is that they can benefit from the site’s purchasing power to induce sellers of products and services to give them price discounts, free extras, and, theoretically, better customer service. Sitting on the other end of the bargaining seesaw, merchants can use social buying sites as online marketing tools to expand their customer base into an online community, gain advantages in fast and precise analysis of marketing campaigns, and, also in theory, increase their repeat business. The social-buying model is represented in the Middle East by scores of startups and locally-grown companies — ScoopCity,
