The farm wasn’t using any formal platform. Instead, we organized group orders through WeChat and WhatsApp, collected responses in chat, tracked everything in spreadsheets, and coordinated pickups manually. It worked, but it was messy, time-consuming, and easy to get wrong.

As we helped run these group-buy cycles ourselves, we saw something surprising: this wasn’t just a farm problem. Restaurants, bakeries, seafood suppliers, and local grocery vendors were all doing the same thing — running group orders through private communities using chat and spreadsheets.

Even merchants already on platforms like DoorDash or Grubhub still relied on these parallel workflows. Those platforms are optimized for individual, on-demand orders, but merchants were using group buying to aggregate demand, increase order size, and make operations more predictable and increase revenue