This “relaunch” of AtCost.com is literally 11 years in the making. Back when the first AtCost.com launched in April of 1999, the only way to get people to work together on the web was by sending emails or sharing info on online bulletin boards.  This was a very cumbersome way for people to communicate with each other en masse.  It was also nearly impossible to aggregate enough demand for the “exciting” deals AtCost was offering at the time (mainly refurbished toaster ovens, phone cards, pre-iPod mp3 players and digital cameras).During those heady days of Web 1.0, many people passionately believed that the Internet would become a powerful tool for collective action.  Dynamic pricing and group buying technology was expected to change the face of commerce by creating exceptional value for both consumers and businesses.Quite simply put- WE were all wrong.

The problem was that we were part of a group of entrepreneurs who were a bit too early to see this dream fully realized at the time.  Consumers did not understand the core concepts we were all pushing.  There was mass confusion about prices dropping, and online “community building” was a buzz word at McKinsey and Harvard Business School, but the concept of a true “community” did not actually exist online.

Although the initial group buying and dynamic pricing sites like Mercata, MobShop and AtCost, failed to gain widespread acceptance online, television became the new frontier and hotbed for innovation.  Over the last 9 years, TV shopping channels like PriceDrop.tv, Deal TV, Bid.TV and GemsTV brought group buying and live price drop auctions to viewers in as far flung places as the UK, Japan, Germany and now the United States.   In fact, Michael Reinstein, our founder and AtCost.com’s “once and future” CEO,  played a major role in launching these types of broadcast television channels in both the UK and the US.

Now that social networking has made group buying and dynamic pricing more viable, we felt that the time was right to make our own contribution to improve the genre and participate in the collective consciousness.  Our initial vision of a democratized web, where pricing is dynamic, commerce is frictionless and transparency reigns seems closer to reality than ever before.

So here we go.  AtCost.com lives again to fight another day.   This time, we promise- no toaster ovens.

The AtCost.com Team

Beverly Hills, California 

May 20, 2010
(AtCost.com 1.0 Screenshots Courtesy of  http://web.archive.org/web/20010331194847/http://www.atcost.com/)

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