This thesis deals with a new trend and a marketing tool -- collective buying. The aim of the work is to describe this trend from two different perspectives and to provide a short-term forecast. In the theoretical sections, we give overview of the history of collective buying, basic terms from the field, and the current situation in the Czech Republic and worldwide. We continue with sections describing the operations of a specific company from the field, BonyBony, which entered the market in September 2010. Author of this thesis has been employed in the company since its founding. In these sections we describe basic operation of the company, marketing tools used and advantages over the competition. The future of companies dealing with collective buying is uncertain; many of them are in red numbers. The last part of this work therefore tries to project the short-term forecast for this company using expert view based on the data acquired from a survey.

Traditionally, group buying is a way to lower down the price due to the group based collective bargaining power. In the Internet age, because the Internet provides more efficient communication tools, it is much easier to recruit more participants to join the group buying to increase the bargaining power and then to lower down the buying price. Hence, in 1998, Mercata proposed an innovative website using group buying as its business model. Since then, there is more and more group buying websites with different group buying models. For single product group buying, there are two most often used models, price acceptance model and free pricing model. The purpose of this thesis is to probe the performance of these two models. First, whether there is difference between the final transaction volumes of these two models and how the difference will be intervened by different price level of product are explored. The next concern is to find what kinds of personal factors of participants will affect their choice of group buying model. The result is that the performance and participants¡¦ satisfaction of free pricing model are better than those of price acceptance model. In addition, the choice of group buying models will be influenced by the ideal price, group size expected by the participants and their motivations.