User:Niazza/sandbox

Pikaba.com is a US consumer-oriented social shopping community that harnesses the power of social networking to bring sellers and buyers together.

History
Pikaba.com was founded in 2008 by former Microsoft ex-SQL Marketing Director Dmitry Balin and Irena Balin, former Microsoft Development Manager in SQL Server product group. In 2008 Pikaba won Mashable’s Open Web Awards in the “Social Shopping” category. In October 2011, Pikaba made it to the finals of x.Commerce Conference. In June 2012 Dmitry Balin, Pikaba’s CEO, was invited as finalists to introduce Pikaba.com at Launch: Silicon Valley 2012 organized by SVForum, the leading non-profit organization for technologists and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Since December 2012 Pikaba has been ranked on the GeekWire 200 Startup List.

Reverse auction
Pikaba can be used as a regular internet marketplace where buyers perform the search for goods or services pre-offered by sellers , but basic deal procedure is reverse auction where sellers compete to give buyers better price. “Pikaba is a great way to normalize prices of some goods that creep up too high. Throw out a price you think is reasonable and see if you get any bites from those hungry, slimy merchant fish.”

Lead Generation for Merchants
While connecting buyers and sellers via web and mobile, Pikaba comes with a set of tools specially designed to help merchants generate more leads with social commerce:
 * 1) Merchants receive email or SMS notifications about new relevant shopping requests;