Bringing Pinduoduo-style group buying to Shopify — launching Aug 25

I've been building Farabiulder for the past year — group buying for Shopify stores. It's scheduled to launch here on August 25.

The idea: a shopper starts a group on a product and invites friends. Once enough people join, everyone in the group gets the discounted price. If the group doesn't reach its minimum before the deadline, every participant is refunded automatically through Shopify Payments or Stripe — the merchant does nothing.

That refund path is the part that took longest. It's also, I think, the reason this mechanic never took off outside Asia: running it manually is painful enough that no merchant does it twice.

A couple of other decisions worth mentioning:

Checkout goes through a draft order tied to the specific group participants, rather than a discount code. A code leaks — someone screenshots it and it ends up on a coupon site. A draft order can't be passed around.

It installs as an Online Store 2.0 theme block, so merchants add it without touching theme code.

First real result: a jewellery store ran one campaign, filled 8 of 10 spots in 8 days, did $8,070, and spent nothing on ads. Their whole channel was Instagram Stories.

Two things I'd genuinely like input on from anyone who's run promotions:

What group size and discount would you actually try? I'm seeing 5–10 people and 15–25% work best, but that's a small sample.

Has anyone run a group buy manually, with spreadsheets and hand-processed refunds? I want to know exactly where it fell apart, because that's what I should be building next.

Happy to answer anything about the implementation.