A friend and I had an idea for a site. The idea is, there are multiple people that want to buy the same product. One of them decides to be the leader, and all the others pay him/her. The leader then goes and finds the cheapest place to get the product, and asks them for a discount because he is buying e.g. 10pcs. He then sends the products to the buyers

This had proven to be a very good system in The Netherlands, with 20k users active on http://www.inkoopacties.net, a site which works kind of like this. Prices are always cheaper than the cheapest source anyone can easily buy the product from, e.g. stores, mail order etc. This is acheived by ordering directly from the US or China or some other wholesaler, without adding (much) profit. Some companies have complained to the site that their prices are insane and they can't compete.

Since this site is only available to the netherlands and belgium, our idea was to create such a site for europe and maybe later expand to worldwide. I have a few years experience with the Dutch version of the site and I am web developer and designer so with some help I could set up the site. Our main issue is users, especially in foreign countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, Portugal, etc etc etc). Wee also need translators. Does anyone have ideas that could help?

This project is in the earliest stage possible (speculation) so don't expect too much just yet.

Very interesting idea, but I'm sure it's already been done.  I, for certain, know such sites exist here in Australia, but the thing is, hardly anyone knows about it.

Perhaps if you could do something, and make it more known, then it would be a success.  The other stumbling block is that doing these group purchases takes a lot of organisation and trust, eg, "wee need 100 people to be able to buy a product, what happens when only 80 people turn up?"

Very interesting idea though.

Yeah what you mentioned is exactly the problems with this concept, I know 2 such sites in The Netherlands but I don't know any abroad. I thought they would exist though. The entire concept is based on trust so that would be the main theme of the site probably, and there is a lot of organisation involved but whoever takes the time (I've done it about 20 times) can end up with a lot of profit. Also, in my experience, minimum orders are usually reasonable and if you can't meet them you need to be looking further down the retail chain (Manufacturer, min 5000 - Wholesaler, min 100 - Store, min 1 etc)

If you see this, are you still working on this?  Just interested...

Not really. Maybe sometime in the far future :P