The Beez App — A Giant Step Toward Wise Consumerism
These days, more than ever before, many people find it really challenging to save money for the bigger expenditures in life, such as education, marriage, and mortgage. This can be attributed to many causes, such as governmental policies, high costs of rental and goods, and so on. That said, you just can’t ignore that this is happening also due to hasty economic decisions. A company named Beez aspires to confront this issue. Their groundbreaking idea inspired me, and this post is dedicated to sharing their concept with you.
I am Ofir Bar, an investor with about 25 years of experience in worldwide markets, and a special interest in innovation and entrepreneurship. In the past decade, I’ve witnessed many millennials (including ones from my own family) struggling to withstand expenses. “How can this problem be solved?” I asked myself, but Beez found an interesting solution before I did. I think their idea has the potential to help people navigate their economic conduct away from the spending highway toward a more convenient and unexplored wise consumerism country road.
The advertising trap
Consumerism has been around practically as long as humanity has, but the boost it has experienced since the emergence of smartphones is unprecedented. Nowadays, we just can’t escape ads. They are with us wherever we go, dinging in our pockets. On Facebook and Instagram, in promoted articles and Youtube videos, on news sites, and in our email inboxes. The list goes on. Many of these ads shout at us: “buy me if you want to be happy!” and “buy me now, before it’s too late!” These days, ad creators know A LOT about human behavior and psychology. Therefore, causing us to buy more than we actually need is just too easy.
How can we avoid the frustration of working so hard during the month, only to find out at the end that our checking account has shrunken instead of expanded? If you ask me, awareness is the first step. Knowing how human psychology and advertising work can give you a broader perspective of what makes you purchase in the first place. Before buying, you have to take into account that Google and Facebook know your personality, desires, insecurities, and opinions to the smallest details. Be aware that they may be using these to make you open your wallet for no good reason.
The loophole
That said, awareness is not enough. To be a wiser consumer, you have to adopt the right consumerist habits: Remember that advertising usually does not target your rationale, but your emotion, which we find harder to harness.
This is where the Beez app comes in. Through this app, you can access more than 450 e-commerce sites, and actually, tell Beez to buy an item for you. You pay back to Beez only after you get the product, and know you want to keep it. But this is not all. Here are a few more ways in which this app can benefit you:
- Payment system — you can pay for your purchases with up to 4 interest-free installments over a 45-day period. The first payment is only 25% of the order value.
- Cashback — for any purchase you can get 2–30% of the product’s price as cashback, which will be saved in your Beez account. The cashbacks you accumulate can be withdrawn when reaching a certain amount, or be used for Beez’s ‘Sweet deals’ — highly discounted products (up to 90% off).
- Delivery — the product’s delivery is free of charge (for VIP members).
Consumerism 2.0
I don’t believe that we need to abstain from our desires to be better consumers. We can still go abroad for a vacation, wear some nice clothes, and have dinner with our loved ones in a fancy restaurant. Wise consumerism means paying more attention to details and acting rationally rather than emotionally. I believe Beez delivers this in a rather stylish way. Hopefully, we’ll learn to navigate this ad-bombarded world in a way that will make us the masters of ourselves once more.
