E-commerce Platform 2012 - 2025

ZBRITJE

E-commerce Product Development Web App Business Development Platform

The challenge

Nobody visits a deals site with no deals. No business posts a deal to a site with no visitors. That is the whole problem, and you cannot solve half of it and wait.

What I did

I went and got the merchants. Door by door, call by call, until there was something worth showing up for. At the same time we built the two things the marketplace needed: a place shoppers could find offers, and a dashboard where a shop owner could post one without calling us.

Results

  • 2,500+ businesses signed up across retail, restaurants, services, and travel
  • A working two-sided product: deal discovery on one side, self-serve merchant dashboard on the other
  • Pricing, onboarding, and support simple enough that a small team could carry thousands of partners
  • Kept free for merchants and shoppers for over a decade
  • Shut down in December 2025, after thirteen years, once the founders weighed the ongoing cost and time against keeping it free

ZBRITJE means "Discounts" in Albanian. It was a nationwide marketplace putting local businesses in front of people looking to spend less, across all of Kosovo.

Marketplaces have one honest problem and a lot of dishonest answers to it. The problem is that both sides are empty on day one. The dishonest answer is a growth strategy deck. The honest answer is that somebody has to go out and get the first two thousand merchants by hand.

That was my job. I built the business development playbook and then ran it myself: who to approach, what to say in the first thirty seconds, what to offer a shop owner who has never posted anything online and does not want to start today. 2,500+ businesses signed up. Retail, restaurants, services, travel.

Talking to that many owners teaches you what the product has to be. They do not want a dashboard with twelve tabs. They want to post an offer in two minutes, see whether anyone cared, and get on with running the shop. So the merchant side stayed narrow on purpose: create an offer, manage it, see what happened.

The shopper side had the opposite job. People do not arrive knowing what they want. They browse. So we built for browsing: categories, search, and a mobile flow that worked on the phone people actually held, which in Kosovo at the time was not a new one.

I sat between both sides. Product decisions on the interface and the dashboard. Business decisions on pricing, onboarding, and the support process. The processes mattered as much as the software. A small team can serve thousands of partners, but only if signing up a merchant does not require a meeting.

zbritje.net stayed free for merchants and shoppers the whole way through, for over a decade. In winter 2025, the founders sat down for a final meeting and decided to shut it down by the end of the year. Keeping something free is a choice you make again every year, not once. The cost and time it still demanded no longer squared with what it was giving back. ZBRITJE shut down in December 2025, after thirteen years.

Thank you for every click, every visit and every sale.