Groupon’s China Site Big in Visits, Behind in Sales
About a month after offering its first discounted deals, Groupon’s China site is attracting big user numbers, but still lags behind the local competition in sales, according to a group-buying aggregator in the country.
The U.S. company’s site at GaoPeng.com represents its push into China, which has 457 million Internet users. Groupon is already popular in the U.S. as a promoter of group buying, a new form of e-commerce that is also taking off in China. Group buying works by featuring steep discounts on goods. Enough users, however, must buy into a deal in order for it to be offered to all who purchased it.
While Groupon has achieved success in the U.S., China’s group buying market is already filled with domestic competitors. The country now has 4,015 such sites, all of different scope, with some focusing on certain cities, according to group-buying aggregator Tuan800.com, which offers an online portal to group-buying sites.
China is a hard nut to crack. Very different market to many other places.
