Big Surprise: College Group Buy Sites in China Also Dying

China's highly-competitive group buy market

China’s beleaguered group buy sites are for the most part doing so badly these days that the “Chinese group buy segment hurting” story is starting to feel a bit cliched. Last time, it was locally-focused group buy sites feeling the hurt. So what’s today’s unlucky subset of the group buy market? College group buy sites!

According to an IT Times report, these sites — which are targeted at and often also created by college students — have been having just as bad a time of it as everyone else. The once-nationwide Xiaowu group buy alliance, which unified college group buy sites, faces an uncertain future. And Siyuantuan, a once high-profile college group buy site that served Shanghai Jiaotong University is closing its doors for good. Other sites targeted at the college market have suffered the same fate.

Part of the reason is that group buy is such a difficult market to navigate it that it’s hard to succeed if you’re in it part-time, and as many of these companies were founded by students who also had classes to attend and tests to take, the group buy sites didn’t always have their full attention.

But founders — like Li Feng, who founded Siyuantuan and Xiaowu — are saying the problem isn’t market pressures or competition, it’s the vendors they work with:

Take Siyuantuan for example, when we started we had very positive talks with vendors around the college, but after several rounds of group deals, they wouldn’t participate anymore. Originally they got their customers from us, but once they’d attracted enough [repeat customers] they discarded us. We brought them benefits and in return they just used us as a springboard.

And Siyuantuan aren’t the only ones to run afoul of these kinds of vendors:

Other schools’ group buy sites have also had this problem. In the [Xiaowu college] group buy alliance, after Siyuantuan dropped out, group buy sites at Qinghua and other schools also died out. I handed control of the alliance over to a Zhejiang University student who runs a group buy site to handle, but people are saying he plans to give up group buy too and move in a different direction.

It’s an increasingly common story here, although it’s not clear where all these group buy founders are going to turn to take their next shot at fortune and fame. What is clear is that these days, group buy is not the way forward.

[IT Times via Sina Tech. And the image is of Arlington National Cemetery]