Kaixin, the Chinese social network, is opening up its fairly new group buy site, Kaixin Tuan Gou – take a look here – to partners, making it an open platform.
Today’s move seems to be about consolidation and partnership, to prevent some of the costly overlapping of efforts – such as signing-up merchants, and crafting new daily deals – that plague the fragmented Chinese group shopping market. There are estimated to be about 5,000 such sites in mainland China now, absolutely none of which are making any money.
Kaixin opened its group buy site last December, coming into a fiercely competitive market that’s dominated by two big names – Tencent’s QQTuan, and Alibaba’s Ju Hua Suan – along with a few indies that have grown to the challenge, such as Meituan and Lashou. I had a conversation with a Kaixin representative, but it seems that the company is being tight-lipped about partners, saying that it’s an open platform and anyone can partner-up – in a manner similar to its online gaming platform, where some titles are self-developed, and others come from well-known game devs.
Chinese site TechWeb, however, is jumping right in and saying that Kaixin has netted some major new buddies, such as Meituan, Dianping, OKBuy, and e-commerce site 360Buy.
In a market where the monthly swings in market share are alarming, it perhaps makes good sense to spare duplicated efforts, and give consumers a broader offering on one platform.
At the moment, Kaixin Tuan Gou is sticking to thirty core cities across China where it feels its white-collar SNS users are located. In contrast, China’s Groupon, Gaopeng, has extended to just over 100 cities – although it’s debatable if that’s always the right move to make.
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