More Consumers Turn to Group Buying Sites for Chinese New Year Dinner Deals

Despite a tough year for many group buying sites in China – including lots of terrible publicity such as huge spikes in customer complaints – lots of consumers turned to such deals sites for their most important event of the year: Chinese New Year dinner.

The deals aggregator Tuan800 has revealed that in China’s 10 biggest cities, people snapped up 734 ‘Year of the Dragon’ dinner deals that sold 54,000 times, amounting to a total of 2.97 million RMB (US$470,000) worth of festive food. That represents growth of 940 percent since the last Chinese New Year back in 2011.

The holiday period as a whole saw even larger group buying stats, as people bought about 11,000 deals that sold 1.83 million times to a total value of 65.92 million RMB ($10.4 million). And remember, that’s not the nationwide figure; that covers only 10 large cities. For the grandest of totals, Tuan800 claims the entire deals sector in China saw 11 billion RMB ($1.74 billion) in sales in 2011.

Meituan.com and Lashou.com emerged as the leaders in this ferociously competitive market last year.

[Source: DoNews – article in Chinese]