Chinese mob shopping sites score big discounts
Marshall Kirkpatrick
27 comments »
The Economist ran a funny story last week on “team buying” web sites in China. The sites, 51tuangou.com and teambuy.com.cn were highlighted, co-ordinate large numbers of consumers interested in buying the same products. People agree on a place and time to meet, then enter the store in crowds of up to 500 people at once. The crowds tell the store owners that they all want to buy, say a TV or a stereo, but everyone wants 10 to 30% off the retail price.
TeamBuy.com.cn has been online for six months, reports 10,000 registered users and says it plans to expand into Beijing and Shanghai soon.
Some store owners aren’t happy about it, but others are glad to move such large quantities of inventory at once. One store described in the story even closed its doors to all other shoppers when a team-buying mob arrived and gave everyone a small bag of gifts on their way out. Smart Mobs says “power to the people!”
Once Walmart spreads, they won’t need to do this anymore.
Yeah, it’s a neat idea. Productive flash-mobbing, I guess.
There was a startup in the bay area called Mob Shop, around 1999 or so, which did this. I think they even sold some cars that way. It’s a model which definitely has potential but has to be managed just right.
For US, CheapStingyBargains.com has forums for similar concept, which they call ‘Co-op’. According to the forum admin, “The Co-Op forum is a meeting place for the community to leverage its power as a group to negotiate lower prices for goods and services.”
Back in ‘98 (or so) there was a company in the UK called LetsBuyIt.com that were trying to do this - they look like they’re doing something different now though.
As Mr. Cashmore alluded to flash mobs earlier, I had the same thought… this is only one modifying adjective away from that hoaxish deal; I can’t help but be suspicious after we got burned by the “flash mob” mania.
Re: Urban
Oh, Walmart is already in China and expanding further! I was near one in Shantou, a coastal city just north of Hong Kong and the store becomes a hub in the town. Walmart brought a lot of new goods to the city. To be sure, its not that walmart goods aren’t expensive, it’s just they are less expensive than everywhere else in the region especially for those “foreign goods.”
Hi, the correct url of the first website is http://www.51tuangou.com.
Cheers from Brazil.
The Chinese know much more about haggling than Americans. When I visted China some years ago, my hosts volunteered to accompany me whenever I wanted to buy something, pointing out that the physical presense of a group of freinds behind me would help get a better price. This seemed to work and I’ve used the idea ever since. It’s not so useful when shopping in the US, since most stores will not negotiate on price, but it’s useful in many other contexts where you want to get someone to agree to something.
Another form of social networking!! Isn’t it?.
I will surely call this Shopping 2.0
Ashish Sinha.
You can already do this. If you get 100 ppl that want to buy a laptop and call the manufacturer they will work a deal with you . This is defintly not new. The only thing new is actually organizing it no a regular basis online.
I think this flash mobbing/shopping 2.0 or whatever you want to call it can work though it needs to be managed properly. For the idea to truly work you require more than just a means for like minded shoppers to connect to each other. This is a crucial first step but a first step only. I think for this idea to work in North America the service provider also needs to provide the procurement function. It would be easy to get people to sign up and say they are interested in receiving product discounts. The real benefit, and the feature that will keep people coming back to a service, is doing the legwork for them. We feel that once a website establishes a customer base and proves to merchants that it can move large quantities of their products the merchants will also find it beneficial.
Anyway, that’s what we’re hoping for as we’re developing a website that does just that.
Cheers to TechCrunch on a great site!
OK!It is a good idea!
When we go to shopping,we always think about then cheaper price in China.So the “TeamBuying” is a better way !
any website like this in europe?