China's biggest e-commerce services supplier Alibaba Group has expanded its market-leading daily deals group-buying business to Hong Kong and Taiwan.
The group's consumer-to-consumer online retail platform Taobao Marketplace and its group-buying specialist Juhuasuan have joined forces to launch Juhuasuan Overseas in HK and Taiwan, reports Don Gasper of AIM Group, publishers of the Classified Intelligence Report.
“Alibaba is by no means unknown in Hong Kong and Taiwan,” he says. “According to Alibaba Group, as of the end of 2012 there were 1.4 million registered Taobao users in Hong Kong and 600,000 in Taiwan. However, Juhuasuan did not reach customers in these territories because cross-border shipping is not supported.”
Alibaba Group international corporate affairs manager Florence Shih said cross-border shipping had not been available via the main Juhuasuan platform, “but through cooperation with logistics companies and merchants, we have made this possible.”
There had been a rising demand from users to participate in group shopping, leading to the launch of the new platform to complement existing services.
Gasper says group buying is not new to Hong Kong or Taiwan. However, Alibaba believes that, unlike in some other regions, there is still room to grow here, and Shih says the group-buying markets in Hong Kong and Taiwan are “big enough for all players to grow”.
The new platform will offer goods and services from selected Taobao sellers in the same daily deals format as the original Juhuasuan.