Eric: We met with Letao, in addition to Baidu (BIDU) keyword, they started group buying.
Paul: Yes, we have established cooperation with Lashou, Meituan and other group buying websites.
Will U.S. retailers embrace group buying groups the way Chinese retailers have embraced tuangou?
Every major retailer employs coupons and discounts, and they will do the same with group buying.
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Both say also they'll use the online group buying companies to sell vouchers for their businesses again.
BBC: Mall v internet: Can ecommerce conquer the Middle East?
The sheer volume of companies leveraging group buying programs will commoditize any brand or footprint Groupon creates.
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Some insiders even believe the group buying model will never make money in China due to heavy competition.
In China, group buying is called tuangou, and was an early popular use of the Internet for organizing.
In contrasting these sites with Groupon, we can learn a thing or two from the group buying heavy-weight.
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Group-buying is not a natural monopoly, yet there is a limit to how many group-buying websites consumers will use.
Groupon.com captured 76% of visits among a category of 81 Group Buying sites for the week ending May 28th.
For instance, in the past two years, 1, 6 thousand group buying websites (most very similar to Groupon) were launched in Brazil.
Groupon has leveraged the popularity of group buying, an activity which has long been popular in China since at least 2004.
Publishers and media companies are in the catbird seat in the next wave of daily deals and group buying for several reasons.
Its group buying site Nuomi continues to bleed cash from the company.
The list of heavy-weight retailers launching group buying is growing and growing.
FORBES: Groupon Should Spare Investors The Pain And Sell Now
Some involved easier ways to deal with car maintenance or methods for buying cars for the best prices, including bidding or group buying.
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Martin Tobias, a Seattle-based venture capital investor and entrepreneur, is founder and CEO of Tippr, a provider of group buying solutions.
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Christopher Steiner is a former Forbes magazine staff writer and now cofounder at Aisle50, a Y Combinator company bringing group buying to the grocery world.
PHH, a mortgage and vehicle leasing company, terminated a merger agreement it had reached with General Electric in March that depended on Blackstone Group buying its mortgage business.
Our cooperation with group buying websites is still in an early stage, but we believe this will broaden our customer channels and thus generate more revenues for our website.
Likewise, for the time being, any increasing revenue seen by using group buying or local commerce websites is also excluded - even when the payment is actually made through the Internet.
BBC: Mall v internet: Can ecommerce conquer the Middle East?
While consumers are lost in a sea of unbelievable offers and companies pawn their value proposition in exchange for the slimmest of margins, the giants of group buying are ever growing.
The main local winner of all the group buying websites is Peixe Urbano, which employs 750 people and is the gold medal winner of the ranking Top 10 Startups in Brazil.
The company also owns and operates its own gaming platform, a group buying service called Nuomi, a video sharing site called 56.com and a professional networking site similar to LinkedIn called jingwei.com.
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In China, the authorities have been wary of uses of the Internet which allow people to organize, but organizing for commercial purposes, such as group buying, are considered harmless, and thus are not obstructed.
Like Fast Track, The Signature Lounge has also used "group-buying" websites to help boost sales.
BBC: Mall v internet: Can ecommerce conquer the Middle East?
Most expect the second-tier video sites and group-buying sites to go out of business.
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