Yahoo Unveils Deals Service in Hong Kong

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Hong Kong- Yahoo Hong Kong has partnered with three local sites, BeeCrazy, Couppie, and FunShare and positioning itself as a group-buying services aggregator in the city.

In February, Yahoo partnered with local social buying sites in five Southeast Asia markets, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand to offer promotions to its users in travel, lifestyle and dining.

Mark Liu, e-commerce director at Yahoo Hong Kong, explained that unlike other markets, payments for Yahoo Deals in Hong Kong would be transacted within the Yahoo platform. He said online shoppers prefer to make their purchase immediately within the portal instead of being redirected back to the group buying sites.

Mark Liu, e-commerce director, Yahoo Hong Kong

To facilitate transactions, Yahoo Hong Kong has partnered with Asiapay for payment processing. Online transactions could be made via computers; Yahoo says it has yet to offer mobile transactions for the time being.

Alfred Tsoi, vice president and managing director at Yahoo Hong Kong, said group buying has seen rapid growth in the last two years and with the rise of social networking, Yahoo wants to provide bargain hunters in Hong Kong a platform to browse for the best discounts in the market.

Yahoo highlighted its massive reach to 98 percent of Hong Kong's Internet community or 4.3 million active users as a key differentiator in the competitive group buy sector. (Source: comScore, April)

Liu added the deals service is an extension of Yahoo Auctions as well as the ability to tap its existing customer base of more than two million unique users from the property.

Yahoo will offer 10 daily consumer deals from its partner sites and leverage on insights from what consumers search on its engine to cater to online shoppers' demands.

There are more than 40 group-buying websites in Hong Kong alone and Groupon leads the sector at 62 percent market share, according to Hitwise April data.

In North America, social network giant Facebook offers deals to businesses with Gap, H&M, and McDonald's among its list and Google recently join the daily deals market with a beta rollout of Google Offers.