Will Taobao Juhuasuan Overtake Yahoo Hong Kong?

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Alibaba's Juhuasuan announced its availability to Hong Kong consumers early this month but latest comScore stats revealed that the group-buying platform is already the top fifth site in the city with 58,000 unique visitors in March.

Hong Kong Top Deal/Coupon Sites

Source: comScore March 2013

Based on the table above, Yahoo Hong Kong Deals currently dominates the market with almost 18 percent reach, followed by Groupon and local start up Beecrazy.

Last week, Yahoo Hong Kong expanded its deals offering and partnered with 10 companies to unveil Yahoo Outlet, an online platform that sells discounted branded products to local shoppers.

Nonetheless, Taobao Marketplace and Tmall (B2C mall) seems to have quite a following in Hong Kong with Alibaba stats claiming there were more than 1.4 million registered users as of end of 2012.

Juhuasuan Overseas platform, which is currently open to Hong Kong and Taiwan markets, is said to feature 12 to 20 daily shopping deals across various product categories from apparels, home wares, consumer electronics to mother and baby products. It plans to offer localized lifestyle services and travel deals in the coming weeks.

"Both Taobao Marketplace sellers and Tmall.com merchants can enroll to offer their products for sale on the Juhuasuan Overseas platform, this will include domestic and International brands," says Florence Shih, international corporate affairs for Alibaba Group.

Taobao might be a Chinese company but it already has a stronger Facebook presence than Yahoo Hong Kong.

The new Juhuasuan Overseas site directs fans to join its Facebook page, which has more than 88,250 fans with talking about this metric around 5,000.

Meanwhile, Yahoo Deals has more than 69,550 Facebook fans with more than 1,350 talking about this.

Globally, Taobao Juhuasuan is the number two deal site with more than 37 million users visiting its shopping platform in March after Groupon.

Global Top Deal/Coupon Sites

Source: comScore March 2013 

Mobile shopping is another trend worth noting.

Here are some stats based on a Taobao report on mobile shopping for 2012:

• 300 million unique visitors used mobile shopping apps or visited via WAP browsers on Taobao Marketplace. Fifty-seven million (19 percent) of these visitors completed Taobao Marketplace transactions with their mobile devices.
• An average of 9.28 million mobile users searched for products daily on Taobao Marketplace, and each user searched 13 to 14 times per day on average.
• Some 3.55 million Taobao Marketplace vendors sold products via mobile devices in 2012, up 87 percent from 2011.

In another Taobao report on how China's mobile commerce measured up against the U.S.:

• China has one billion mobile subscribers compared to 321.7 million from the U.S.
• China's m-commerce is estimated to surpass China in 2014 at $27.1 billion compared to the U.S. at $23.7 billion.
• On Single's Day shopping festival (November 11, 2012), Alibaba's online payment platform Alipay facilitated almost nine million mobile payments with transaction volume worth $193 million in a single day.