The turnover of China’s group-buying industry hiked 67.7% year-over-year to 35.88 billion yuan ($5.94 billion) in 2013, according to research report released by group-purchasing navigation website Tuan800.com.
As of December of 2013, the number of Chinese group-purchasing customers reached 71.23 million. The average price of each order increased to 59.4 yuan in 2013 from 46.9 yuan one year earlier.
Group-purchasing orders received from mobile terminals accounts for around 50% of the total, even hitting 70% for several leading group-buying sites. 73% of the mobile orders were used within one hour of the purchase, while the figure for PC orders is only 7%. The average per order consumption amount of iPhone users is 4.8 yuan higher than Android device users.
The most popular vertical fields are catering, film tickets, and hotels. The latter two fields, which respectively recorded 3.64 billion yuan and 3.21 billion yuan turnover this year, are becoming the hotspots for group-buying sites to expand their business scales.
Third- and fourth-tier cities has overtaken first- and second-tier cities to become the largest market of group-buying industry, representing a collectively 53.5 percent of the market in 2013, the report added.
The turnover of top-five group-buying services amounted to 33.81 billion yuan, accounting for 95.7% of the total market. Two leaders of the industry, Dianping and Alibaba-backed Meituan, represent 66.3% of the total market on aggregate and both of the two companies hit 1 billion yuan monthly turnover milestone. The monthly turnovers of Baidu-backed Nuomi, 55tuan, and Lashou, range between 300 million and 400 million yuan. Gaopeng, which is venture-backed by Tencent, is also a major player on the battlefield, according to the report.
Under the fierce competition, the number of domestic group-buying sites shrank to 213 from 281 in September last year, according to the report.