Oh the drama of group buying in Hong Kong…
They are back up, all 139,000 fans.
Danny from ubuyibuy left a comment on my last post including the letter they received from Facebook.
He also said in another comment that the new ubuyibuy Facebook page I talked about was not created by them.
So, is someone trying to sabotage them by reporting their fan page, then creating a new page?
I can’t believe how many of these there are…
Does anyone know of more? How about Macau?
thanks for the list, very useful. I only knew beecrazy, ubuyibuy and valuup so far.
Got pitched from another group buying site
http://www.qpon818.com/
Hi John Erik,
thanks for the list. I arrive in Hong Kong Thuesday, flying in from Germany. Hope I can find a deal that fits for me ;)
I will be in Hong Kong some weeks to meet interesting people interested in Startups and Ruby on Rails, so if you are interested, iwould love to meetup for a drink or so. Just send me an email.
All the best for you,
Alex
Hi! Can you make a similar list for group sites in Manila, Philippines? Thanks!
That would be awesome! We’re working on stuff like this actually.
Are you in the Philippines? Why Are you interested??
Haha, yeah, I shuttle back and forth between Manila and HK. =)
ahh interesting. teaching ESL, or is this just some random gmail address. :)
Nope! Definitely not random. Took it during the early days of gmail. =)
a new group buying website: http://www.happyjetso.com/
Vespera its funny bc I find some of their deals are overpriced when I check on the website. its not ethical for consumers
Just when I thought I’d be missing all those crazy deals because there are too many of them to screen, someone has come up with a great idea of compiling them into a single list! Brilliant! Thanks for the effort, keep up the good work!
Groupcow.com is a very good Hong Kong group buying site that offers excellent services..
You left this one out… very popular site in Hong Kong
u miss this
it is new… it just started couple days ago.
50% OFF – 4 in 1 Facial Cleaner Device $75 … 0 sold. Some Chinese site trying to push their own products. Good luck with that.
It’s the first charity groupbuy site in HongKong! :)
Shop for Better is the first and only charity group buy site. We donate 33% or more of our net profit to charities. The current beneficiary is Chi Heng Foundation Hong Kong which is supporting the education for more than 10,000 orphans and children impacted by HIV/AIDS infected by blood selling at various villages in China.
I admire your dedication to charities, but 33%? I wish you luck staying in business in this market. Or, you simply pay out huge salaries to your bosses to ensure minimal profit. I’m afraid, ultimately this business model will not ensure you success in this space.
They are the first charity groupbuy site. Have a look at their info & deals.
Thanks! ^^
Hello Everyone.
Visit us at: http://www.catchthedeal.com.ph
To celebrate the opening launch of “Catch the Deal”. We are giving away an Apple Ipad 2 and a trip for two to Boracay with accommodation included.
All you have to do is “Like our Facebook Page” and “Register” on the website (www.catchthedeal.com.ph). Its that easy and its free….
Good Luck to Everyone.
Thank you from the Catch the Deal team…
Jigocity does a lot of Macau deals as well as Hong Kong deals, there is a link but I’m not sure what it is.
:)
Which ones have the best deals? Especially for hotels?
Dear John,
Yes we are another one, http://www.bringtou.com.hk, Hope you can put us in your list is well, have a nice day!
Best Regards
Andy
Now that ubuyibuy’s Facebook page (which had 130,000+ Likes) is down, they’ve created another one: http://www.facebook.com/pages/uBuyiBuy/129669207073439 … now at 19 fans.
I clicked one of the people who liked ubuyibuy’s new page. They live in Pennsylvania. Ok, possible. But they also have liked 1147 pages. Who likes that many pages? I’m pretty active on facebook, and pretty keen to like things I actually, um, like. I’m at 189 likes.
So, is there an underground liking-ring that I don’t know about?
Dear John,
This is not uBuyiBuy’s page. I also left a comment on the page to advise people not to like the page. This is definitely a competitor trying to sabotage us and impersonate us. We are working on the issue and hope to have it resolved shortly. Thank you
Danny Yeung
uBuyiBuy
Dear John,
We had brought the attention of our fake facebook page to facebook which they immediately shut down. Also, we had figured out the reason via response from facebook on why our facebook fans page was inadvertently disabled for the weekend. It was due to our profile name not matching with a real person, I wish facebook would of at least given us a warning about this. I do have to say Facebook was very quick to restore the account as they restored it once it was USA working hours. It was a very minor thing and glad it was resolved so quickly. In case anyone is interested, the email is from facebook.
Hi ,
We noticed that the profile held under this email address is being used to maintain a Facebook presence for a brand, business, group, or organization. Facebook profiles are intended to represent individuals only, and it is a violation of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities to use Profiles to represent any other entities.
If you do not have a personal Facebook account, please sign up for a new one at http://www.facebook.com and add yourself as an admin for all your Facebook Pages. This profile must be an authentic representation of yourself but not of your company.
Be assured that the people who connect with your Pages will not be able to see or access to your personal profile. Any actions that you take as a Page administrator on your Page will show the Page’s name as the actor and not your personal name.
After that, please deactivate or delete the current account that is in violation of our policy.
Complete these steps within the coming week. Please be aware that we enforce the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities appropriately when we encounter violations on the site or receive reports of violations. If accounts like this currently exist on the site, it is only because they have not yet been reported and removed.
If you have additional questions regarding Facebook products and features, feel free to visit our Help Center at the following address:
http://www.facebook.com/help.php
Thanks for your understanding,
Faye
User Operations
Danny, thanks very much for you comments.
Hi Danny,
I got some questions for you, would you please kindly send me an email?
John- sorry for the spam. I love reading your blog.
Thanks,
Judy
No worries, Judy. But Danny won’t be able to email you unless you post your email address.
Update: they didn’t go anywhere. And in fact they are already up to 140k (nov 10). ubuyibuy’s CEO explains more in the comments http://blog.think27.com/2010/11/where-did-ubuyibuys-130000-facebook-fans-go/comment-page-1/#comment-12145
Dear John,
This is Danny Yeung with uBuyiBuy, I had previously written on your blog. Yes, it is a fact that we do have over 130,000 fans on facebook. There was nothing sketchy we did on facebook. As group buying has taken off quite fast in Hong Kong and we have been offering great deals to Hong Kong citizens, it became viral very fast in which friends of friends just kept adding us. Certainly, we also promoted ourselves via facebook ads along with our two ambassadors of Van Ness Wu and MC Jin which promoted us early on as well.
We have been trying to get in contact with facebook so that our page is back up and the new page which you mentioned is NOT our company fan page. I suspect it is one of our competitors which hired a bunch of people to report our original page as spam, and have it know another one of our page just happened to pop up. We are also reporting the new page as not ours and hopefully that can be taken down very shortly. It is a shame when one company has to go to these depths to try to gain an advantage as in the long run, these tactics will never prove to be worthwhile. Thank you
Danny
Honestly I think you’re lying considering that even GROUPON itself, combining all the big cities on the first page when you search Groupon including NY and LA + Groupon’s main fanpage of 64,000 doesn’t even equal to as many likes as your company’s facebook page in just Hong Kong.
Haha, that’s was my thinking too and why I originally posted this stuff. Also I knew other people faking their numbers. I don’t know though. People in Hong Kong seem to Like things much more that other places (like America). … I think I read somewhere that more people per capita in HK use Facebook than anywhere else.
I’m glad we can all have a good conversation here on this topic and rather provide facts and figures on this topic so we can all make a decision. Yes, Groupon if you look at even their biggest cities does not reach the numbers we have. This is due to a variety of reasons, Groupon’s main delivery message to it’s database is not through facebook but rather through their EDM database. They put a very strong emphasis on email and analyzing email bahavior. Another reason is that you have to remember the USA is so spread out that it is hard to have a huge concentration of fans in one particular city. The advantage in Hong Kong is that it is so dense and everyone seems to know everyone else. Once a product or anything is popular, it really spreads like wildfire. Additionally, as John had mentioned, Facebook is extremely popular in Hong Kong with almost 3 million facebook users in which you have a total HK population of over 7 million. Due to this staggering fact of almost 43% of population on facebook, facebook in Hong Kong is a much more widely used medium even instead of email. Now this is just my personal take on facebook versus email for Hong Kong. I believe it is opposite in the USA in which I have spent a quite deal of time as well. Below is the link which shows the # of Hong Kong facebook users.
http://www.hongkongwebanalytics.com/2010/04/bubble-facebook-trend-in-hong-kong/
If you look at our current 140k fans on facebook, it is very small compared to actual facebook users in Hong Kong. We have studied and tried to best maximize our marketing and brand awareness on Facebook, it is not overnight but through a series of trial and error and discussing with some top experts on facebook. Facebook is also very strict on their TOS so we would never do anything not adhering to meeting the standards as why risk getting your page shut down when we know it is one of our main communication channels to our valued fans. I also do believe in the most fair practice in business for everyone, not just us. It is never right to bad mouth anyone, including any competitors just for the sake of the opportunity. As long as everyone is focused on the core business, good outcomes will occur.
Thank You
Danny
I don’t doubt the that Hong Kong has alot of facebook users in a dense area. However, the other fact is that it is also very true many companies in Hong Kong and China tend to cheat in business. I’ve talked to many people who work in even the biggest companies in Hong Kong about inside activity that isn’t fair practice like fixing their accounting numbers. I won’t name names of course, but this isn’t anything new in Hong Kong. China is known to copy others and Hong Kong is no exception. If you were the originator of this group buy idea, I would shut up, but it’s hard to believe what you’re saying from a person who took the complete layout of livingsocial.com, changed a few things and called it UBuyIBuy. Then you have babybamboo.net (another HK company) which looks exactly the same except it’s flipped. It’s hard to believe for instance like mycutepons.com to have 74,000 fans and barely have any advertising. So what makes your company the exception? Besides giving very general statistics of HK and saying Groupon doesn’t concentrates more on emails doesn’t say enough for such a staggering fanbase difference. UBuyIBuy is popular, but Groupon is the most popular worldwide they’ve been out for 2 years and you’ve been out…4 months? So what solid proof do you have that can show that you didn’t buy your fans?
sorry i meant concentrates more on emails*
Dear Jorne,
Thanks for your response. I’m not going to comment on the practices of other companies in this space as even if I did know any unfair practices, I would not comment on it. I’m focused on making our company grow and by providing the best deals to our fans. Social Media will not happen overnight, it takes lots of trials and errors and I do believe our staff has done everything to maximize our Social Media online. In fact, Paypal and our company had a e-Commerce seminar in which we talked about these exact same subjects and one of the key things is that we would not look for short term gains and would not risk our company future to engage in anything which is deemed not appropriate. Certainly, not all companies think this way but it is the way we and our staff believe in. One thing that you can look at is how our voucher sales have been increasing over the past few months, if these fans were not real fans, our numbers would not have increased so drastically. Additionally, as I previously mentioned, we do spend money on facebook advertising which I’m sure all of the group buying websites including Groupon and Livingsocial do, this is one of the most effective ways of gaining facebook fans. It just depends on the budgets of different companies on what each company can spend on a monthly basis. Thanks!
-Danny
all these sites miraculously pop up out of nowhere with 30,000 fans… ubuyibuy included…
I think they are real. People in HK are just crazy about Liking things. I heard Gobuya ran a contest giving away an a couple iPads to people who Liked their page, they posted about it in a forum and then someone from a radion channel read about it and gave them so airtime to call in and announce the offer. In two days they had 10,000 new fans. ubuyibuy has used http://wildfireapp.com/ for creating sweepstakes on facebook.
The Swiss Expat, 
Judy Ng, and 
Bono,
Gary 12:29 am on November 9, 2010 Permalink |
I’m Gary from Gobuya. Thanks for mentioning us!
John Erik 9:40 pm on November 9, 2010 Permalink |
hey dude!
Kenneth Kwok 2:31 am on November 9, 2010 Permalink |
John, You should try to get the list for China :)
John Erik 9:40 pm on November 9, 2010 Permalink |
it would be 7 pages long
Chief 4:24 am on November 9, 2010 Permalink |
U missed valuup and gigonzone
John Erik 9:41 pm on November 9, 2010 Permalink |
thanks!
Michael 12:05 pm on November 9, 2010 Permalink |
For Macau, Twangoo is open there. But I dunno any Macau based group buying website. There is also an aggregator which gather all the deals: dailydealshunter.com
M.