China’s massive group buying and daily deals market has consolidated significantly in the past few years, from a highly fragmented industry to just four major players: Nuomi, Dianping, Juhuasuan and Meituan. It’s not coincidence that each of those companies is backed by a respective domestic web giant: Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba for the lattermost two, respectively.

Last month, Dianping and Meituan merged in a surprising deal for an undisclosed, but no doubt huge sum. The two will continue to operate independently but will coordinate their efforts on the back end. The two companies have their roots in separate sectors--Dianping in food reviews and Meituan in group buying, or tuangou--but eventually they expanded into each other’s turf. Both companies now offer local food delivery and daily deals.

For the uninitiated, group buying and daily deals companies use the same business model as Groupon, which actually tried to enter China a few years ago and was crushed by domestic competition. Group buying actually originated in China, where people met on internet forums, formed groups, and approached retailers to buy items in bulk at a cheaper price than if they were to buy individually. Companies like Meituan and Nuomi capitalized on this trend, expediting the process by hunting down available deals on behalf of customers and offering them on their websites.

Today, group buying can be used to purchase a wide variety of goods and services: food, property, movie tickets, massages, tours, hotels, KTV, and much more. Below we’ll give a quick tutorial for the English speaking community in China on how to start using Meituan. Most of these companies use fairly similar interfaces, so if you can use one competently, switching to another shouldn’t be a very difficult transition.

How To Use Meituan in China
First off, head to the city selection page on Meituan and choose your location. For demonstration purposes, we’ll select Beijing.

Next you’ll see a page with a bunch of promoted offers and a search bar. From here you can feel free to browse, filter, or type in a search query. For this tutorial, we’re going to get our hands on some discounted Baskin Robbins ice cream. The discount is pretty small on this item, but you can often find great deals at just a fraction of the original price. In some cases you can save hundreds of Yuan.

If you’ve ever shopped on JD or Taobao before, the item page should look familiar. The important bits here are the item and description at the top, the discounted price and the original price (original price is crossed out), quantity, and the big turquoise buy button. Below that you can find more details on the item and the conditions of use for the voucher you’ll receive.

Hit the big turquoise button to purchase now, or the button next to it to add it to your cart. We’re going with the former for this tutorial.

Next you’ll be brought to the first checkout page, which shows all the items you’ve added to your cart so far. You can access this page any time by hitting the little shopping cart icon at the top of all Meituan shopping pages and going to checkout from there. If this page contains everything you want--double check your quantities--click on the big turquoise button that in English says “Submit Order.”

At this point you’ll be prompted to log in or register for an account. We’re assuming you’re new at this, so hit the link just below the big turquoise button that says “免费注册”, or “free registration.”

Next you’ll have to enter some account details. Refer to the screenshot below for a translation. Uncheck the box just above the CAPTCHA if you don’t want to receive promo emails. Alternatively, you can also register using your phone number using the option at the top. Once all your info is filled in, hit the turquoise button to agree to terms of service and register an account.

Now you need to verify your email. My verification email ended up in the spam filter, so be sure to check there if you don’t receive it in the next couple minutes. Click the link in the email, which will bring you back to the checkout page. At the bottom there will two new input fields for your phone number and a verification code. Input your phone number, hit the button, and you should receive an SMS. Input the code from the SMS into the next field, then hit the submit order button again.

You’ll be directed to a payment page. If you have a Chinese bank card, you can use that here. If not, click on the last tab to use Alipay, Tenpay, or WeChat payment. Select one and hit continue. For this tutorial, we’ll use WeChat payment.

Use WeChat to scan the QR code displayed on the screen. If you’re not sure how to use WeChat payment, check out our tutorial here.

Once the transaction is complete, an SMS will be sent to your phone with a code that you show to the vendor. Bon appetit!

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Keywords: Tuangou Tutorial: How to Use Group-Buying and Daily Deals Sites in China