Launched in Silicon Valley by Chinese engineers five years ago, Dealmoon.com has grown into a popular site for bargain hunters, attracting more than 7 million monthly unique visitors in 2014, Dealmoon says. That’s comparable to the traffic of some major U.S. e-retailers. For example, average monthly unique visitors of Shutterfly Inc., No. 50 in the Internet Retailer Top 500, was about 6.9 million in 2013.
Dealmoon.com displays offers from U.S. retailers and consumer goods brands, such as Amazon.com Inc. and Coach Inc., in both English and Chinese. A consumer interested in a deal clicks through to the retailer or brand site to make a purchase. The site shows deals from 3,000 brands, which pay to advertise. The major categories are apparel, cosmetics and electronics.
More than half of visitors of Dealmoon.com are of Chinese descent, either Chinese-Americans or consumers living in China. In order to keep up with the bargains offered on Dealmoon.com, more than 3 million Chinese consumers have followed Dealmoon’s Weibo account. Weibo is a Twitter-like Chinese social network.
“Who doesn’t like discount information? A deal is a deal. We post more than 300 pieces of deal information per day on our site and on our social media accounts,” co-founder and chief marketing officer Jennifer Wang tells Internet retailer. On the Friday after Thanksgiving last month, or Black Friday, Chinese consumers viewed Dealmoon.com’s Weibo posts by 1.81 billion times, according to the company.
Besides offering deals, Dealmoon.com caters to Chinese shoppers by translating offers into Chinese and by providing information to site visitors about the participating U.S shopping sites and U.S. fashion trends. The company also maintains a blog called Fashionmoon that provides advice primarily to Chinese-Americans about fashion, makeup and skin care.
Besides promoting offers to Chinese consumers on Black Friday, a U.S. retail sales event, Dealmoon.com has been encouraging U.S. retailers and brands to promote specials on China’s big online shopping festival, Singles’ Day, which occurs every Nov. 11. On Nov. 11, 2013, about 20 retailers participated, but that grew to more than 100 this year, with 70% of them offering an exclusive coupon code for Dealmoon.com’s consumers, Dealmoon.com says. Those brands include Elizabeth Arden, Clinique and Bobbi Brown.
Dealmoon.com has more than 100 employees and recently opened a new office in Beijing, the company says.
More information about Chinese e-retailers, please click here for Internet Retailer China 500.