Chinese Consumers Overwhelm Retailers With Team Tactics
Mr. Zhang Haggles With Gang
Over Cost of Cabinets;
'Let's Talk About Price'
SUZHOU, China -- Seller beware: Some of China's 1.3 billion consumers are angling for group discounts.
Chinese shoppers have long been known as hard-nosed bargainers. Now, to the dismay of merchants, some have started shopping in teams to haggle for bigger markdowns.
The practice, called tuangou, or team purchase, begins in Internet chat rooms, where like-minded consumers hatch plans to buy appliances, furnishings, food, even cars, in bulk. Next, they show up en masse at stores like Suzhou Zhongyi Kitchen Co. to demand discounts.
On a recent Saturday, Zhang Qinyong, who owns the kitchen-cabinetry shop in this city near Shanghai, found himself cornered against his display cabinets by a team of more than a dozen shoppers.
"In Suzhou, no other products are better than ours, I bet," he told the crowd. He insisted that craftsmanship and German materials made his cabinets worth more.
"Forget quality. Let's talk about price," snapped one member of the buying group, 36-year-old Guo Yong, an electrical engineer. For the next hour, the shoppers turned aside Mr. Zhang's sales pitches with an unbending response: "Thirty-five percent off!"
Cai Kun with the Chevrolet Aveo he bought with a team-purchase discount in Shanghai.
Successful haggling is a point of pride in China, where even shoppers in department stores treat price tags as mere starting points. The practice is gaining popularity at a time of unprecedented change in China's retail sector.
Name-brand consumer goods now fill the nation's stores, giving Chinese consumers more choice than ever before. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, merchants are quietly bending to consumer demands.
Group purchasing is catching on in booming cities such as Shanghai. On the Web site 51tuangou.com -- in Chinese, the name sounds like "I want to team buy" -- consumer teams formulate plans to bargain for products ranging from Buick automobiles to Panasonic television sets and refrigerators. Dozens of other Chinese Web sites offer similar services. EBay Inc.'s Chinese site offers potential bulk sellers of goods an option to solicit team bids.
Zhang Guohua, the 34-year-old founder of 51tuangou.com, says he decided to launch his Web site after saving money two years ago on bathroom fixtures for his new apartment. He arranged those purchases, he says, by posting messages in general-interest Internet chat rooms, listing the brands he planned to buy. "Let's meet at the shop," he wrote. Many did. "I was really shocked by the power of ganging up," Mr. Zhang says.
Last year, he says, 380,000 consumers registered to use his Web site, free of charge, to organize group purchases. He says he gets his profit from ads and commissions from companies that offer discounts on the site.
In the U.S. and Europe, several Web-based businesses were set up in the late 1990s to arrange discounts on group purchases of consumer goods. But customers were turned off by the amount of time it took to complete transactions and other complications, and many of the Internet businesses failed.
China's version of team buying, however, leads to face-to-face negotiations. "That's a little scary, the mob mentality," says Tom Van Horn, former chief executive officer of Mercata Inc., whose now-defunct Web site attempted to negotiate bulk discounts for U.S. consumers.
In Shanghai, when Cai Kun decided in December to buy a new General Motors Corp. subcompact, the Chevrolet Aveo, he logged onto a Web site where others were chatting about staging a team purchase. On a Saturday morning, 28-year-old Mr. Cai and 17 others met for the first time at Anji Mingmen Car Services Co., a Chevy showroom in downtown Shanghai. As planned, they told the dealership's manager they would buy 18 Aveos in one pop -- but only if he would cut roughly 10% off sticker prices as high as $12,862.
Negotiations went on for six hours. Group members broke away occasionally for private meetings. The dealer tried unsuccessfully to negotiate separately with buyers who wanted the more expensive SX model and those who didn't. In the end, the group extracted a discount of nearly 9% on a fleet of 18 Aveo cars, along with gifts such as car-wash vouchers, says one buyer. Group members such as Mr. Cai who bought the fancier Aveo SX AT, for instance, agreed to pay $11,712, about 8.9% below the sticker price. Individual buyers can normally expect a discount of as much as 6%, Shanghai Chevrolet dealers say.
Yang Feng, sales manager of the dealership that provided the discount, declines to talk about individual deals. "Team purchases aren't common," he says. "But if more than 10 buyers come together, we can give them a cheaper price than we do individuals."
Some manufacturers don't like the practice. Some Chinese dealers of sinks and toilets made by Kohler Co., for example, have offered group discounts via Mr. Zhang's Web site. The company, based in Kohler, Wis., said in a statement: "Kohler does not support team purchases via the Internet as it purely supports competition based on price."
Chinese dealers of BMW AG's luxury cars typically provide 2% discounts for four-car orders, says Jiao Jian, fleet sales manager at Shanghai Bowdex Motor Co., a BMW importer. But such discounts are intended primarily for companies ordering more than one car, not strangers who meet on the Web. In an internal memo this year, the dealership urged employees not to capitulate to buying groups set up for the sole purpose of getting a discount, Mr. Jiao says.
Cosmetics group Estee Lauder Inc. and Cartier, the jeweler owned by France's Compagnie Financire Richemont SA, say they stop team-buying at the door with fixed-price policies.
The team buyers who targeted Mr. Zhang's cabinet shop, most of them new homeowners in their 20s and 30s, met on an Internet bulletin board, where earlier postings revealed that another team last year had squeezed a 35% discount from Mr. Zhang. For two weeks, they plotted strategy, and team members visited his shop individually to view the cabinets. "If we have more people, we can of course get more discount," said one of their Internet postings.
Nearby cabinet shops were nearly vacant when more than a dozen team members filed into Mr. Zhang's store one Saturday afternoon this month and began haggling for a 35% discount. More than an hour later, Mr. Zhang appeared to be wearing down. He directed an assistant to type up and distribute an offer: 30% off cabinets, 15% off hinges and free gifts to the team.
Three hours after the group arrived, some team members continued to press for a bigger discount. Ten had put down deposits on the package offer, including Mr. Guo and his wife, who agreed to pay $875 for new cabinets. They chose Mr. Zhang's shop, they say, only because they saw the team forming on the Internet. "Last year I bought wooden flooring this way," Mr. Guo says. "I don't have too much money."
团购风靡中国
有一个动态很值得销售商关注：中国13亿消费者中，很有一些人热衷于集体采购，以便享受折扣价。
中国消费者一向以喜欢砍价而著称。现在，让商家感到可怕的是，一些消费者开始搭帮结伙地去砍价，争取从他们那里获得更大的优惠。
这种做法被称为“团购”，即集体采购。这种有组织的采购行为最初发源于互联网聊天室，一些“志同道合”的消费者制订较大数量大购买家电、家具、食品乃至汽车的方案。接下来，他们又成群结队地出现在商家那里讨价还价。不久前，苏州中意橱柜(Suzhou Zhongyi Kitchen Co.)就接待了一群团购者。
上周六，十多位消费者组成的采购团来到中意橱柜，把老板张勤勇团团围在产品展示室里。
张勤勇对他们表示，“我敢打赌，在苏州，没有人的产品比我们更好。”他一再强调，制作工艺和德国材质使得他的产品物超所值。
团购成员之一、电器工程师郭勇打断了张勤勇的讲话，他说：“别谈质量，我们先谈谈价格。”接下来的一个小时里，这些团购成员对张勤勇的各种促销噱头不予理睬，只是不屈不挠地要求获得35%的折扣。
在中国，砍价得逞是很让人长脸的事，中国人甚至在逛百货商店的时候，也会将标签上的价格视为起价大“砍”一番。中国零售业正处于从未有过的变化时期，这种做法也越来越大行其道。
中国的商店里如今充斥著各种名牌商品，为中国消费者提供了无比丰富的选择。竞争的日趋激烈迫使商家放下身段去迎合消费者。
团购在上海等经济发达的城市已逐渐成为一种时尚。无忧团购网(51tuangou.com)就是一家服务于团购消费者的网站。消费者团队在这家网站上针对别克车、松下电视、电冰箱等各种商品组织砍价方案。数十家其他的中国网站也提供类似的服务。例如，EBay Inc.中国子公司就为潜在的大宗商品卖家提供了吸引团体竞价采购的选择。
无忧团购网34岁的创始人张国华表示，两年前他在装修自己新家的浴室时突发灵感，随即决定成立这家网站。他在互联网聊天室里面刊登了准备买一些东西的帖子，罗列了他希望购买的品牌，然后写到“让我们店里见”。结果应者云集。张国华说：“人多力量大”，当时那种阵势真是让他很震撼。
他说，去年共有38万消费者成为无忧团购网的免费注册用户、加入其团购大军。他说，他的收入来源主要靠广告以及在网站刊登打折信息的公司提供的佣金。
90年代末期，欧美也相继涌现出一批为团购消费者安排打折服务的网站。但完成交易时间过长以及其他一些复杂因素让消费者对这类网站很难提起兴趣，因此，许多网站最后都倒闭了。
但中国版的团购网站略有不同，它们为消费者提供了面对面协商的机会。现已破产的美国Mercata Inc.前首席执行长范霍恩(Tom Van Horn)表示，“人群聚集在一起产生的精神力量还是挺可怕的。”Mercata曾尝试为美国消费者提供批量折扣服务。
去年12月，上海的蔡鲲决定买一辆雪佛兰乐骋(Aveo)微型轿车。他登陆了一家网站，网上已有人酝酿进行一次团购。一个周六的早晨，28岁的蔡鲲与以前从未谋面的17位消费者相约来到雪佛兰经销商安吉名门汽车服务有限公司(Anji Mingmen Car Services Co.)那里。按照事先制订的计划，他们找到安吉名门的经理，称他们准备一次性购买18辆乐骋，但前提是他们要从12,862美元的标价中拿到近10%的折扣。
整个讨价还价的过程持续了6个小时。团购成员不时中断谈判私下碰头。安吉名门曾试图与准备购买价格高些的SX车型的成员和不准备购买该车型的成员分别谈价，但未能得逞。据一位团购成员透露，他们最终拿到了近9%的折扣，并获得了优惠洗车卡等赠品。蔡鲲等购买SX车型的消费者最终支付的价格为11,712美元，比标价低8.9%左右。安吉名门表示，零散的顾客一般最多只能拿到6%的折扣。
安吉名门的销售经理杨峰不愿谈论涉及到具体交易的情况，但他表示：团购并不普遍，不过，如果10个以上的消费者一起到我们这里，我们会为他们提供一个比零星的消费者更优惠的价格。
一些制造商对团购的做法表示反感。洁具制造商科勒(Kohler Co.)的一些中国经销商通过无忧团购网提供团购折扣。但科勒表示，公司不支持网上团购，因为它只会助长价格竞争。
宝马(BMW)经销商上海宝德汽车有限公司(Shanghai Bowdex Motor Co.)的团体销售经理矫健表示，宝马豪华车的中国经销商通常可以给4辆以上的订单给予2%的价格优惠。但这类折扣主要是针对采购多辆汽车的企业，而不是在互联网上结识的一群人。矫健说，他所在的公司今年在一份内部备忘录中要求员工不要向单纯为打折而组成的团体买家退让。
化妆品生产商雅诗兰黛(Estee Lauder Cos.)和珠宝商卡地亚(Cartier)表示，它们会拒绝团购的人，公司的制度是以固定价格销售产品。
前面提到的那些想购买中意橱柜的团购成员年龄在20岁-30岁之间，大多刚刚买了房子，他们是在一个互联网论坛上结识的。这个论坛里曾有一张帖子声称，去年的一个团购组从张勤勇那里得到了35%的折扣。他们花了两周的时间研究策略，团购成员们分头前往中意橱柜的商店，挑选自己中意的橱柜。有一张帖子说，“如果能有更多的人加入，我们肯定能拿到更大的折扣。”
那个周六的下午，张勤勇的商店因十几位团购成员的涌入而显得热闹异常，而其他的橱柜店几乎门可罗雀。1个多小时之后，张勤勇觉得精疲力竭。他让手下给出了最后的报价：橱柜，30%折扣；合页，15%折扣；外带赠送一些礼物。
在张勤勇的店铺里待了3个小时之后，一些团购成员仍然要争取更大的折扣。但有10名成员接受了张勤勇的报价，并预付了定金，其中包括郭勇和他太太，他们两人同意为新橱柜支付875美元。他们表示，之所以选择到张勤勇的店团购，完全是因为在网上看到有这个团。郭勇说：去年我也是用团购的方式买的木地板。参加团购是因为我没有那么多钱。
