From Baidu Images
Meituan Dianping, China’s largest group buying platform backed by Alibaba and Tencent, launched its home decoration department on Wednesday, further exploring the O2O home decoration market.
Meituan Dianping aims to make its home decoration business the leading O2O home decoration platform, improving their customers’ home decoration experience by providing comprehensive related services, reported Chinese news website Chinanews.com. Meituan Dianping is also attempting to use its existing platform influence to set up a series of industry standards, promoting an “Internet Plus” upgrade for the home decoration sector.
Meituan Dianping has 60 million registered users and 20 million buyers, revealed Huang Haihui, director of the newly formed home decoration department. In his eyes, the large user base and highly efficient review system will equip them with unique advantages in the home decoration industry.
“We will build a closed business loop to combine decision-making, transactions and services,” he said.
He added that the loop can meet users’ demands for home decoration online and offline. Before booking a decoration plan, customers can see the basic information about decoration companies and other customers’ comments on the services.
The home decoration department works with a down payment. During the whole process, customers observe every step of the work. They won’t pay the rest of the cost until they are satisfied with the services they receive. In addition, a third party supervisory company will be introduced into the deal to guarantee customers’ interests.
Based on their previous home decoration channels, Meituan Dianping’s home decoration department has covered 23 cities with 30 thousand agents on its platform. Page views reached 10 million per month.
In general, China has seen rapid growth in on-demand services in first-tier and some second-tier cities. These include ride hailing through Uber and Didi, house cleaning services hired through Ayibang or 1jiajie and food services through Baidu or the Alibaba-backed Koubei.
The mainstream of the O2O business is shifting to personalized services with high demands including wedding arrangements, beauty care and home decoration analysts say.
According to the China Construction Industry Association, China’s home decoration market scale reached RMB four trillion in the end of 2014, an annual growth rate of 10%.