Dianping.com Sees Explosive Growth in Mobile Sector With More Than 10 Million Mobile Users Accessing the Site

SHANGHAI, Aug. 31, 2011 /PRNewswire-Asia/ -- Dianping.com, China's leading local review website for consumers, announced on August 30 that the number of unique active users accessing the site through their mobile devices has soared since the beginning of the year, having surpassed the 10 million mark during the month, nearly 20 times the number of mobile users a year earlier.

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"Improving consumer experience and providing consumers with more and better personalized services based on location is the goal Dianping.com will work for going ahead in the mobile sector," said CEO Zhang Tao. LBS (Location Based Service) will become one of the important applications of mobile Internet in the future, and an urban consumption information platform featuring LBS will be a new profit point of mobile Internet applications, Zhang added.

It has become a habit for China's urban white-collar workers to search information about relevant merchants on Dianping.com and get their coupons before consumption.

Dianping.com was founded in 2003 as a food review website. As one of the first third-party local review websites for consumers worldwide, it was established one year earlier than Yelp, a user review website in the US that was set up in 2004. After eight years of development, Dianping.com has evolved into an interactive platform that provides basic and special offer information about merchants in catering, shopping, entertainment and life service areas and allows consumers to publish reviews of these merchants. In addition, the website provides one-stop, precise marketing solutions for small- and medium-sized businesses, including e-coupons, keyword-based search, group buying and member card services. As of the second quarter 2011, Dianping.com had more than 42 million monthly active users, nearly 20 million reviews and almost 1.2 million registered merchants, encompassing more than 2,300 cities across China.

Dianping.com has successfully distributed LBS model on mobile Internet following the distribution on its website. Dianping.com mobile client currently can support a variety of mobile platforms including iPhone, Android, Nokia (Symbian) and BlackBerry. Through geographical location, netizens can look for urban merchant information including catering, shopping, entertainment and life services, download electronic coupons provided by merchants, check consumer ratings and reviews, purchase group buying coupons, receive merchant preferential treatment by checking in through mobile devices, and do many other things at all times and places.

Data shows that by the second quarter of 2011, the monthly view at Dianping.com had exceeded 500 million, and the monthly view through mobile client had risen to over 50% of that through the PC client. The mobile client view is expected to keep the same with the PC client view at Dianping.com next year.

The major handset makers at home and abroad now have all entered into cooperation with Dianping.com to preinstall Dianping.com mobile client in their newly available handsets. During the first half of 2011, Dianping.com client was ranked first in terms of share in the Android mobile built-in market, according to the data reported by Sino-Market Research Ltd., an authoritative market research agency in Chinese mobile communication industry.

Dianping.com CEO Zhang Tao said that the simple LBS functions such as check-in are not appealing enough to users. To make great strides forward, the American company Foursquare and similar Chinese companies should continue to aggressively expand urban life consumption information services, and build a platform with enough user adhesiveness that combines consumers and merchants. The process cannot be completed overnight; it's a severe test of operators' competency, experience, wisdom and patience.

SOURCE Dianping.com