Dianping adds service

China’s independent third-party consumer service, Dianping.com, has added restaurant reservations to its suite of services.

Dianping.com has an existing services which include merchant information, consumer service rating services, group-buying, e-coupons and e-membership cards.

“China’s online restaurant reservations market has a potential of over 100 billion yuan,” said Wang Xugang, head of booking business at Dianping.com, adding that he expects the market to pass that number in 2016.

He explained that he came to that estimate based on the average number of orders received by each merchant and the expectation that the number of merchants that will have signed up by that year will surpass 80,000.

Survey data shows that three out of four consumers will book their table at a restaurant online, or, put another way, 75 per cent of bookings will come from online restaurant reservations.

Currently, Dianping’s online restaurant reservations service is already available in nine cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Tianjin, Nanjing, Suzhou and Hangzhou.

It says it will expand to include an additional seven cities: Chongqing, Wuhan, Shenyang, Xi’an, Qingdao, Dalian and Wuxi, in November. Going forward, market penetration will move into second-tier and third-tier cities.

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