Shopping Club Stampede: Brands4Friends Acquiring Its Way In To Travel

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Shopping Club Stampede: Brands4Friends Acquiring Its Way In To Travel

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We’ve seen a spate of investments in online shopping clubs over the last year. But most of the sites are geared to selling goods - as the market becomes crowded, can they branch out in to other verticals, like experiences?

That’s what Germany’s Brands4Friends, one of the leading buying clubs, is doing by acquiring two-year-old TripHunter (no, no that Trip Hunter), an online club that was already operating in the deluxe holiday space.

Berlin-based Brands4Friends says travel and its existing lifestyle categories are a perfect fit; it will hire about 100 positions in travel in the coming months.

Shopping clubs generally work by offering quick-fire discounts only to registered members, or offering discounts only when a threshold number of buyers is triggered. The space is hotting up and should prove attractive to established online retailers like eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) and Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN). Over the last year…

—Mycitydeal picked up €4 million from eVenture Capital Parnters, Rocket Internet and Holtzbrinck Ventures (which also coincidentally backs brands4friends)

—Russia’s KupiVIP.ru raised $20 million.

—Spain’s Privalia got €8 million.

—Brands4Friends received €10 million.

—BuyVIP raised €14.9 million.

—News International has invested in BrandAlley.

—France’s Vente Privee is by far the biggest of these all with revenues of around €650 million annually.

Brands4Friends is growing fast. Having got in to the shopping club game relatively early, it’s already on its own acquisition spree - it bought in to the UK last month by investing in SecretSales.

By Robert Andrews