享樂團購網 (FunShare)

» see funshare.com.hk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The notice went up on 16 March 2016 and it was specific in a way these notices usually are not. Members could keep buying until Tuesday the 22nd. At 11:30 that morning the deals came off the site. Accumulated loyalty points stopped being worth anything at the same moment, but every voucher already sold stayed valid at the venue that had agreed to honor it, and the customer service desk kept answering until 15 April. FunShare closed on a published schedule with a month of tail on it.

The wave that made it had reached Turkey too. Grupanya and Grupfoni both opened in 2010, the Groupon franchise arrived under a local name in the same stretch, and for about two years the Turkish internet ran on the identical promise Hong Kong's did: seventy percent off a restaurant you had never been to, with two days to decide. I watched that happen from inside the Turkish version of it. The mechanics were the same everywhere, because there were not many mechanics.

Hong Kong's version of the story had three companies in it and FunShare was the one that stayed independent. Cheng Wai-cheung started it in 2010. Nobody from Chicago or Singapore ever bought it, which meant nobody ever wrote it a check big enough to lose, and also meant it had to survive on what it earned.

~ the case file ~

~ the class of 2010 ~

uBuyiBuy launched first, ran eight months, and was acquired by Groupon, which renamed it Groupon Hong Kong. BeeCrazy opened in July 2010 and was bought inside four years by Ensogo, a Singapore operation listed in Australia. FunShare was the third seat at a table built for maybe one company, in a city of seven million where the merchant pool for discount spa treatments is finite and gets exhausted faster than anybody's spreadsheet predicts.

The category died of irrelevance rather than of competition. By the middle of the decade a Hong Kong shopper looking for something cheap could go to an Instagram seller or to one of the big e-commerce platforms and get the same price without the expiry date and without the awkward conversation at the counter about whether the voucher covered the drink. Academics quoted in the local press at the time put it plainly: the space these sites lived in had closed up.

~ what BeeCrazy did instead ~

On 20 June 2016, three months after FunShare finished its wind-down, BeeCrazy simply stopped. Customers found they could not pay for anything. Staff were told not to come in. Ensogo's Australian-listed parent went into a trading halt the next day and announced it would no longer fund the group-buying subsidiaries. The Consumer Council took 163 complaints, suppliers went to the police together over unpaid invoices running into the tens of millions, and the courts ordered a winding-up in August.

Set the two endings next to each other and the FunShare notice starts reading like an achievement rather than an afterthought. An unglamorous independent that nobody acquired managed to close in an orderly way, honor what it had already sold and tell people the dates in advance. The one with the listed foreign parent locked the doors on a Monday.

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