Shopping Club Stampede: Brands4Friends Acquiring Its Way In To Travel

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…

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