The flurry of shopping club activity doesn’t look like abating. This time, Turkish private buying club Markafoni, which has over 870,000 members, has raised 11 million Turkish lira (£4.8 million, $7.2 million).
The investor – Trayas, which counts Spotify investor Klaus Hommels and StudiVZ backer Oliver Jung as partners – also last week invested $5 million in BrandsExclusive, the name under which Markafoni operates in Australia, TechCrunch reports. It’s planning to expand in Greece, Ukraine and South Korea.
Meanwhile, former Kelkoo price comparison alumni Philip Wilkinson and Glen Drury are launching their own private buying club, Keynoir, that’s got £1.3 million backing from PROFounders Capital, Index Ventures, plus investors Jan Riem, Paul Birch and Andrej Henkler.
The site is pitched as exclusive and so highly audience-targeted, offering discount prices only when a threshold of committed buyers is triggered. One problem – Keynoir is so exclusive, it won’t even let you see any of the offers before having to sign up.
Shopping clubs generally work by offering quick-fire discounts only to registered members, or offering discounts only when a set 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