Is Groupon coming to Indonesia?

A couple of weeks ago we reported on the acquisition of a few Asian Groupon clones as well as the company’s expansion plans to the Southeast Asian region. While it explicitly mentioned Singapore, Hong Kong, The Philippines, and Taiwan, it said nothing of the rest of the ASEAN countries.

All of the sudden, thanks to a tip from @farry, we discovered that a sushi ad on Facebook led to a Groupon-like page in Indonesian and presented visitors with a registration page for an Indonesian language newsletter.

Upon registration, subscribers receive a message saying that they will be the first to know when local daily deals begin and that Groupon will make its debut in Indonesia in a matter of weeks.

The site’s address is Groupon.biz and is inaccessible unless you had the full link. However, a whois lookup revealed that it was registered by Groupon Inc. from Chicago, while the links at the bottom of the site lead to Groupon’s UK pages. Adding a piece of the puzzle, Groupon.co.id apparently has been registered by CityDeal GmBH which was purchased by Groupon earlier this year.

While all signs seem to point to the site being legit, we can’t confirm it at the moment but surely we’ll find out soon enough. In the meantime, there are apparently 11 Indonesian daily deals site that has been launched in the past year including Valadoo and Lapar which were just launched very recently. The current leaders in the Indonesian deals space are Disdus and DealKeren.

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