China’s Chowhounds: Dianping.com puts Chinese Dining at Your Fingertips

After studying for ten years in the USA, epicure Zhang Tao was overwhelmed by the abundant dinning options upon returning to his native Shanghai in 2003. To help himself and everyone else find the gems among the multitudinous possibilities, he created Dianping.com, the online forum for user ratings and reviews that ranks and critiques dining and entertainment venues across China. Company spokesperson Long Wei tells Agenda the story behind this online delight for gourmands.

What is the origin of Dianping?
Upon returning to China from abroad, our founder Zhang Tao remembered The Zagat Guide – the popular book of restaurant reviews generated by dinners through questionnaires. At that same time Web 2.0 sites like Wikipedia and Amazon.com (the product reviews) were emerging as powerful and important online presences with this new model – user generated and edited content that was really attractive to other users. Drawing on his past experience as an IT consultant, an idea came to Mr. Zhang’s mind – why not integrate the Web 2.0 approach with diners’ opinions of restaurants? Let people who have had personal experiences share their opinions with other people, in a forum that emphasizes accuracy and objectivity. This model will be as useful and as authoritative as magazines. That’s how Dianping was born.

Do you think Dianping’s reviews show us anything about Chinese diners? Are the restaurants that have most reviews and highest scores indeed usually the best?
Dianping’s mission is to provide a platform for consumers to make comments and share information on local restaurants, entertainment life service venues, to provide objective and accurate local consumption guidance. We are serving the general public consumers. For food, everyone has their own taste. Not all experts’ picks will be suitable for every diner. But on the platform of Dianping, the scattered voices of the public in the traditional world are harnessed together, shared objectively, making the aggregate experiences of the consumers the real authority. The cumulative experiences posted on the Internet express the majority’s opinion, thus becoming a useful dining guide for many consumers, utilizing the frank and earnest spirit of word of mouth. A restaurant with the most reviews and best ratings is very popular, and you can see that at a glance.

On Dianping’s platform, we don’t give out awards to “the best.” We encourage people to find out what suits them the most, which places are the best for individual people. Everyone has different tastes.

How are the restaurants ranked?
There are many rankings on our website and they are all continually fluctuating and updating. For instance, there is an integrated ranking, in which flavor, environment and service ratings all account for certain percentages of the final ranking, while the volume of reviews, and number of page views also affect on the final ranking. It’s a complex formula; all the elements involved are weighed against each other. We also have specific rankings for flavor, service and environment, and geared towards different kinds of people – e.g. students, white collar women, dates, etc.

As the third party platform site, do reviewers and businesses view you differently?
The purpose of Dianping is to remain an objective, independent third party platform. This has been consistent and accepted by both users and businesses throughout the years. For users, Dianping is an urban lifestyle consumption companion which helps people conveniently find and share information, write reviews and find discount info. Dianping is also a platform where businesses can communicate with their customers, gain customer feedback on their products and service, and also get in touch with customers’ evolving needs and consumption trends.

How do you attract clients and how do you keep them happy?
Many businesses like to work with us because we have 16 million users in big cities all over China. We have two hundred million page views every month. Dianpingers are predominantly urban white collars with strong consumption power – very influential people for establishing consumer confidence with other demographics. Our advertisements and products are totally separate from our reviews. No one can affect the objectivity and independence of users’ reviews. Some advertisements help customers find venues more easily and attract them with tempting activities. In the beginning, some advertisers thought that we could change reviews if we have a partnership but we have always insisted on the policy separating reviews and advertisements into clearly distinct channels.

Dining is the most successful section of Dianping. Why do most people review restaurants but not other types of venues?
Users’ reviews on Dianping cover 700,000 businesses including restaurants and entertainment venues in more than 300 cities in China. Among these reviews, the restaurant section is the oldest, most popular and most developed. It takes time for users to take to all the sections. We revised our homepage last year so that the restaurant page is no longer the mainpage but shows all sections including gyms, hotels and marriage. In the meantime, we have many member activities helping members to get to know each other better.

What is the relationship between your restaurant guide brochure and the website?
Our guide books are an extension of the website. We select the restaurants with the highest user ratings and popularity in every city and edit them for our guidebooks. We have restaurant guidebooks for more than 20 cities already, and guidebooks covering other types of venues as well out for Beijing and Shanghai.

How many cities does Dianping cover? Which city has the most users?
We cover more than 300 cities all over China, among which we have offices in six (Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Nanjing, Hangzhou). We will expand our offices to more cities. Shanghai is where we are headquartered and where the site was born. Users in Shanghai are comparably more active.

Are you able to analyze data to compare the food industry and consumption situations in every city?
We have a seasonal report of every city’s life service data that reflects each city’s own characteristics, new popular dish, average consumption. The latest was out in July. All data are summarized by users’ records.