Alibaba Group has opened its group-buying platform, Juhuasuan.com, to other industry players such as Groupon's Chinese joint venture firm Gaopeng and the country's leading group-buying website Meituan.

Juhuasuan, which was launched in March last year, is a platform on which users can browse through hundreds of group-buying deals. "The open platform will not only allow large group shopping websites such as Gaopeng and Meituan to offer their deals to, and tap into the buying power of, Juhuasuan's tens of millions of active users, but will also offer a platform for smaller deal providers to thrive and propel their reach into the consumer market," an Alibaba spokeswoman said in a statement on Thursday.