Alibaba is selling its $1bn of preferred shares in Meituan-Dianping, the online booking and discounts platform, at a steep discount — a move that will put a brake on the Groupon-style company’s fundraising efforts, according to investors.

Meituan-Dianping, which is backed by Alibaba’s ecommerce rival Tencent, had been seeking to raise funds from existing and new investors on terms that gave it a $15bn valuation. But some investors are concerned that Alibaba’s discounted share sale is likely to value the group-buying site at nearer $13bn.

Alibaba was once among the largest shareholders in Meituan but was disappointed by the online group’s October merger with Tencent-backed Dianping, under which with the latter ploughed another $1bn into the merged entity.

Now, Alibaba is considering funnelling the proceeds from its stake sale into Ele.me, a food delivery app that partly competes with the Meituan-Dianping — in a further attempt to take on Tencent, Baudu and other rivals in China’s fast-growing internet economy,

A rapid proliferation of mobile internet buying services has started to give way to consolidation, as the model of offering big discounts has failed to win repeat business. Customers have tended to defect once bargains are withdrawn.

This has exacerbated the turf wars, which are spilling over into adjacent industries. A few vendors have been informally asked by some Meituan sales teams to ditch Alipay, Alibaba’s payments system, in favour of Tencent’s alternative offering.

Meituan itself is asking its vendors to sign exclusivity arrangements with Alipay rather than the new Koubei platform that Alibaba launched several months ago.

Further clashes are being set up by changes to the companies’ business models. For example, Meituan, which accounts for four out of every ten movie tickets sold in China, is now mulling a move into film distribution, where it would compete with Alibaba’s Ali Pictures. That has led Alibaba executives to tell investors that they consider Wang Xing, Meituan’s founder, “ungrateful”.

However, the domestic battles may at least yield bargains for new investors in the rival online services. These potentially include Tiger Global, the US investment fund, and Digital Sky Technologies, the venture capital firm run by early Facebook-backer Yuri Milner. They now have an opportunity to play the internet companies off against each other, to secure better terms.

But that prospect is less welcome to some existing investors who committed a small amount to Meituan-Dianping’s new fundraising in the expectation of selling on their holdings, and earning a fee in the process.