Why did group buying never cross from Asia to the West?

I work on Shopify apps, and this is something I genuinely can't resolve.

Group buying — where shoppers team up so everyone unlocks a lower price — is enormous in Asian ecommerce. Pinduoduo built a top-tier company on the mechanic. In the West it's essentially absent. Groupon isn't a counterexample: that was a marketplace selling daily deals, not a shopper recruiting other shoppers into a shared purchase.

The usual explanations don't fully hold up for me:

"Western shoppers won't wait." But people wait for restocks, drops and preorders constantly.

"It cheapens the brand." Maybe, though referral discounts and friend-invite codes are everywhere and nobody argues that about those.

"The social graphs are different." This is the one I find most convincing. WeChat made group sharing frictionless in a way iMessage and WhatsApp never quite did.

But there's a fourth possibility I rarely see discussed: it's an operations problem, not a demand problem. The hard part of group buying isn't the discount, it's the failure case. When a group doesn't fill, someone has to unwind and refund every participant. Do that manually once and you won't run the promotion again. If the tooling to handle that automatically never existed in Western commerce platforms, then "shoppers here don't want it" was never really tested.

So: is the absence a real signal about Western consumer behaviour, or an artefact of nobody building the infrastructure?

Interested in arguments either way, especially from anyone who's worked in Asian ecommerce and can tell me I'm romanticising it.