China E-Commerce

Tmall Global to launch O2O retail stores

Interesting developments in the China cross-border e-commerce market: Tmall Global will launch 23 offline stores in Hangzhou as an initial test run. The stores will offer a mix of approx. 70% immediately available imported products as well as 30% of inventory through O2O cross-border shipped foreign products. The offline retail expansion will be in cooperation with Chinese department store operator Intime Retail Group - one of Alibaba's 2014 investments into brick & mortar retailing.

Web2Asia is excited to have one of our clients participate in the first roll-out and are looking forward to sharing further updates.

Source: ebrun

China E-Commerce

Alibaba to Start Telecom Services in China

Alibaba, China’s biggest e-commerce group, will be launching Chinese telecom services in June. The company received China’s first mobile virtual network operating licenses late last year. The exact details of the services will remain under wraps, but it has been reported that Alibaba has coordinated with China’s major telecom companies – China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom – to offer the ultimate services to millions of mobile users. Alibaba is actually among 11 companies approved by Chinese regulators to operate virtual network in China.

Source: Wall Street Journal

China E-Commerce

The Vatican to go digital

A Japanese IT firm will work in tandem with NTT Data in order to ‘digitize’ the Vatican Library which was founded in 1451, and contains more than 82000 manuscripts, some of which are 1800 years old. The first round of documents is set to take 4 years, and will only cover 3000 documents. At the speed at which things are being done now it will take more than 100 years to digitize everything. The first sets of documents are set to be online by the end of 2014 and the documents are expected take up 43 quadrillion bytes of storage space, and will be backed up in case files are accidentally deleted or corrupted. The initial 4-year phase is expected to cost around $25 million, but NTT Data are hoping that some of their expenses will be compensated by donations made through the library’s website.

Source: Mashable

China E-Commerce

M-Commerce in China flies

Mobile commerce, commonly known as M-Commerce is in full swing, and the statistics show it. Sales are set to exceed $51 billion by the end of this year, with an average of 50% growth over the next 2 years, exceeding $115 Billion by 2016. Year on year, M-Commerce has grown 165.4% since 2012, however the trend is expected to slow as the market saturates. 69% of Chinese consumers have purchased a product through their Smartphone’s, compared to only 46% in the US. In terms of online mobile platforms, Taobao accounts for 76.1% of the market, and interestingly Amazon only accounts for 0.6%. On the Taobao platform, more than 80% of the purchases are made through Smartphone’s, and purchases take on average 67 seconds quicker than PCs. All these stat’s go to show just how big the M-Commerce market is, and how quickly it’s developing. It will be interesting to watch the rest of the world to see if they will follow this trend.

Source: Resonance China

China E-Commerce

14% of Chinese Shop Online Everyday

According to a report created by PricewaterhouseCoopers, 14% of Chinese respondents shop online daily. Over 60% claim to shop online at least once a week, which is much higher than the global average of just 5% who shop online everyday and 21% every week. When it comes to mobile shopping, Chinese consumers ranked first, with 4% of respondents shopping via mobile everyday, 20% using it once a week, and 27% once a month. The global percentages are 2%, 7%, and 12%, respectively.

Source: China Internet Watch

China E-Commerce

Chinese online market revenue and mobile users increase exponentially

The Ministry of culture today released a report stating that the popularity of mobile Internet and more specifically online music increased remarkably. Market revenue of China’s online music business reached 7.41 Billion Yuan, an increase of 63.2% since 2012, while the online music market increased 140% to 4.36 Billion Yuan.

Of particular interest were the online user figures. The number of online users only increased by 4.6% to 450 million people, however the number of mobile music users grew 203% from 96 million to 291 million, highlighting the huge move towards mobile Internet usage. Although the report sounds promising there were still problems regarding network efficiency, which plagued the development of the music industry, but the Ministry of Culture has said they will focus on improving policies and regulations to progress the integrity and effectiveness of the system in order to promote continued prosperity and healthy development.

Source: Alibuybuy

China E-Commerce

China Overtakes the U.S. as the Biggest Online Spenders

The Chinese e-commerce industry is predicted to be worth $541 billion USD by the year 2015. In fact, 49% of the population made an online purchase last year, a figure that is meant to increase to 71% by 2017. The demographic of the Chinese online consumer is comprised primarily of younger people, with 60% of the consumers under the age of 30. They are also considered to be affluent – online spending is highest in China’s tier one cities, and those earning more than 5,000 RMB per month are likelier to make online purchases. The market is also dominated by mobile devices, with 464 million of its 591 million internet users opting to use their smartphones or mobile devices to surf the web.

Source: The Future of Commerce

China Digital

WeChat adds image recognition feature which can benefit online-retailers

 Since the release of the WeChat 5.0 version (launched in August last year) users could already learn more about a product like books or music albums by scanning the barcode on the cover or packaging and be redirected to the company website – and in some instances directly to the e-commerce sites for purchase.

This week WeChat released a new Image Recognition Feature. Now users no longer have to rely on barcodes but can simply scan a book cover and e.g. read reviews from Douban Book (a popular chinese platform for book ratings and reviews) or purchase the book directly from online retailer Dangdang.com. WeChat plans further enhancements to this service which is currently offered for free.

Source:Technode

Source:JingDaily

China E-Commerce

French Ready-To-Wear Brand Cache-Cache to accelerate it’s development in China E-Commerce.

As part of its development strategy in China, the French ready-to-wear brand Cache-Cache has decided to step on the accelerator for their investments in the Chinese e-commerce market. The brand has over 850 brick-and-mortar stores across the country and is already selling its products on Tmall. Cache-Cache is now considering to have its own platform of e-commerce to reclaim its online business in order to support its omni-channel strategy based on web-to-store. Online sales should allow the brand an annual growth of 30%.

Source: Les échos de la franchise

China E-Commerce

JD.com to Develop its O2O Model

Jingdong has signed with about 10,000 Chinese convenience stores to establish an innovative online-to-offline retail plan. These 10,000 convenience stores will cover 15 cities, and will include brands like Quik, Good Neighbors, Buddies, C&U, and Meijiya. The deals will let Chinese customers buy items online and have them delivered or be picked up at physical locations. It will also let them use online payment methods at the brick-and-mortar stores themselves.

Source: China Tech News