ALIBABA’S NEWEST 11.11 GMV RECORD: US$38.4B

Eleven years in, and Alibaba Group, the e-commerce and media giant that created and grew 11.11 into the world’s largest shopping festival, is still delivering record results – and the innovations necessary to make them happen every November.

By the time 11.11 ended at midnight on Monday, Alibaba had generated RMB268.4 billion (US$38.4 billion) in gross merchandise volume in just 24 hours, a 26% jump over last year’s numbers. GMV in 2018 was RMB213.5 billion, or US$30.8 billion.

“Today we showed the world what the future of consumption looks like for brands and consumers,” said Fan Jiang, president of Taobao and Tmall. “We are meeting the growing demand of Chinese consumers and helping them upgrade their lifestyles, while introducing new users to our digital economy from across China and around the world.”

WATCH: Highlights from 2019’s 11.11 Global Shopping FestivalPlay

In addition to a new record GMV, the total number of delivery orders also reached a new high: 1.292 billion, up 59% from 812 million last year. There were 299 brands to reach RMB 100 million in GMV, including Apple, Nike, Estee Lauder and Giorgio Armani. The top 10 countries selling to China through Alibaba’s cross-border platforms were Japan, the U.S., Korea, Australia, Germany, France, the U.K., New Zealand, Italy and Canada.

Last year’s festival was all about the Alibaba ecosystem, and certainly that ecosystem continues to play a critical role in setting new GMV records and generating greater levels of consumer engagement, as Alibaba draws additional businesses into 11.11. 2019, however, was all about consumers: where they are in China, how to reach them and providing them with the best possible selection of products.

Capturing Lower-Tier Consumption

Increasingly, those consumers are in China’s lower-tier cities and rural areas. Alibaba had said that it expected most of the 100 million new users participating in this year’s 11.11 to come from these areas, where China’s biggest consumption growth is happening. In fiscal 2019, more than 70% of Alibaba’s 102 million newly acquired annual active consumers were based there.

“Lower-tier areas are the most important business strategy for us this year and a strategic direction for the company, because China’s less-developed markets have a lot of potential for growth when you consider their population, geography and shopping habits,” said Liu Bo, general manager of Taobao and Tmall Marketing, at a press conference on Monday afternoon.

Alibaba is leveraging its powerful consumer analytics and supply-chain capabilities to create new products for lower-tier consumers, Liu said, firstly by partnering with multinational brands, such as P&G and L’Oréal, and secondly by working with China’s vast network of manufacturers. The company provides both brands and manufacturers with the data they need to develop and market products tailored directly to these new online shoppers.

By delivering better-quality goods at affordable prices, consumers in lower-tier areas “have a lot of potential to make frequent purchases,” Liu said. And Alibaba wants to capture that consumption.

New Products to Meet New Demand

As essential as lower-tier areas are to Alibaba’s growth strategy, the company’s focus on new products is not bound by geography. In fact, this year’s 11.11 alone included 1 million new products on the company’s e-commerce platforms.

“We take new products as a major strategy for this year’s 11.11 has become the largest platform to launch new products,” Liu said. “Many international brands are leveraging the platform and the results have been excellent.”

For example, cosmetics brand MAC sold 60,000 units of a limited-edition, just-for-11.11 lipstick in five minutes of pre-sales. And brands are committed to developing even more new products for Alibaba’s platforms going forward. Ten global brands, including Olay and Shiseido, have committed to incubate more than 50% of their new products with Tmall this year, Jiang said.

The Must-Do of Livestreaming

Once just a single marketing tool among many for brands selling to China, livestreaming has since become a must for any company that wants the attention of Chinese consumers.

These consumers use livestreams, typically hosted by popular key opinion leaders, to find and learn about new products, making it an essential part of product discovery. That’s a stark contract to the West, where most livestreaming platforms are focused on gaming and entertainment.

Just how popular is the trend? Taobao is home to over 4,000 livestream hosts who generate 150,000 hours of content each day. For 11.11, more than 100,000 brands and merchants used livestreaming to market their products.

“It’s a brand-new experience. Livestreaming is becoming ubiquitous for merchants and a new [shopping] channel for consumers,” he said.

A Green 11.11

Jiang said that Alibaba’s logistics arm, Cainiao, had delivered 100 million packages before 8 a.m. on Monday, just eight hours into 11.11. But he said the company was committed to fulfilling those orders sustainably.

“Green is the most important keyword for this 11.11,” Jiang said. “We’ve shipped 1.292 billion packages, but through this we want even more to promote the concept of green consumption.”

To that end, Cainiao has set up more recycling stations – 40,000 of them – across China through its Cainiao Smart Logistics Network, while its express-courier partners is hosting an additional 35,000. Consumers will also be rewarded “green energy” points on Ant Forest for their recycling efforts.

Alibaba has established Nov. 20 as “National Cardboard Box Recycling Day” in China, as well, to further promote its push for a green shopping festival.

Alibaba Group To Improve The Experience Of Visitors To Universal Parks & Resorts

The two have formed a partnership to improve the user experience and to digitize the operations of the future Universal Beijing Resort, which will open in 2021

A cutting-edge theme park with the best technology that improves the user experience. This is the Alibaba and Universal Parks & Resorts project that intends to make the future Universal Beijing Resort, which will open in 2021, one of the most technological theme parks in the world.

The park will use facial recognition during park admission, app-based food ordering and more. To help is the ABOS project, which offers all the tools and services of Alibaba to companies so that they can better meet the pace and needs of the Chinese market.

Brian Roberts, president and CEO of US communications and entertainment company Comcast, owner of Universal Studios, said it was important to make sure that Universal makes it fun and easy for guests to enjoy their time with family and friends.

Visitors can use the local Koubei service app

“Our collaboration with Alibaba will help us do exactly that. Together, we can take the theme park experience to a new level, “Roberts said.

Visitors will be able to book tickets and hotels via Beijing’s Universal Fliggy flagship store and will also be able to watch the resort’s schedule and universal movies on Alibaba’s Youbu video streaming app.

Once at the resort, visitors have the opportunity to use Alipay’s facial recognition technology for anything. The use of Alipay mini-programs is also planned to improve the guest experience, such as travel planning or parking, as well as encouraging low-carbon lifestyle choices.

Alibaba’s cloud computing arm will support the technology infrastructure

The companies, which also collaborate with the Beijing Tourism Group, expect the collaboration to offer “the best experience for guests” and establish a new benchmark for the entertainment industry and theme parks globally.

Daniel Zhang, executive president and CEO of Alibaba Group, said: “This partnership will also bring to fruition a multidimensional, data-enabled operations-management solution for the industry and create a truly digitized theme park,” he said. “The future of commerce is driven by technology and big data, and digitization will be the source of brand-new growth opportunities for all businesses.”

The Alibaba Business Operating System (ABOS) program is a complete solution that helps brands use all the tools available in the corporate ecosystem, which includes marketing and branding, sales, product development, customer services, finance, logistics, supply chain and management channel and local services on request.

China, The New E-Commerce Trend Is Second-Hand Luxury

The trend is confirmed by Liu Bo, general manager of TusStar Venture

The Chinese luxury goods sector has received a steady stream of investments in recent years. TusStar is one of the capital investors that pays money in the sector, acting as the main investor for the high-end operator of used Ponhu-Luxury.

Building an integrated offline platform for second-hand luxuries is what the market will need in the future, TusStar Venture’s general manager Liu Bo told TechNode.

“In Japan, the penetration rate for used luxury goods has reached a 1: 1 ratio, which means that every time a new stock is bought, an old one will be resold. In China, only 3% of the stock is sold. Basically, nobody bought second-hand luxuries,” Liu said.

TusStar invests in high-tech, high-growth start-ups

Liu expects growth in the market for the sale of high-end used products in China. “One must think that one day, if an economic recession hit China, second-hand luxuries would retain their value as they did in Japan in the past. The cultures of East Asia are similar. We see promising growth points in the luxury sector second-hand in China “.

In his current role, Liu keeps an eye on TMT investment opportunities, energy savings and the environment, as well as the new economy and new services.

Moreover, TusStar invests in high-tech and high-growth start-ups, focusing mainly on TMT, mobile internet, cleantech, new material, health care, advanced production, education, intelligent hardware and consumption area. The company, in confirmation of this, has signed agreements with over 300 startups and so far has invested over 2 billion RMB.

But China, despite strong progress, seems to appreciate offline trade more

Some argue that digitization is the main driving force behind luxury sales in China, but Liu argues that the real “battle” develops offline. “Only some users might consider buying luxuries online. Most customers, in fact, care little about the discount, aiming more at brands and quality.”

According to a report published by Bain Analysis in 2019, although online luxury sales have surpassed the global market in 2018, online penetration in other luxury categories remains very low, with the exception of cosmetics.

“There are still many opportunities to build platforms in this area,” Liu said. “But it’s not the kind of e-commerce platform on the Internet that people talk about today, but an offline platform that unites all the key nodes of the entire commercial chain.

Focusing on its Users, Pinduoduo Has Become China’s New E-Commerce Giant

Pinduoduo is not the new kid on the block anymore. From lower-tier cities, it has made its way to the largest centers so much so that today, it is officially a viable competitor in China’s e-commerce arena

There is a Chinese app that embraces many of China’s contemporary trends and at the same time, faces the market’s modern challenges with extraordinary success. It is Pinduoduo, the e-commerce platform for group-buying deals, which is threatening Alibaba and JD.com’s duopoly in the Middle Kingdom.

Pinduoduo has been China’s third most popular shopping app since July 2017 but its daily active users have outnumbered JD.com’s for at least the past 12 months, turning it into China’s second-biggest e-commerce company by the number of users.

Its origins can be traced back to the US Silicon Valley where Pinduoduo’s founder, Colin Huang, started his career as a Google engineer. Mr. Huang, indeed, belongs to that group of Chinese entrepreneurs who, after a working experience abroad, have returned home to launch those hi-tech companies, which are making history today.

In particular, Colin Huang has managed to combine Chinese love for bargaining with the force of recommendation among friends while also targeting and unlocking the most neglected market, that of low-income households. The mission is clear: “The future of the Chinese digital economy is not to give a Shanghai resident the life of a Parisian. The future is to provide handkerchiefs and fresh fruits to those living in the province,” said Huang.

However, Pinduoduo’s history does not stop in the province. The company’s new challenge is to compete with the big ones on the same battlefield. Therefore, the next step is to develop an in-house logistics network and shipping information technology.

Currently, Pinduoduo is the second most used e-commerce platform and the fastest growing app in the history of the Chinese internet. Although it is mostly associated with lower-tier and lower-income buyers, last June, orders from Tier 1 and 2 cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou accounted for almost half of the platform’s total order value.

© 123rf. Although Taobao and JD.com are still the e-commerce market leaders, Pinduoduo is the app that benefits from the highest loyalty rate.

The startup, whose name is roughly translated as “buy more together”, was launched in Shanghai in 2015. It turned into a Unicorn after just 21 months, reaching $1.5 billion gross market value much faster than its older peers like JD.com and Alibaba’s Taobao.

The explosive growth of Pinduoduo is essentially due to two main factors. The first factor is the significant number of funds received, such as that of Tencent and IDG, which allocated an investment of $110 million in 2016. The second factor is the app’s ability to take hold in smaller cities.

Today, 483.2 million buyers use Pinduoduo for their online purchases and 135 million of them use the app daily. Numerous international brands such as Huawei and Apple have their flagship stores on the platform and the overlap in users between Taobao and Huang’s app has now reached the figure of 109 million people.

In June, Pinduoduo’s average monthly active users were 366 million, an increase of 88% from 195 million in the same quarter of 2018. It represents almost half of monthly active users of the total Alibaba ecosystem.

However, compared to its peers, Pinduoduo works differently, allowing users to participate in group buying deals. More than a simple digital shopping platform, it is a social commerce app, which uses a “team purchase” model and leverages social sharing on Chinese social networks.

The consumer can buy an item at full price or get a discount if he invites other people to join the purchase. This is a model that applies perfectly to the Chinese cashless society as about 583 million people used mobile payment last year. But above all, it makes the most of the sharing-with-friends potential, creating a viral environment.

Therefore, Colin Huang’s experience in the digital landscape together with a forward-looking approach made him build a completely different kind of marketplace, whose appeal is the satisfaction of taking advantage of a great deal instead of the lower price of products. This explains its virality and addiction primarily in lower-tier cities where salaries are still lower compared to first-tier ones.

© 123rf. Although the average order spending on Pinduoduo is lower than its peers, its users have nearly doubled their annual average spending to $208 in the last 12-month.

Nevertheless, although the competition with China’s e-commerce giants is strong in higher-tier cities, the app is moving away from the frame of a second-level platform for lower-income buyers to finally make its way in the Chinese high-end market. Here, China’s internet titans, Taobao and JD.com, dominate the market, keeping off potential rivals.

To reach its goals and be a viable competitor in the market, the Shanghai-based company thus plans to develop its own logistics network and, therefore, speed up its deliveries. According to Pinduoduo, with the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data technologies, new services will include route planning, parcel sorting, and the improvement of fresh produce deliveries.

Pinduoduo aims to answer the demand for fast and reliable delivery, especially since these two claims have overtaken the demand for competitive prices and a wide selection of products.

The plan is, therefore, to invest in advanced technologies like AI-powered routing in order to develop and then improve its logistics network.

The Vice President of Strategy at Pinduoduo, David Liu, said that the decision to implement the orders’ fulfillment has come after the company received customer complaints about the deliveries. He also explained that many merchants on the platform were using the competitor’s logistics network. Therefore, the app had no control over these shipments.

Since its launch, the app relied on Alibaba’s logistics arm Cainiao to track and handle about $70 billion of its annual shipments. Over these years, the rival Alibaba has, therefore, had access to Pinduoduo’s activity and its customers’ shopping habits. But this is all about to change, especially since the platform launched its own shipping information technology early this year.

Since the launch of Pinduoduo’s waybill system, an average of 40 million orders per day has already migrated to the new system, which are almost all orders generated on the platform.

David Liu revealed he is well aware that there are many established logistics services in China that Pinduoduo can leverage. He thus pointed out that the Shanghai app will not try to copy its larger rivals. Indeed, contrary to Cainiao and JD.com, Pinduoduo has no plans to operate warehouses or build its own delivery fleet.

Pinduoduo aims, instead, to help sellers participating in the supply chain. Being one of China’s largest online retail platforms for fresh products, farmers will thus leverage the platform’s big data analysis to syncronize the harvest and shipments and avoid food waste.

© 123rf. The next battlefield for e-commerce dominance will probably be the fresh food e-commerce, of which Pinduoduo is one of the largest players.

Once again, this young company focuses on its users to enhance the platform. It started as a group-buying app for lower-income households and then spread in higher-tier cities through its social nature and a check-out system that allows automatic payment.

Today, Pinduoduo targets the sellers. Although the company has already allocated an over $505-million-investment to help farmers selling their perishable agricultural goods on the platform, it now aims to help all the merchants improve their understanding and participation in the retail supply chain. And by entering the higher-tier market and the logistics sector, it has now officially entered into direct competition with China’s e-commerce giants.

But its strength is still the focus on both the customers and the sellers, which is increasingly developing around the fresh produce market. This is not about “provide handkerchiefs to those living in the province” anymore. Now, it is about building a direct line between farmers in rural areas and consumers in bigger cities.

The next battlefield for e-commerce dominance will probably be the fresh food e-commerce and Pinduoduo is already in the front line.

Tencent Aims at E-Commerce With Live Streaming on WeChat

The H5 page allows users to click on the products listed in the live streaming video

Tencent, the Chinese internet giant, has accelerated the integration of live streaming features into its WeChat mini-program platform, with the aim of enhancing e-commerce, according to a WeChat public account called Tencent Live Streaming Assistant.

Tencent began recruiting content management companies to test the live streaming feature last March and recently also began selecting competitors for e-commerce to test the live streaming feature.

The solution is an H5 page embedded in a vendor’s mini program on WeChat

Tencent, as shown by some movements in the app over the past few months, has taken another step forward to allow a gradual transition between watching a live streaming show and the online shopping experience.

The solution is an H5 page embedded in a vendor’s mini-program on WeChat. The page, which can be added upon request, allows users to click on the products listed in the live streaming video and direct them to the provider’s mini program for a transaction.

Live streaming has become a valid source of income

WeChat, with 1.1 billion active monthly users, has opened its mini-program platform to various small suppliers, allowing them to generate revenue in a new channel as well as other e-commerce sites such as Alibaba’s Taobao or JD.com. Precisely on Taobao, as proof of the market trend, the goods sold in live streaming in 2018 are worth a total of 100 billion yuan ($ 14.9 billion).

Short video sites like Douyin of ByteDance, which has an equivalent app called TikTok outside the Chinese mainland, and Kuaishou supported by Tencent, both used live streaming as a way to boost e-commerce.

Live streaming has become a valid source of income thanks to the boom in the Chinese live-streaming sector in recent years. According to a report published by the China Internet Network Information Center, at the end of 2018, China hosted 397 million users on multiple live stream websites and demonstrated tremendous purchasing power.

COACH TARGETS CHINA LUXURY MARKET THROUGH TMALL

From Alizila.com

Tapestry Inc. is bringing more of its brands – including Coach and Kate Spade – to Alibaba Group’s dedicated platform for luxury and premium goods, Tmall Luxury Pavilion.

Following the launch of its footwear label Stuart Weitzman last October, the New York-based luxury and lifestyle group said Thursday that Coach will officially open a flagship store on the Pavilion in December, followed by Kate Spade early next year.

Tapestry said the brands will adopt Tmall’s new “Flagship Store 2.0” format to “offer elevated, rich shopping experiences for customers,” such as more personalized content. They will be among the first to tap the newly upgraded layout.

“Tapestry is committed to the Chinese market,” Tapestry Chairman and CEO Jide Zeitlin said.

“Tmall is at the forefront of the fast-paced digital ecosystem in China, highlighted by their innovative approach and consumer-centric attitude,” Zeitlin said. “Given Tapestry’s focus on customer experience, creating innovative strategic partnerships with leaders such as Tmall helps us to connect our unique lifestyle brands with the important fashion- and digitally savvy Chinese consumer.”

The partnership would help Tapestry gain deeper insights into the China market, fueling its efforts to create seamless experiences for consumers both online and offline, the company said.

The announcement comes as Tapestry unveils its “2020 ChinaNext” digital innovation roadmap, which looks to drive engagement in the region and explore best practices it can also leverage globally. Noam Paransky, chief digital officer at Tapestry, said that partnering with Tmall, which allows them to connect with a broader audience, is a foundational part of this strategy.

“We are committed to offering a compelling experience for Chinese consumers wherever they choose to shop: our stores, direct brand and third-party websites or social platforms,” Paransky said.

Lazada is Leader of E-Commerce in South-East Asia

With over 50 million buyers, Lazada, a Singapore e-commerce company founded by the German Rocket Internet in 2011 and controlled by the Alibaba group since 2016, can now be defined as the e-commerce leader in Southeast Asia

South-East Asia has an e-commerce leader. In fact, Lazada, which operates in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, with over 50 million buyers can claim the role of e-commerce leader in Southeast Asia.

To clarify the numbers of success is Pierre Poignant, CEO of the Lazada Group, who said that the company manages the best e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia with over 50 million active buyers every year.

In June 2017 Alibaba Group increased its investment in Lazada by increasing its stake from 51% to 83%

Poignant said in an interview: “We are growing at triple digits for the past three quarters, which has really sort of defined our position as number one. We’re very happy about the progress of where we are.”

In particular, the comment of the managing director comes as a denial of some voices that saw the rival platform of Lazada, Shopee, managed by the Internet Sea company, as the most popular e-commerce platform in the region.

However, a clarification is needed. According to the online shopping aggregator iPrice, in fact, Shopee has the highest number of monthly active users, downloads and site visits in the region starting from the second quarter of this year. While, Lazada, guided in terms of monthly active users in four of the six major e-commerce markets in the region: Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines.

In March 2018, Alibaba invests another $ 2 billion in the company and replaces Lazada’s CEO with Peng Lei

The Southeast Asian market is increasingly sought after. In fact, the region can count on an increasingly rich population of over 600 million people. Furthermore, it is a relatively new region for online shopping, so it has great potential for growth.

To make Lazada grow, Alibaba replaced Max Bittner, then CEO of Lazada, with Lucy Peng Lei, a co-founder of Alibaba who previously served as executive chairman of Ant Financial Services.

Alibaba also made changes to the business model, launching LazMall which offered branded products and “premium services”. In addition, the platform has become more “asset-light” as Alibaba’s Taobao Marketplace and Tmall e-commerce platforms, serving primarily as a transaction platform for third-party sellers and buyers.

Alibaba acquires NetEase Kaola in deal worth $2 billion

From Catherine Shu@catherineshu 

Alibaba Group has acquired NetEase  Kaola for $2 billion, the two companies said today, and will integrate it into Tmall, creating the largest cross-border e-commerce platform in China. The announcement follows weeks of media reports about a potential deal, which was said to have stalled in the middle of August after the companies reportedly disagreed on transaction details.

Tmall Import and Export general manager Alvin Liu has been named as Kaola’s new CEO, replacing Zhang Lei, but Kaola will continue to operate independently under its own brand.

Tmall Global and Kaola are China’s largest and second-largest cross-border e-commerce platforms, respectively, holding 31.7% and 24.5% of the market, and their union means they will create a business that will far outstrip in size rivals like JD Worldwide, VIP International and Amazon China. (Earlier this year, NetEase was reportedly in talks to merge Kaola with Amazon China.)

Alibaba and Yunfeng, the investment firm launched by Alibaba founder Jack Ma, also agreed to invest $700 million into NetEase Cloud Music’s latest funding round. This will give Alibaba a minority stake in the streaming music service, with NetEase remaining its controlling shareholder.

In a press release, NetEase CEO William Ding said, “We are pleased to have found a strategic fit for Kaola within Alibaba’s extensive ecosystem, where Kaola will continue to provide Chinese consumers with high-quality import products and services. At the same time, the completion of this strategic transaction will allow NetEase to focus on its growth strategy, investing in markets that allow us to best leverage our competitive advantages.”

Daniel Zhang, Alibaba Group’s CEO, said “Alibaba is confident about the future of China’s import e-commerce market, which we believe remains in its infancy with great growth potential.”

E-commerce: Is Alibaba Acquiring Kaola?

It’s offcial: Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is in talks with NetEase to acquire its cross-border e-commerce platform Kaola

According to LatePost Alibaba is close to acquiring e-commerce rival NetEase Kaola. Once the two agree on final details, Kaola would merge with Alibaba’s cross-border arm Tmall. Although both parties involved in the deal declined to comment on the matter, NetEase has been trying to sell its cross-border branch or attract investment over the past few months. Launched in 2015, NetEase’s Kaola is one of the largest cross-border e-commerce platform in China.

Launched in 2015, NetEase’s Kaola is the largest cross-border import retail e-commerce platform in China with a 26% market share in 2018.

A merger between the China’s top two cross-border e-commerce platforms would create a dominant market giant. Experts agree that this deal could not only increase Alibaba’s competitiveness in terms of cross-border e-commerce, but also fend off its rival Pinduoduo, the new merging Chinese e-commerce platform that already intended acquire Kaola. The Shanghaibased e-commerce platform wanted to introduce a more convincing and quality e-commerce platform to enhance its reputation, a person familiar with this matter told LatePost.

According to report from research institute Analysys, Tmall International supported by Alibaba took up 32.3% of China’s cross-border e-commerce market in the first quarter this year, followed by NetEase Kaola with 24.8%. Easy to understand that after the acquisition completed, the total market share would reach 57.1%, securing them a leading position in the industry.

Vip.com, the new frontier of luxury e-commerce

Total orders for the full year 2018 have increased by 25% on an annual basis to 335.0 million

With China becoming an increasingly rich country, even luxury brands begin to make ample profits. In particular, Vip.com, a leading online discount retailer for brands in China, saw its total active customers increase by 6% compared to the previous year to 29.8 million. Last year, Vipshop generated $ 19.47 billion in GMV from 60.5 million active customers who placed 437.4 million orders overall. Total net revenue reached $ 12.3 billion.

These figures include the total orders for the entire year 2018, which increased by 25% on an annual basis to 335.0 million. The gross profit for the full year 2018, on the other hand, increased by 20% on an annual basis to RMB 18 billion from RMB 16.3 billion the previous year.

JD.com and Tencent co-invested $ 863 million in Vipshop last year to counter Alibaba

Vipshop, confirming its growth, announced that it has become a sponsor and exclusive Chinese e-commerce partner for London Fashion Week, one of the most influential fashion events in the world. Through this sponsorship and partnership, Vipshop aims to introduce more fashionable and authentic British brands for Chinese consumers through its powerful platform.

JD.com and Tencent co-invested $ 863 million in Vipshop last year to counter Alibaba. This investment gave Tencent a 7% stake and increased JD’s existing participation from 2.5% to 5.5%. Vipshop has launched around 400 million “mini-programs” on Wechat (the best messaging app in China). In addition, it has grouped VIP subscription packages with Tencent Video subscriptions.

What kind of products are sold on Vipshop and VIP International?

Vipshop still holds a rather small market share of 4.3%, as Tmall and JD dominate the national and general electronic commerce market. VIP International, on the other hand, accounts for just over 15% of the cross-border e-commerce market, just behind Kaola and Tmall Global.

As shown on the Vipshop website, the app works mainly with international and competitive brands in the beauty, cosmetics, clothing and jewelery sectors. Some important brands that work with Vipshop include Calvin Klein, Armani and Tommy Hilfiger, just to name a few.

Vipshop is the undisputed leader of “flash sales”

Vipshop also caters to consumers in lower-tier Chinese cities. While Alibaba, which has a market capitalization of $ 256 billion, dominates the Chinese e-commerce landscape with its market linking buyers and sellers, Vipshop has carved a small but profitable niche.

Vipshop, which has a market capitalization of $ 11.5 billion, is the undisputed leader of “flash sales”, where it sells branded goods, which mainly include clothing and cosmetics, at a considerable discount compared to what is sold in stores of brick and cement.