E-commerce in China
China is the world’s largest e-commerce market, with sales totaling $1.9 trillion in 2019. This figure is expected to grow to $4.8 trillion by 2025. And it’s not just big businesses that are benefitting from this growth. A recent report found that there are now more than 100 million small and medium-sized enterprises in China selling products online. If you’re thinking of starting an e-commerce business, China is a great place to do it. Not only is the market huge, but there is also a growing demand for foreign goods and services.
Tmall 天猫
China's e-commerce giant
China’s online shopping landscape is dominated by Tmall which accounts for roughly 64% of the market share in China.
XiaoHongShu 小红书
China's influencer hub
Xiaohongshu is a e-commerce driven social media platform headquartered in Shanghai. The app plays a pivotal role in brand discovery.
Young & wealthy female user base
- Xiaohongshu’s users are high-value, high-influence & high-activity people in China with big spending habits.
- High ROI channel for a growing number of consumer products such as technology, pet products, medical, home supplies and much more.
Tmall takes the route of boutique and high quality brand. The product quality is better, more credible and guaranteed.
Tmall is a new B2C (Business-to-Consumer) created by Jack Ma’s Taobao.com. It integrates thousands of brands and manufacturers to provide a one-stop solution for merchants and consumers. Tmall, as an open platform, is mainly for merchants to open flagship stores, which logistics, and warehousing is also provided by Tmall.
Jingdong serves people who pursue quality of life, has its own logistics and distribution system, and is concerned about the volume of transactions.
Jingdong is a self-operated model, with its own warehouses, most of the products are operated by Jingdong itself, and a small number of resources are opened to enterprises or other organizations to operate, Jingdong acts like a purchaser, as well as through strong logistics and distribution
The processing is relatively fast and reasonable later, but the variety of goods is slightly less; in addition, the same goods are slightly more expensive on Jingdong.com.
In addition to choosing an e-commerce channel, you may also want to promote your products, so Xiaohongshu is the social media you want to consider because it works with pictures and text to integrate into everyday life to attract customers.
The core competitiveness of Xiaohongshu is its own community gravity, and now many people have the habit of going to Xiaohongshu to search for something before they buy it. Xiaohongshu then launched its own self-run e-commerce platform, Welfare Club, in line with the trend.