Tag: china mobile commerce

JD.com and Tencent continue their push into the mobile sector

JD.com, one of the largest online retailers in China, is taking steps to combine its business with Tencent, developer of China’s most used messaging and gaming platforms. Earlier this year, Tencent purchased a 15% stake in JD.com in its ongoing effort to compete with Alibaba. The two companies have been working together to establish a stronger foothold in the mobile commerce market, with Tencent trying to convert its WeChat users into JD.com shoppers and vice versa.

New service will allow retailers to build their own mobile commerce websites and connect with consumers

JD.com has created a new service called PaiPai Weidian that will allow merchants to easily create mobile commerce websites. This will help smaller merchants to better engage the mobile audience, which is comprised of a rapidly growing consumer base that is eager to purchase products online from their smartphones and tablets. The new service will allow these merchants to promote their products on the WeChat platform, which boasts of more than 460 million active monthly users throughout Asia.

Mobile sites help bring in $16.2 million in mobile payments

The service could go a long way in helping JD.com establish a stronger presence in mobile commerce. The company sees a great deal of promise in this sector, as mobile consumers have shown that they are willing to spend large amounts of money online. During China’s Singles Day, which is the retail equivalent of Black Friday in the United States, some $16.2 million in mobile payments were processed through sites built by JD.com’s new service. The service had a test launch in September of this year, during which small retailers were able to test its capabilities.

Mobile commerce continues to explode in China

Mobile commerce is thriving in China. This is largely due to the growing number of people that are gaining access to smartphones and the mobile Internet. Growth is also being powered by companies that are offering mobile shopping and payment services to consumers and retailers alike. Retailers are beginning to take advantage of these services in order to connect with a new generation of consumers.

Alipay, the Alibaba smartphone payments arm, released a report to describe these digital shopping trends.

In China, the trend in mobile commerce has been a rapid growth this year, according to a report that was released by the smartphone based payments branch of Alibaba, Alipay.

The report detailed the way in which the less developed western region of China has driven mobile shopping.

The Alipay report showed that over half of the online transactions that occurred at Alibaba over the first ten months of the year occurred over mobile commerce. In fact, mobile phones were responsible for 54 percent of the online transactions using Alipay from January through the end of October. Comparatively, throughout all of last year, it had represented a much lower 22 percent of total online payments volume for purchases made online through the service.

The western, inland parts of China are easily the fastest growing areas being seen for mobile commerce.

The Tibet autonomous region, the Ningxia Hui autonomous region, and the province of Shaanxi were identified as the areas where mobile commerce was taking off most rapidly, at 62.2 percent, 58.3 percent, and 59.6 percent, respectively. Those areas are quite remote and lack a solid infrastructure of broadband internet service. Desktop and laptop computers are also still quite expensive there, making them less appealing than the far more affordable smartphone.

On the other hand, Guangdong province and the cities of Shanghai and Beijing, all well developed areas, saw growth of a much lower 27, 24, and 29 percent during that same period of time when it came to mobile shopping transactions.

According to expert in online shopping and the vice president of greater China for hybris AG (the enterprise software provider division of SAP AG software giant, based in Germany), Burghardt Groeber, who commented on this mobile commerce trend, “As mobile penetration in rural China far outpaces fixed-line Internet penetration and with continued upgrades to mobile network connectivity and the popularity of new devices, it is natural that consumers are rapidly taking up mobile shopping.” In China m-commerce is expected to reach $162 billion by the close of 2017.