Sep 14, 2020| JD Retail

JDer Lab #2 with Alexander Kremer: Rolling-up His Sleeves on the Frontlines to Get the Job Done

Ling Cao

by Kelly Dawson

JD.com’s more than 280,000 employees range from warehouse workers to world-renowned doctors, with a wide range of backgrounds and areas of expertise. In the next installment of our JDer Lab series, we speak to another JDer about what it’s really like to work for China’s largest retailer.

As a director in JD’s FMCFG Omnichannel division, Alexander Kremer manages special projects for category growth, profitability improvements and operations, primarily in the beer category.

One might expect that he would spend most of his time behind a desk—but as Kremer told us, he first got a taste of the company’s hands-on work culture when he was sent to Suqian, a Chinese city in northern Jiangsu province, to man a customer call center, an experience that really drove home how much the company values customers and high-quality service, he said. Unlike other companies, JD does not outsource customer service.

In his two years with the company Kremer has also served on some of JD’s other frontlines, as part of the company’s tradition of inviting “white collar” workers to support logistics and “last mile” delivery services during the annual 618 Grand Promotion and Singles Day (November 11^th) periods. “That’s exciting, because it’s a really important part of our business,” Kremer said. “I think it’s something that could only happen here [at JD].”

That tradition is just one of the many ways in which the team comes together to pull off the 618 (June 18) mid-year shopping festival, which this year grossed 269.2 billion yuan for the company. Kremer’s team put in extensive preparation and thought into making the promotion enjoyable and exciting for consumers, working closely with sales partners and celebrating with them as the promotion proved successful, he said.

These days Kremer is most excited about tackling omnichannel integration in JD’s supermarket division. As the company has expanded into different formats, including offline, multi-channel and online, customers can now expect even faster delivery—even within half an hour of purchase in some cases. As always, the goal is to ensure the customer receives their order as quickly as possible at reasonable cost, he said.

(kellydawson@jd.com)

Mar 29, 2023| JD Retail

Annual Sales of Home Appliances on Shop Now Platform Increases 9-Fold Year-on-Year

Yuchuan Wang

by Mary Ma

JDDJ and Shop Now, the on-demand retail business jointly launched by JD.com, and Dada Group (Nasdaq: Dada), has reported great growth amidst significant expansion over the last 12 months in recent annual results.

In particular, the home alliance category has seen large growth. In March, JD.com published the “JD.com Helps the High-Quality Development of the Home Appliance Industry White Paper”. The white paper revealed that the home appliance industry is embracing the innovative on-demand retail, to achieve growth.

In 2022, sales in this category on JD Shop Now increased by more than 9 times year-over-year, making it of the most important channels for top home appliance brands.

As the key players in JD.com’s omni-channel service, JD Shop Now and JDDJ has connections to 11,000 brick-and-mortar home appliance stores, which accounts for about 60% of the top home appliance manufacturers and covered 300 cities in China.

As the on-demand retail business in JD.com’s ecosystem, JDDJ provides consumers with a service of “order online, deliver from nearby stores within one hour”. Based on analysis of home appliance trends, JDDJ identified the pain points of physical stores and provided integrated solutions in connecting off- and on-line inventories, user and service digitalization, to optimize cost, efficiency and experience.

As for large and heavy appliances, together with well-known merchants, JDDJ has established a “deliver and install” service, which can be fulfilled as quickly as the next day. The innovative service has greatly improved consumers’ experiences in home appliance consumption.

Since last year, home appliance’s on-demand retail business has been growing rapidly, and the online sales of offline stores are expected to exceed RMB 10 billion yuan in the next two years.

The key of on-demand retail is the digitalization of traditional stores. As the representative of open platform model, JDDJ does not touch the inventory, and brings high quality products and services to consumers together with all-category retailers and brand owners on-board.

By merging the borders of online and offline shopping, the omni-channel retailing model extensively integrates physical and digital channels, resources and capabilities to bring the ultimate experience to consumers while stimulating greater consumer potential.

At present, there is a surging need from retailers and brand owners for access to online traffic and efficient on-demand fulfillment solutions. More retailers are now starting to build their own O2O team and by leveraging JDDJ, they can expand their on-demand retail business rapidly.

(mayiqian3@jd.com)

Mar 28, 2023| JD Retail

JD Announces “One-Stop Shopping for Home Products and Appliances”

Yuchuan Wang

by Yuchuan Wang

On March 21, JD Retail announced “one-stop shopping for home products and appliances” and relevant plans for home appliances. It also announced that JD Home Appliance will stock RMB 100 billion worth of goods for the 20^th 618 Grand Promotion this year, with bulky order purchase target of 5 million units.

From 2012 to 2022, with the transition of sales channels, from offline to online to omni-channel, China’s home appliance industry developed new business models while maintaining healthy and rapid development. The industry continued to grow in 2022 and generated revenue of RMB 1.75 trillion, with a year-on-year growth rate of 19.9%. Additionally, Chinese home appliance brands also achieved great success in international markets, while creating new jobs and making innovations in brand and technology.

Despite this growth, the industry continues to face challenges, as well, including rising real estate costs, global supply chain issues, and product and innovation homogenization.

To continue to build momentum and address these challenges, JD Home Appliance is unveiling a new approach of “persistence and change”. It includes being persistent in putting customers first and upgrading services, retail-driven, healthy and sustainable development, upgrading product offerings, making structural breakthroughs, developing omni-channel and establishing an industry ecosystem, enhancing cost and efficiency, and achieving win-win outcomes with partners.

The approach also includes changes in promoting a product stratification initiative for both structural and low-priced products, accelerating sales and growth of new and trending products, improving pricing capabilities to ensure fair prices, upgrading the trade-in service to fully stimulate user demand, accelerating omni-channel layout, and expanding the marketplace business (POP platform) to create an open platform for businesses to achieve sustained profits and steady growth.

JD Home Appliance is working with partners to enhance customer experience and boost sales of new products through innovative actions such as the launch of JD Mall and trade-in services. It is also expanding to new areas, such as the lower-tier market, which offers significant potential for growth of home appliance brands. According to Yi Xiao, president of washing machine business unit of Midea, China has approximately 490 million families and daily consumption of home appliance mainly comes from 200 million of them. That means there is an untapped market of nearly 300 million to be served.

(yuchuan.wang@jd.com)