The J Shop Launches Its First Flagship Store in Chengdu

Posted on by Doris Liu

by Doris Liu

The J Shop, JD’s upgrade of its Fashion and Lifestyle business, officially launched the first flagship store on July 2 in Chengdu, one of the largest cities in southwest China, offering local customers around 400 brands, 2,000 products and several immersive experience areas featuring various themes.

The 1,000 square-meter brick-and-mortar retail store, located in the well-known Chunxi Road shopping district, brings together a full range of new fashion and lifestyle categories of cosmetics, apparel, lifestyle, sports, luxury fashion, watches and more.

With JD’s core capabilities in digital supply chain and omnichannel, the J Shop can quickly complete new product launches and product circulation based on dynamic changes in consumer trends and product adjustments by brand merchants, leading to a stronger ability to meet consumers’ needs in new fashion and lifestyle purchases, said Terry Wang, general manager of JD Beauty.

In order to enhance customer experiences at the mall as well as strengthening the links of both online and offline businesses, the J shop has set up photo-ready scenarios featuring products for social media posting. Also, customers can occasionally join livestreams in the mall to enjoy a more comprehensive shopping experience.

In addition, the store will soon kick off one-hour delivery services, which enables customers to receive their orders within an hour as long as their homes are within a radius of 5 kilometers from the store.

The J Shop deeply integrates JD’s capabilities in commodity and service in omni-channel retailing. The online channel of the J Shop became available on JD’s App from early May, followed by the opening of pilot offline stores in five cities of Xi’an, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Yinchuan and Beijing.

In the JD618 Grand Promotion that ended on June 20, the overall performance of the J Shop had improved dramatically, with 531 categories and 9,707 brands doubling sales while omni-channel business rose by 83 percent year-over-year (YOY).

The flagship store in Chengdu was completed with an in-depth cooperation between JD and Chinese cosmetics brand Perfect Diary. The previous pilot stores also saw JD’s cooperation with Italian luxury retailer COSCIA, Huaguan Shopping Mall and JD Mall to provide new sales channels and display scenarios for more brand merchants.

In the process of exploring the new model of digital omni-channel ecosystem, the J Shop will join hands with more partners to actively embrace offline business and create new growth value, said Carol Fung, Senior Vice President of JD.com and President of JD Fashion and Lifestyle business group. The J Shop will continue to improve and innovate through practice to better accommodate consumers’ needs in fashion and lifestyle consumption and experience, Fung added.

 

(liujun215@jd.com)

JD Report: Fast-growing Baby-care Market Trends Toward High-end and Segmented

Posted on by Doris Liu

by Doris Liu

The consumption of mother and baby care products is showing trends of high-end with refined segments, with sales volumes of premium diapers and baby snacks spiking by 150 percent year-over-year (YOY), according to a report issued on July 1 by JD Super, the online supermarket arm of JD.com.

The report, based on data of the JD618 Grand Promotion from 8pm (BJT) on May 31 to midnight of June 18, indicates that as the consumption concept and parenting philosophy keeps changing, high-end diaper sales rose by 150 percent YOY; meanwhile the sales volume of organic baby formula, organic snacks and baby skin care products doubled YOY.

During the JD618 campaign, baby ride-on cars, once not common in China but now more prevalent in childbearing families, increased more than four times in sales compared with last year, while overall sales of baby formula rose over 50 percent YOY.

From the perspective of age, products for children who are 3 years old or above are in stronger demand. The report says that almost 99.8 percent of the customers who bought mother and baby care products made purchases from this category. Among parents of children aged 0-3 years old, 77.9 percent chose milk powder for 3 years old or above and 76.6 percent bought children’s snacks.

JD Super also provides the bestselling lists of children’s products and brands to young parents. Aptamil Profutura 3 milk powder, Heinz’s baby rice cereal, walnut oil of Grandpa’s Farm, Little Freddie’s smoothie and Huggies Platinum diapers were listed as the most popular ones.

In addition, JD Super jointly released the “Current Situation of a Million Chinese Mothers – Survey Report on Feeding and Sleeping” with the Hong Kong-listed China Parenting Network, aiming to help families with professional parenting guidance by analyzing postings of 1.07 million mothers in China from social networks and online communities. JD Super will further simplify the shopping experience for parents to access a full range of products that are healthy and joyful for children.

 

(liujun215@jd.com)

JD Fresh Commits to Sustainable Marine Development

Posted on by Mengyang He

by Mengyang He

Upon invitation from the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), JD.com’s fresh food business JD Fresh recently attended the North Atlantic Seafood Forum, one of the world’s largest seafood business conferences. Yu Feng, head of overseas direct procurement for meat, poultry and seafood at JD Fresh shared JD Fresh’s best practices in sustainable development for the ocean.

The North Atlantic Seafood Forum

“To tackle the problem of overfishing and reduce bycatch, JD Fresh teams up with responsible suppliers and processors worldwide to jointly set targets,” Yu Feng said. “JD Fresh also encourages its suppliers to achieve sustainability standards and certifications.”

Partners of JD Fresh

With products from over 13,100 brands from 50 countries and regions, JD Fresh now has a user base of 92 million. “By leveraging search engine optimization (SEO) on the JD App, JD Fresh can give exposure to sustainable seafood products with the MSC blue ecolabel,” Yu Feng explained. “It will reinforce consumer awareness with the concept of sustainability and eco-friendliness.”

For example, JD Fresh launched more than 70 sustainable seafood products with the MSC blue ecolabel at an MSC sustainable seafood event last year.

MSC Certified Manila Clams

In addition, “by working with international organizations, JD Fresh will continue to provide sustainable aquatic products with access to the Chinese market, and further diversify its selection of products,” added Yu Feng.

 

(hemengyang5@jd.com)

French Brand Longchamp Opens Flagship Store on JD.com

Posted on by Doris Liu

by Doris Liu

Longchamp officially launched its flagship store on JD.com on July 2, offering a wide selection of fashion items including bags and accessories, further enriching JD Luxury’s brand pool.

Longchamp’s core business is women’s handbags. The iconic Le Pliage nylon bag with Russian leather flap and shoulder handles, Le Pliage Cuir leather bag and the latest autumn/winter collection are all available in JD’s online flagship store.

Notably, the cooperation between Longchamp and JD is in the vendor-managed inventory (VMI) model, a new initiative by JD Luxury that allows the brand to run the store with independent operation, meanwhile enjoying the warehousing and logistics services offered by JD Logistics.

Longchamp was established by Jean Cassegrain in Paris in 1948, and has gradually become a fashion and leather house in France.

To date, more than 300 luxury brands have opened official flagship stores on JD.com, covering such categories as bags, apparel, footwear, jewelry, watches and so on. JD Luxury will be devoted to expanding the matrix of big brands in the future and bringing consumers a more diversified and unique quality of life.

 

(liujun215@jd.com)

JD Health Acquires Pet Care Business

Posted on by Vivian Yang

by Vivian Yang

JD Health announced an acquisition of assets agreement with JD.com on June 29 ，pertaining to the purchase of pet health product categories including prescription drugs/ prescription diet, pet nutrition, pet deworming, pet milk powder, pet mouth, ear and eye cleaning, and more.

JD’s internet pet hospital, launched in October 2021, provides integrated online and offline pet care to customers with diversified services in the area of pet diet, disease prevention and veterinary medicine, healthcare advice, pet behavior training and more. JD.com, the controlling shareholder of JD Health, believes that the acquisition will help further integrate professional veterinary services, offering quality products to customers and creating a comprehensive ecosystem with one-stop solutions to meet users’ pet-healthcare needs.

To date, JD Health’s pet hospital has over 5,000 registered vets who provide 24/7 online consultations in seven departments, namely dogs, cats, general practitioners and more. The hospital also provides a full process service to meet pet’s healthcare needs in different scenarios, such as specialist centers, pre-diagnosis consultations, post-diagnosis health management, online follow-ups, hospital visits and more. This April, it became the first online pet hospital in China that passed the ISO 9001 quality management system standard.

JD’s pet products business has seen a rapid growth in recent years with the rise of the pet economy in China. The platform is currently partnering with over 3,000 merchants and offering nearly 20 million SKUs of products. During this year’s JD618 Grand Promotion, over 680,000 pet products from over 550 brands participated in the 30-day price guarantee program, offering better quality and more assured services to customers.

According to the White Paper on China’s Pet Health Industry 2021, besides pet food, pet health has become the second-largest market of rigid demand of the industry, with a size reaching RMB 60 billion yuan and accounting for 22 percent of the entire pet industry and the market share continues to grow.

 

(vivian.yang@jd.com)

JD Cloud’s Digital Human Technology Passes Assessment

Posted on by Doris Liu

by Doris Liu

The Yanxi (言犀) multimodal digital human platform developed by JD Cloud was announced on June 21 to be one of the first eight companies in China to pass the capability assessment of such systems by an official research institute.

The assessment is based on the “Digital Human System Basic Capability Requirements and Assessment Method”, a benchmark highly recognized by the industry, which is a standard formulated by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) with leading domestic Internet companies and key industry enterprises.

The three dimensions of basic capabilities in technology, engineering and security guarantee were evaluated comprehensively for the participating digital humans, involving indicators such as voice technology capability, interaction technology capability, standard resource allocation, content traceability and content risk control.

The multimodal digital human platform of Yanxi, JD Cloud’s intelligent customer service system, integrates multiple technologies such as acoustic speech recognition (ASR) and multi-turn dialogue to generate natural speech, human-like facial expression and body posture, as well as offering an immersive experience to users.

Yanxi’s digital human, positioned to improve industrial service experience, is developed from complex scenarios provided by JD’s businesses in retail, supply chain, cloud computing and more.

During this year’s 618 Grand Promotion, two virtual anchors, Jing Maimai from JD and Du Xiaoxiao from Chinese internet search engine company Baidu, joined hands to interpret the shopping bonanza’s consumption trends. During the broadcast, Jing Maimai presented in a lifelike way with smooth facial expressions and body motions to catch the audience’s attention.

Another example is Qian Yan (芊言), JD’s first intelligent digital human engaged in customer service in the retail sector. With technology integration of ASR, Natural Language Processing (NLP), speech synthesis (or Text-to-Speech, TTS), real-time rendering and so on, Qian Yan is able to handle various kinds of sale-related queries, enabling 24/7 continuous service.

Furthermore, the Yanxi digital human is also adopted in many other scenarios like finance and public administration to help an array of industries upgrade to digital intelligence.

The technology embedded in the Yanxi digital human platform has been widely recognized, winning the best presentation award at the international conference ACM Multimedia 2021, with about 130 papers being published at top international AI conferences such as NeurIPS, CVPR, AAAI and ACL. Moreover, JD previously won the IEEE Signal Processing Best Paper Award and Super AI Leader Award (SAIL Award) at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) for this technology.

As the emerging metaverse concept accelerates the process of aligning business and technology, JD’s Yanxi system will continue to explore more possibilities to apply digital human technology in wider practical scenarios, benefiting thousands of professions and industries.

 

(liujun215@jd.com)

JD Fresh Pushes Forward Direct Procurement Capabilities

Posted on by Mengyang He

by Mengyang He

JD.com’s fresh food business JD Fresh is committed to further elevating its direct procurement capabilities, based on its global network, quality control system, cold chain logistics, and a large customer base. This is the key message giving by Mr. Yu Zhao, GM of Meat, Poultry and Seafood Business of JD.com, at the Online Forum on Imported Food Materials And Consumption Trend held on June 30.

As of now, JD Fresh has already signed cooperation agreements with partners from nearly 20 countries and regions, and established long-term partnerships with industry leaders, including Tyson from the US, JBS from Brazil, Anchor and Silver Fern Farms from New Zealand, and Rangers Valley from Australia.

Full blood Wagyu M9+ beef from Rangers Valley

During a steak promotion earlier this year, the transaction volume of Australian steak products accounted for 53 percent of imported steak products sales on JD.com, according to Xiaozhou Zhou, general manager of JD Fresh. “As JD Fresh is committed to providing high-quality fresh food to our consumers, we will also explore the U.S. market to bring more premium meat products to the Chinese market,” he said.

In addition to meat products, China’s import volume of aquatic products totaled 5.39 billion US dollars in the first four months of 2022, marking a YOY growth of 37.05 percent.

MSC Certified Manila Clams

The size of China’s e-commerce market for fresh food has maintained steady growth in recent years. According to an industry report, the transaction volume of fresh food products generated through e-commerce in China reached RMB 465.81 billion yuan in 2021, recording a YOY increase of 27.92 percent.

 

(hemengyang5@jd.com)

The J Shop Boosts Sales of French Swimming Gear Brand

Posted on by Mengyang He

by Mengyang He

With an aim to further enhance its omni-channel retailing with a seamless customer experience, the J Shop, a recent upgrade of JD.com’s Fashion and Lifestyle business, initiated the arena Brand Day on June 28, intending to boost sales of “arena”, the French swimming gear brand ahead of the summer heat.

Founded in 1973, arena keeps innovation in its heart, offering a range of best-performing equipment and apparel, both professional and beginner-friendly, including swimwear, beachwear, two-piece swimming suits, swim goggles, sport sandals, water shoes, swimming caps, towels, training tools, and more.

During the arena Brand Day, consumers not only had access to arena’s excellent selection of products, such as high-quality and well-fitting swim goggles, swimming caps, and swimming suits, but also enjoyed several discounts introduced by the J Shop.

Through the integration of commodity and service capabilities in omni-channel retailing covering the categories of apparel, lifestyle, cosmetics, sports, luxury fashion, watches and more, the J Shop provides a one-stop solution with full-scenario and omni-channel approaches, increasing awareness and sales opportunities for brands and products across both online and offline channels.

 

(hemengyang5@jd.com)