by Hui Zhang

JD Worldwide, the import platform of JD.com, is expecting to explore in-depth cooperation in both online and offline, cross-border and duty-free business with Lagardère Travel Retail in the near future, after Lagardère Travel Retail announced obtaining investment from JD.com on Sept. 1.

According to the announcement, Lagardère Travel Retail and JD.com will cooperate in areas including omni-channel retail, smart supply chain, logistics and data analysis.

Through the cooperation, JD Worldwide will take advantage of Lagardère’s great network of international brand partners to seek more cooperation while assisting these brands to expand Chinese markets relying on its platform advantages. Lagardère’s years of physical retail experiences will also benefit JD Worldwide in its offline duty-free business.

Established in April 2015, JD Worldwide has become a trusted platform for  customers to shop for imported products online and offline, offering over 10 million SKUs (stock keeping units) of imported products from 20,000 brands and 100 countries, covering categories including maternal and baby, fashion, beauty, electronics, food, health supplements and more.

Since November 2019, JD Worldwide upgraded its business from a cross-border platform to a comprehensive imported products platform, including cross-border business and general trade business, which now includes duty-free business.

Last year, JD Worldwide made a big move to enter the duty-free business by opening a store through partnering with Hainan Tourism and Investment Development Co. The decision echoes preferential policies initiated as part of China’s plan to build a high-quality free trade port in the province. According to the plan, Hainan will establish a basic free- trade-port policy system with a key focus on helping free trade and investment by 2025.

“Our strategic cooperation with Lagardère Travel Retail can enhance our respective strengths and bring mutual benefits, allowing us to explore more opportunities in the travel retail sector,” said Simon Han, Vice President of JD.com supervising JD Worldwide. “At the same time, we will join hands to develop a comprehensive cooperation that will create richer shopping choices and a better experience for customers.”

(zhanghui36@jd.com)

by Vivian Yang

JD Books and Kuaishou, China’s leading video-sharing app, will join hands to create an initiative to support livestream influencers on Kuaishou to recommend books . The two parties announced it on August 28^th in Beijing.

The initiative, called “Knowledge from many stars” in Chinese, brings together JD’s strength in book supply chain and Kuaishou’s livestreaming scenarios and traffic to enrich reading culture in China as knowledge sharing formats have been gaining steam in the market.

“Many livestream hosts and MCNs are interested in the book category but lack the source of products and management skill in book supply chain,” noted a manager in charge of Kuaishou’s e-commerce business. The collaboration with JD Books will support these people by providing access to a comprehensive pool of authentic book products as well as JD’s premier logistics, after-sales services and more, offering a better shopping experience to their fans.

According to a representative of JD Books, under this initiative JD will work on bridging Kuaishou hosts and book authors for various interactions, such as inviting authors into Kuaishou hosts’ livestreaming sessions and offline events to directly interact with fans, and involving livestream hosts into authors’ new book release activities and more.

Furthermore, Kuaishou’s short video matrix on its platform and JD Books’ publicity resources via multi-media channels will both help boost the visibility and content varieties for livestream influencers’ performance on book recommendations.

To encourage outstanding influencers to continuously produce high-quality content, JD Books will offer a number of incentives such as naming them as JD’s “book recommendation officers,” providing new book launching resources on specific book products, online traffic support and more.

The initiative will be officially launched on Sept 1^st and will last until the end of 2022, and aims to draw together a vast range of book industry players, livestream influencers and content platforms to explore collaboration and value co-creation among relevant industries.

(vivian.yang@jd.com)

by Mengyang He

JD.com has released the “2021 Living Room Consumption Trend Report” on August 31, showing that across China, living rooms have turned into a new type of space where various intelligent and personalized products are being displayed and used.

A Space for Recreation

As the report indicates, male Gen Zers who are still relatively new to the workforce prefer a recreational element in their living room. The sales of bean bags take the lead with a stunning increase of 202% YOY. As opposed to young male consumers, consumers born after 1975 (aka “post-75s) pay more attention to building cinematic vibes in the living room, for which the sales of home theater couches grew by 154%, and home theaters by 43%.

A Space for Kids and Pets

The report also reveals that post-85s mothers are keen to create an amusement area in the living room. The sales of family amusement facilities for children increased by nearly 120% YOY, with children’s slides boosted by as much as 173%. Apart from meeting the needs for children, the generation of post-85s are also the main consumers for pet-friendly living rooms, in which the sales of pet couches grew by 86%.

A Space for Storage and Sports

When it comes to the choice for living room furniture, more and more consumers are paying attention to the function of storage. The sales of couches and stools with this function increased by nearly 40%, and sales of boxes raised by 249%. Additionally, young and middle-aged white-collar males are more likely to use spare time for living room workouts, driving sales for many fitness gears suitable for the living room. The sales of cordless skipping ropes soared by 1045%, and smart hula-hoops rocketed up by 822%.

“The boom of the ‘living room economy’ stems from the diverse functions and values created by a wide range of high-tech products,” explained a representative of the JD Research Institute for Consumption and Industrial Development. “A personalized and convenient experience could not only cater to the needs requested by customers, but also provide a pathway to sustainable development of decoration, home appliances, and the home furnishing industry at large.”

(hemengyang5@jd.com)

by Hui Zhang

The search volume of the key words “Universal Studios” increased by 620% on JD.com compared with the previous month, after Universal Studios announced on August 31 that it will officially open its Beijing theme park to the general public on Sep. 20 after a delay of several months due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The number of searches for hotels around the resort increased by 460% month-on-month, and the number of searches for air tickets to Beijing increased by 410% month-on-month.

The Beijing resort, which will begin a trial operation on Sept. 1, is the world’s fifth, Asia’s third, and China’s first Universal Studios-branded theme park. The park is also a joint venture between Comcast Corp’s Universal Parks & Resorts and state-owned Beijing Shouhuan Cultural Tourism Investment.

The theme park has seven lands including Kung Fu Panda Land of Awesomeness, Transformers: Metrobase, Minion Land, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, Jurassic World Isla Nublar, Hollywood and WaterWorld. It will contain rides, shows and attractions, hotels, retail, dining and entertainment.

(zhanghui36@jd.com)

by Ling Cao and Yang Feng

“As customers are continually shifting from a centralized platform to multi-end shopping places with increasing expectations of fulfillment capability, JD has implemented an omni-channel fulfillment model and redefined three core elements: Products, places and people,” shared Curtis Liu, president of intelligent supply chain at JD.com, during the Enterprise Supply Chain Leaders Peer Forum Asia-Pacific held by Gartner on August 24.

According to Liu, JD is building a closed loop experience including different online platforms and offline stores to provide a more convenient and better shopping experience for customers, such as online shopping, group buying, auctions, offline convenience stores and pharmacies. Customers can choose the preferred way to shop for products within JD’s ecosystem. “It is like using one membership card for every store in multiple shopping malls,” explained Liu.

Curtis Liu

As for products, JD is trying different practices to create more value to meet customers’ demand—Consumer-to-Manufacturer (C2M) is one example. By providing customer insights to manufacturers and fully supporting the whole process, from product design to sales operation, JD is able to launch more new products quickly and efficiently for both upstream and downstream stakeholders. Data shows that 40% of home appliances sold on JD.com in 2020 were produced through the C2M process, and more than 1,000 brands developed C2M products across over 900 different product categories during the year.

However, connecting the three categories of products, places, and people together requires a highly efficient fulfillment system. Liu shared, “Our intelligent fulfillment system is able to integrate and process huge amounts of different types of information simultaneously, such as order information, delivery capacity, and inventory availability, and output the fulfillment decision automatically.”

For example, during this year’s JD 618 Grand Promotion, JD’s intelligent supply chain made hundreds of thousands of decisions per day to improve the efficiency of replenishment, transfer, and fulfillment, making sure the process ran smoothly down to the last mile, even during peak times. The average time of producing fulfillment decisions can be as short as 50 milliseconds for tens of thousands of incoming orders at the same time.

“Going forward, we will focus on several areas, such as attaching services to products to produce more and better combinations; further developing our B2B business and building corresponding fulfillment capability; and extending our supply chain to upstream such as product design, raw materials supply, and manufacturing. Finally, we will also focus on both physical and digital areas,” shared Liu about the future plans.

(ling.cao@jd.com)