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JD Data: Hubei Resorts Favored By Holiday Makers

by Martin Li

Resorts in Hubei province were favored by tourists during the eight-day National Day holiday in China, which ended on Oct. 8th, according to data from JD’s cultural and tourism business department.

Among the most popular cities in the province were Wuhan, Yichang and Xiangyang. The largest sources of tourists include Guangzhou, Beijing, Nanning and Haikou.

Hubei is home to almost 400 top-rated State cenic spots in China. Hubei Provincial Museum, the venue of the 10th China (Wuhan) International Garden Expo, and Wuhan Botanical Garden were the three most popular ones during the holiday.

Thirty key scenic spots in Hubei received more than 210,000 tourists as of 2:00 pm on October 1, bringing in total income of RMB 20.32 million yuan, back to 82.5% of the amount during the same period last year.

Discounts offered by quality hotels through e-commerce platforms including JD also contributed to the recovery.

Hotels which offered online packages with favorable prices were much sought-after by tourists, according to JD data.

In China, there were 14,941 flights on October 1st, transporting 1.67 million travelers, leveling with October 1st last year. October 1st saw 97 million tourists across the country, generating income of RMB 76.65 billion yuan, according to official statistics.

Besides the tourism market, the film industry in China also saw a robust recovery during the long holiday.

The first three days of the holiday saw box office sales exceed RMB 2 billion yuan. Total box office sales in China this year to date exceeded RMB 10 billion yuan by 1:00 pm on Oct. 3rd thanks to more than 270 million movie goers.

E-commerce platforms including JD have been taking active measures to make it easy and carefree for people to buy movie tickets, including a real-name purchase system completed within three days, as well as various discounts.

 

(bjlihao3@jd.com)

 

 

JD Drives the Upgrade of Pet Economy in China

by Vivian Yang

JD Super, the online supermarket of JD.com, kicked off its Pet Life Promotion Week starting on Oct 10th with a series of pet products and services on sale, including the popular JD Brand Super Days.

“The pet economy has become a prominent emerging consumption trend in China,” said Lizhen Liu, general manager of the consumption department of JD Retail. “JD Super is China’s leading supermarket both online and offline. We can provide strong support on big data and consumption insights to pet brands and help them reach the right customers, and also bring customers good quality pet products and services.”

According to a Nielsen report on pet food trends in 2020, sales of pet food on JD Super increased sharply from January to July this year, far exceeding the average growth rate of other B2C platforms. Within this period, sales of the popular Chinese pet brand Wanpy rose 15 times. Other popular brands such as Natural Balance, GO! Care, Ramical, Orijen, Solid Gold, and MyFoodie all achieved 200% to 500% growth.

JD Super has also stepped up efforts on channel building and brand cooperation in the pet category. During this year’s Pet Fair Asia, JD Super inked a number of agreements with pet brands including Mars, Royal Carnin, MyFoodie, Navarch, Nature Bridge, Frontline and Pure&Natural, with the goal of supporting 100 brands to achieve over RMB 100 million yuan of transaction volume in the next 3 years.

On the offline side, JD Super is enriching its omnichannel services for pet owners, joining hands with New Ruipeng Pet Healthcare Group to offer convenient pet products and services under JD’s “One-Hour Delivery Circle” program. The services will be available in 100 Chinese cities, including delivering pet food, pet prescription drugs, pet deworming, pet vaccination, pet beauty and more.

“With the expansion of omnichannel development and partnerships, JD Super will play an important role in driving the upgrade of China’s pet industry, and help form a healthy business ecosystem,” said Liu.

 

(vivian.yang@jd.com)

JD Updates Open Data Platform in Preparation for Singles Day Promotion

by Rachel Liu

The Singles Day(November 11th ) Shopping Festival is around the corner, and for third party merchants on JD, sales performance may depend on making the most of big data. JD Business Intelligence, an open data platform that provides support for merchants, released an updated version during a conference on October 10th at JD’s Beijing headquarters.

The new version is a smarter and more convenient product that can help merchants with data-based intelligent operations during the grand promotion and achieve business growth.

“JD Business Intelligence has been providing comprehensive data support for our merchants,” said Wen Yu, head of JD Advertisement Operations. “This upgraded version will leverage technology to help merchants analyze the problems in their store operations, and provide more comprehensive business data and marketing suggestions for merchants. In this way, they can better improve the efficiency of store operations and lower costs.”

Yilin Sun, head of operations for JD's Business Intelligence unit, speaking about the platform update

Yilin Sun, head of operations for JD’s Business Intelligence unit,

speaking about the platform update

At the conference, JD also invited a group of experienced merchants and store operators to be JD Business Intelligence Ambassadors, and share their experience and successful cases with other merchants for the upcoming promotion.

JD Business Intelligence was first launched in 2012, and aims to provide data support for merchants during their daily operations and marketing campaigns. Now over 80% of merchants on JD are using the Business Intelligence platform.

 

(liuchang61@jd.com)

Liquor Sales on JD Soar during National Day Holiday

by Rachel Liu

JD data shows that during the National Day holiday(October 1st -8th ), sales of liquor, including Chinese baijiu, wine and beer all saw rapid increases, and many brands even saw three-digit sales increases. Behind the rise is the popularity of giving alcohol as gifts.

Baijiu has long been a popular go-to gift during holidays in China. Sales of baijiu gift boxes on JD increased five times YOY during the Golden Week. Sales of French wine Lafite increased 100% YOY while sales of craft beer and fruity beer, which is highly popular with female consumers, were the leaders in terms of growth in the beer category increasing 120% and 300% respectively.

Sake and whiskey led the sales increase in the liquor category. Sales of whiskey increased 100% YOY and sales of Hennessy increased 150% YOY. According to JD Super, JD’s online supermarket, young customers are the main driving force for the sales increase of imported liquor during the holiday period. Updated services like one-hour delivery and rebates provided by JD Super also served to further enhance the customer experience.

In addition to liquor, travel-related products and children’s products also saw strong performance. Sales of instant rice increased 250% YOY, and beverages increased over 130% YOY. STEAM toys (curriculum-based products to help prepare children for the study of sciences, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) increased 30% YOY and musical instruments for children increased 280% YOY.

 

(liuchang61@jd.com)

In Conversation: JD’s Director of FMCG Omnichannel Speaks with IGD

by Kelly Dawson

As China’s retail industry recovers from COVID-19, major opportunities have emerged. Alexander Kremer, director of JD FMCG Omnichannel, spoke with Jiong-Jiong Yu, senior retail analyst at IGD, a UK-based research and training charity which sits at the heart of the food and consumer goods industry, about why supermarkets became the new growth driver for JD.com in the first half of 2020.

When China went into lockdown earlier this year, online shopping spiked—with many consumers buying online for the first time. Now, even as the virus has receded, many shoppers have grown accustomed to the ease of ordering online, particularly when it comes to necessities. “As the overall situation here gets better, a lot of our consumers are sticking to our offerings,” Kremer told Yu.

By offering an expansive range of products and 24-hour fulfillment for more than 90% of offerings—and in some cases 1-2 hours for supermarket items, JD is addressing an important pain point, he said. “Many people living in the big cities don’t have a lot of time, they work long hours and don’t have many days off. So having a convenient offering is very important. If you combine that with our [range of] offerings, that’s what makes people switch and say, ‘Well that really adds something to my overall user experience.”

However, when it comes to fresh produce and other supermarket items, a strictly-online offering is limiting, Kremer said.

“Over time we have seen that there’s a need to cater to different consumer demands in a better way,” he said of JD’s shift to an omnichannel approach, which combines both offline and online offerings. “If you go to a supermarket, you will see that people really like to look at the vegetables, hold them in their hands, see if they’re fresh and then pick the good ones.”

In order to address this need, JD’s omnichannel supermarket concept SevenFresh provides customers with the chance to browse in store, purchasing the exact items they want for immediate delivery to their home—sometimes even within 1-2 hours. If they prefer not to visit the store in person the next time, they can also order directly from the app.

Similarly, JD is working to reshape the previous offline store model in other areas, Kremer said. For example, instead of a traditional home appliance store, a consumer might visit what JD calls a “product experience space,” where they have the opportunity to try out a product in person, and then use the JD app to order the product and arrange home delivery.

However, the race to develop the omnichannel market is not without its challenges, Kremer said. For example, as JD expands its offerings and channels, customers expect special promotions to cut across different channels, which requires additional coordination.

Another way in which the pandemic continues to reverberate is heightened price-consciousness, Kremer told Yu. “We try to cater for that need with really good offerings and promotions that we build together with our brand partners,” he said.

Current conditions may pose challenges, but it also offers enormous opportunity, Kremer said.

As the omnichannel market grows in scope and success, Kremer believes that JD can combine the advantages of offline and online to serve the ever-increasing requirements of consumers. “Potentially in five to ten years, people will no longer talk about, this is an offline retailer, or this is an online retailer. People will only talk about omnichannel retailers because there are not going to be any retailers anymore doing only one or the other.”

Watch the full discussion here.

 

(kellydawson@jd.com)

Chinese Consumers Race to JD for 2020 Nobel Prize Winning Literature

by Ella Kidron

JD customers wasted no time getting their hands on the latest Louise Glück compilations when the winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature was announced on October 8th. Data indicates that sales of the book (in Chinese) consisting of Glück’s The Wild Iris, Meadowlands, Vita Nova, and The Seven Ages collections (月光的合金) within 30 minutes on the day were nearly 200 times that of daily sales in September. Sales of the book consisting of the celebrated American poet’s Averno, A Village Life, and the First Four Books (直到世界反映了灵魂最深层的需要) collections were nearly 750 times that of daily sales in September within the same amount of time.

JD is becoming increasingly popular with publishers, book sellers and writers as a channel to promote reading online.

JD is becoming increasingly popular with publishers, book sellers and writers as a channel to promote reading online. On July 31st, Chinese laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Mo Yan, saw over 10,000 copies of his new book A Late Bloomer sold on JD within only 30 minutes during a livestream he did on Tencent. Earlier this year, JD Live was the exclusive live stream sales channel for the Chinese version of A Woman Makes a Plan written by Maye Musk, mother of Elon Musk.

JD began selling books in 2010. At the time, it was considered a strategic category in the company’s journey to truly become a full-category platform, which was proposed and decided by Richard Liu, founder and CEO of JD.com. Today, the category has further expanded into JD Books, Culture and Education, becoming China’s leading online book and education platform with more than three million affordable books under the retail model and around 2,000 third-party sellers.

 

(ella@jd.com)

JD is First in the E-commerce Industry to Apply Creditability to Third Party Store Evaluation

by Yuchuan Wang

Ahead of the annual Singles’ Day (November 11th) promotion, JD has updated its standards for third party store performance evaluation, becoming the first in the industry to include “merchant creditability” criteria, in an effort to urge merchants keep improving product offerings and services. To facilitate timely improvement, JD also provides an online performance monitoring system to provide early and real-time warnings to merchants at risk.

JD Credibility is the system for JD’s third party merchants which comprehensively evaluates a merchant’s historical operations from five aspects including irregularities, product quality, operations history, financial fulfillment and store page compliance.

The evaluation will be carried out monthly, rather than annually. It will not include a “one-strike out” policy but rather will give three-to-six-month exemption according to different categories giving merchants adequate opportunities to improve and taking into account specific situations. For example, when evaluating store performance for seasonal products, the seasonal nature of the merchant’s business will be taken into account.

“A reasonable, comprehensive and considered evaluation standard will help merchants more clearly identify problems and assist them to keep improving,” said Bo Wang, head of platform regulation and governance at JD Retail. “We are committed to building a healthy e-commerce platform to provide more business opportunities to merchants, and better shopping experiences to over 400 million JD customers.”

 

(yuchuan.wang@jd.com)

JD and Ports Go Omnichannel for PLUS Members in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen

by Ella Kidron

JD and Canadian fashion group Ports held a special promotion for users of JD PLUS, the e-commerce giant’s premium membership program. In addition to providing online benefits, the event held on PLUS DAY (October 8th) went omnichannel, giving PLUS members in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen the chance to visit Ports’ offline stores to see the products in person and enjoy PLUS membership benefits in store.

This is the latest in a series of partnerships between JD and Ports. In early spring, JD, with the support of Unicorn, a Chinese fashion agent engaged in international brand retailing, helped Ports host a nine-hour fashion show via livestreaming, resulting in sales of more than RMB 10 million on the day. The show was the longest livestream show Ports has ever hosted. It attracted 580,000 new followers to Ports’ flagship store on JD, with nearly 1.3 million viewers online at the same time.

PLUS DAY, which was previously held once a year, has been held on the 8th of every month since the beginning of this year as a way of giving back to JD’s over 15 million high quality members by offering exclusive benefits and deals.

Ports was established in 1961, and has quickly become the first choice for many Chinese women since coming to China in 1993. The brand opened a flagship store on JD in 2015, and has maintained rapid growth on the platform since.

 

(ella@jd.com)