Selling the future

China leads a global consumer market revolution with the convergence of online and offline sales channels

Imagine you are in a department store looking for, say, a suit. Can't find what you are looking for?

No problem. You go to one of the store's computer banks and tell it exactly what you want. At the same time, you are being scanned for size and measurements.

Yes, the suit is available in your size. Click to buy and click to pay. Within 24 hours, the suit will be delivered to your home or a store near you, which could be your local convenience store.

Welcome to the new retail revolution that is sweeping China, the world's biggest consumer market.

The term "new retail" was coined by Jack Ma, founder and chairman of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which has been moving into traditional brick-and-mortar retailing.

Ma said he views the concept as "the integration of online, offline, logistics and data across a single value chain".

Matthew Crabbe, research director at Mintel, a London-based market research company, says: "New retail can best be described as the convergence of online and offline retail to the point where they are so mixed with each other that they simply become integral parts of each other, and therefore retail becomes new.

"What it means is that it includes all retail, whatever the channel of sale, be it online or offline."

On July 25, US retailer Walmart and Chinese e-commerce site JD.com announced they will be "expanding their cooperation to further integrate their platforms, supply chains and customer resources in China".

Coinciding with the launch of the first JD-Walmart 8.8 omni-channel shopping festival on Aug 8, the initiative will give shoppers in China faster and more convenient access to high-quality products through multiple channels, JD.com says.

The collaboration will boost the popularity of US-made products in China and allow consumers to directly buy goods from Walmart through the JD.com platform.

"Our ability to tap into JD.com's advantages across logistics, big data, technology and customer service gives Walmart a huge advantage in reaching China's rapidly expanding consumer class," says Ben Hassing, senior vice-president of e-commerce and technology at Walmart China.

Carol Fung, president of JD Fast Moving Consumer Goods, says that as technology pushes the boundaries of what is possible, JD.com and Walmart will offer "complementary platforms and a commitment to customers that provides us with an enormous opportunity to define the future of retail in China".

Over the last year or so, many of China's top retailers - led by giants such as Alibaba and JD.com - have been looking for ways to improve the online and physical relationship of shopping.

"Alibaba has experimented with opening up physical stores and seems to be getting involved with the department store market in China," says Oscar Orozco, senior forecasting analyst with US-based market research company eMarketer.

"For all intents and purposes, (what Alibaba is doing) is similar to what we would call omni-channel integration here in the US. Not a new term by any means, but it includes a well-balanced mix of in-store and online targeting of consumers," he says.

Fortune magazine said in June that Alibaba already accounts for more than one-tenth of China's total retail sales (including 75 percent of online sales), with revenues surging at an astounding 50 percent yearly.

"In little over a year, Alibaba has gone from opening its first physical store to acquiring a major Hong Kong-listed department store chain, Intime Retail, for $2.6 billion," the magazine said.

The company also has investments in offline players, including electronics retailer Suning and household appliance maker Haier.

In February, Alibaba announced a strategic alliance with State-owned supermarket mall and department store chain Bailian Group. The deal marked another major push by Alibaba to digitize offline malls and fuel growth in the increasingly saturated online traffic.

Alibaba said a surge in mobile Internet usage and the growth of big data capabilities are driving "this new shopping experience as a way to better meet consumer demand". The e-commerce group has 500 million monthly active mobile users.

It said it wants to bring Bailian and its 4,700 stores in 200 Chinese cities and autonomous regions into the fold as well.

"Our partnership with Bailian is an important milestone in the evolution of Chinese retail, where the distinction between physical and virtual commerce is becoming obsolete," Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang said in February.

As part of the deal, Alibaba and Bailian will co-design brick-and-mortar stores that merge offline and online shopping and services to "improve the buying experience" for consumers.

They will also combine their membership bases to deliver enhanced customer service through technologies such as geo-location, facial recognition and big-data-driven sales and customer management systems.

In addition, there are plans to make Alipay, the online payments app owned by Alibaba affiliate company Ant Financial, available at all Bailian stores. And the department store's payment services - Safepass and Bailian OK Card - will be integrated with Alipay.

Mintel's Crabbe says the rapid development of new retail is certainly not exclusive to China.

"In the US, Amazon Go is an attempt by an online retailer to go into the physical store realm, but by creating an online payment interface that means consumers shop in-store, but pay online," he says.

"Obviously, as new retail combines both online and offline retailers, the leading companies are those who lead in both the physical and online realms: Alibaba, JD.com, Suning in the online realm, and many different retailers across the physical retail sectors," Crabbe says.

He says the fastest integration between online and offline appears to be happening in the convenience store sector. However, this sector is "very fragmented", he says, as is the case with most physical retail sectors in China, so there are no clear leaders at the national level.

Convenience stores are important, since they can work with online platforms to offer "last mile" delivery for online orders. This makes it one of the sectors seeing stronger growth in sales, and also faster integration between online and offline.

"This is why there have been so many new developments in terms of experiments in cashless payments, self-checkout counters and (most recently) even unmanned stores (like Amazon Go) in the convenience store sector in China," Crabbe says.

Alibaba is at the forefront of new retail, but time will tell what innovations it will integrate in terms of new retail.

Orozco from eMarketer cites mobile wallets as an example of integration. These allow customers to shop for goods in-store and "the total cost of purchase is automatically charged to the customers' payment option".

"Another example would be targeted sales/discounts and newly stocked goods that are sent directly to a customer's mobile device based off of their search preferences," he says.

"The customer would just have to opt into this option. There are many things that can be done, and retailers understand the importance of this."

A recent report by eMarketer said JD.com, the nation's second-largest online marketplace, has opened three offline outlets at Yonghui Superstores in Beijing, in which the e-commerce company has a 10 percent stake.

Some of these stores even opened in lowertier cities across China, but instead of a physical showroom of products, they mostly serve as distribution, delivery and after-sales maintenance centers for home appliances, the market research company said.

JD.com also took a lead by allowing the delivery of online orders for fresh, chilled and frozen produce to existing convenience stores, from which the "last mile" delivery could be made to the customer's door (or collected in-store), once the time and place are confirmed.

In March, Dalian Wanda Group, one of China's largest conglomerates, joined hands with card processor China UnionPay. They announced a partnership that sees Wanda partner merchants co-developing a UnionPay cardholder service system, mobile apps and marketing campaigns to serve shoppers across all Wanda properties.

"New retail is the result of efforts to find solutions to a key set of problems for each side," Crabbe says.

"For the physical store chains, they have been unable to keep up with the growth of online retail. For the online operators, they have struggled to keep delivery infrastructure capacity up with the rapid growth in online shopping demand," he says.

New retail means more connection and integration - not just for retailers but also for consumers, manufacturers and other industry players, Vishal Bali, managing director of Nielsen China, said in March.

"It is improvement of developed technology, consumers getting sophisticated, and diversification of industry and platform," Bali said.

karlwilson@chinadailyapac.com

(China Daily European Weekly 08/25/2017 page1)