Wholesale city riding wave of e-commerce

Gong Chenghao, vice-manager of yiwugou, echoed that assessment, saying that the orders of trade businesses are much bigger than the sales of a retailer. "So importers are looking for suppliers who are reliable rather than those who merely have cheap products," he said.

"All of the suppliers on yiwugou are vendors who have booths in our market. So compared with e-commerce companies, which can only shut down online virtual stores if there is misconduct, our company has a much bigger say in terms of regulating our vendors' online behavior."

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Many of the vendors in China Commodities City have witnessed rapidly growing online orders over the past year despite the fact that most of the orders still came from offline.

Jin Hongjin, manager of Wamar Wine Co, one of the 75,000 vendors that have set up online stores on yiwugou, said the Yiwu market can offer advantages especially when business of traditional importers is flat.

"It would be difficult for any importer if their purchase cannot fill one container. Even if the sellers are OK to sell you a halfcontainer of products, you still need to pay for the shipping cost for the halfempty container, which would drive up the cost of importers," he said.

But in the Yiwu market, people can easily select and pick up hundreds of different products, put them in one container and ship them back to their home countries together, according to Jin.

Selling less than containerloads is increasingly popular in Yiwu as importers are not confident to sell a large amount of products when their countries have been hit by an economic slowdown.

The situation actually boosts Yiwu's business because the market sells close to 2 million different types of small commodities, said Chang Xiaolei, chief executive officer of Master Base International ECommerce Co Ltd, an Australian trade agent.

"The business model of Yiwu fits the demand of Australian importers very well because it is a country with a small population. Many of the importers cannot buy a container of one type of products," said Chang, whose company has been offering trade services to Australian importers in Yiwu for 20 years.

Chang's company is also one of the 11 global partners of yiwugou. He has invested about 10 million yuan to set up the Australian e-commerce site of yiwugou because he sees the potential of the market.

"When our website is officially launched later this year, importers will not need to visit Yiwu to make purchases, but they can still benefit from our services offline. No one can resist the business model that combines both the advantages of online and offline services," he said.

Liu Weinan, chairman of the board of Beijing Noel International Forwarding Co Ltd, which will represent yiwugou in setting up an e-commerce site in Russia, agreed, saying that many of his company's customers are interested in trying out the site.

"Market demand is not what we worry about most. We just want to focus on offering a good user experience so that Russian importers will truly rely on us as an online access to Yiwu market," he said.