Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, China's largest search engine, says: "If you are shopping at a Wanda Plaza and you find a passerby wearing a really nice skirt you can simply take a photo of it and search for it on Baidu, and that will tell you which Wanda store sells it."

Baidu recently launched a service that supports searching by photo rather than pure text.

"And if you find a poster of a movie, you can use the same method not only to buy tickets for the movie, but also select your seat," Li says.

Jack Ma's $21.8 billion puts him top of China's wealth list

Charge of the Internet bulls

As more and more people gain access to the Internet by mobile phone, Baidu has made it its top priority to connect people with the services they need rather than simply giving them answers by text, he says.

Facing the challenges brought by China's booming online shopping market, many brick-and-mortar store operators such as Wanda have been making huge efforts to become more Web savvy.

Suning Commerce Group Co Ltd, the country's leading electrical appliances retailer, with about 1,600 stores across the country, has launched its own online store to ride the e-commerce wave.

Intime Retail (Group) Co, a Hong Kong-listed company that owns department stores and commercial real estate assets, teamed up with Alibaba earlier this year to integrate e-commerce with brick-and-mortar businesses. For last year's Nov 11 shopping discount festival, Alibaba allowed users of Tmall, a business-to-consumer platform, to place orders online while picking their orders up at Intime so they did not have to wait for deliveries.

Burghardt Groeber, vice-president of Greater China for enterprise software provider Hybris AG, says the joint venture makes sense, even if it does not necessarily revolutionize e-commerce.

"But for sure, their collaboration will take some pieces out of the large Alibaba pie."

Success of the joint venture largely hinges on how efficiently the three companies work together, says Mo Daiqing, an analyst with the China E-commerce Research Center in Hangzhou.