Exploit Chinese Marketing Channels — Social Shopping Sites (Part 1 Of 4)

Azoya will publish 4 articles exploring the main marketing channels for e-tailers in China. These main channels are social shopping platforms, search engine, social media and online advertising.

There’re mainly 3 kinds of social shopping sites in China, i.e. online shopping guide, affiliate platforms and price compare websites. These sites are ideal places for overseas e-tailers to launch marketing and promotion campaigns. In this article, we’ll look into how Chinese social shopping sites work and the opportunities they offer to overseas retailers who want to take on the market swiftly.

Online Shopping Guide

Online shopping guide is a platform in which users or the platform itself publish/share shopping experiences or products information. The biggest advantage of online shopping guide is that it has a group of loyal users who are drawn to the community for their common interests and experiences.

Online shopping guide operates in two ways. The first kind is positioned as media. The platform publishes contents written by professionals, giving authoritative advice and opinion on shopping or product selection. This model is called PGC (Professionally Generated Content) community.

The second kind is positioned as social platform. Users share their own experiences and opinion on the platform, they can interact with each other by commenting, liking, reposting and sharing. The platform is built on contents created by users. The platform encourages users to publish original contents by giving them credits, which can gain them special offers. This model is called UGC (User Generated Content) community.

Both the two models accurately targets at Chinese overseas online shoppers. Users tend to develop a high level of trust on the community and the platform. An article recommending certain products usually has a conversion rate up to 10%- 10% of the readers will eventually buy the products.

The platform serves two functions in users’ shopping decision making. The first is to select products. There’re countless products from dozens of countries over the world. Consumers will find themselves lost in the ocean of information if they decide to find the right products from tens of thousands of products’ page. To save time and energy, consumers have no choice but listen to what the professionals and peers are saying.

The second is to provide guarantee to users. Facing numerous shopping choices, consumers don’t have enough information to judge which one can be trusted. The platform can give them guarantee over the promoted products. To maintain its own brand image, the platform must be meticulous over the products they are recommending. All products appearing on the platform are carefully screened to make sure the information is truly helpful. After all, a disappointed user will never come back again.

Affiliate sites

Affiliation Platform is an eCommerce platform that converge products from various e-tailers. After consumers complete the transactions, the website will rebate certain amount of money to the consumers.

This model creates a win-win situation for both the consumers and the e-tailers. The consumers save money, while the e-tailers avoid undercutting their profits and impairing brand image with low price.

It’s a great opportunity for new comers who want to open up the market quickly without cut-throat discount.

Price Compare sites

Price compare websites list the same products from various e-tailers and rank them according to their prices. These websites usually provide browser plug-ins to display the ranking list automatically when users are browsing shopping sites. This means tremendous traffic and brand exposure opportunity.

By cooperating with the price compare websites, e-tailers can have their products displayed in the ranking list. It’s advisable that overseas e-tailers select certain low price products to go there. Even if the prices are not competitive enough, it’s still an opportunity to expose your products and brand.