360buy’s Eight Profit Strategies
Founded in 2004, Chinese B2C service 360buy, also known by Jingdong Mall has gone through eight years of bumpy ride. It can hardly generate much revenue even with good reputation and remarkable sales. The service has made some bigger and bolder stride recently to diversify its offerings, like the newly launched digital distribution and travel booking business. Local media Chuangye Bang counted JingDong’s new tricks, let’s take a look at how reliable these new moves could be to contribute to a more positive cash flow in the company’s future operation.
1. App Store
360buy has launched its own app store, offering mobile games and applications. The store has covered almost all major platforms such as PC, Web, Android and iOS, and is now open to 3rd party developers.
How does 360buy’s app store stand out? The company said with an accumulation of 80 million registered users who are mainly male purchasing 3C products, app store can highly match the demand of its target customers.
2. 3rd Party Payment
In August last year, 360buy discontinued collaboration with Alipay. In November this year, 360buy bought in Chinabank Payments, a 3rd party payment solution provider, and got a payment license, thus revenue splits between 360buy and Alipay is avoided. The new payment platform will play an important role in the future.
3. Web Game
As we all know, running a web game is the fastest way to monetize web traffic, at least in China that’s the case. 360buy offers platform, technology and traffic while the operators provide games, and each party involved takes a portion of the revenue.
4. Advertising Platform
The SVP of 360buy Cheng Junyi revealed that 360buy’s commercial advertising platform would be launched at the beginning of next year. This year 360buy earned almost RMB 200 million from ads. The new platform would accelerate the ads growth.
5. Digital Music Service
In China, the era of free music will be over soon due to a new regulation calling off pirated and free online music. In August this year, 360buy launched its digital music service in a way to expand its digital offerings. The biggest highlight of the service is storing music information on cloud and download anytime anywhere. The pricing is also favorable, only 1/3 even 1/10 of a CD’s.
6. Opening up Courier Service
To some extent, 360buy earned its fame by delivering products amazingly fast. Since 2008, 360buy invested huge in warehousing and logistics system, this year alone it spent RMB 3.6 billion in ramping up the delivery arm. 360buy has offered 5-hour-pick-up service and logistics service system platform. Opening up its deliver infrastructure would be an attraction among other merchants reside on its B2C platform.
7. Financial Service
On November 19 this year, 360buy held a meeting preaching its supply chain finance model. On November 27, 360buy announced cooperation with Bank of China through an across-the-board cooperation.
8. Overseas Market
360buy launched its overseas site (en.360buy.com) with more than 400k items ranging from electronics, video games, costumes, book, music to movies to serve consumers in 36 countries.
Though 360buy has just raised Series D with $ 400 million, the shrinking valuation implied it confronts really challenges to monetize the service. To some degree, the company might be too big to fail, at least its investors won’t happy to see that happen, but in the long run with other B2C services, 360buy is gradually losing momentum.