Alibaba Tmall Partners Ten Home Appliance Brands to Experiment with C2B

Tmall, the online business-to-customer marketplace of Alibaba Group, has reached partnership with ten Chinese home appliance brands to experiment with customer-to-business model on twelve production lines.

Tmall will offer sales data and consumer feedback generated from those brands’ stores so that they will be able to make improvements on or customize certain products. For instance, a specific function can be added to a product as requested for users aged 25-30. But since the number of users of this age group who’d possibly buy this custom edition must be much smaller than the total, the planned output shouldn’t be high.

It is expected those products will be sold at comparatively lower prices as there will be no distributors other than Tmall.

The first batch of products, ranging from traditional home electronics products to newly emerged gadgets such as digital media player, will land on Juhuasuan, the group-buying platform of Alibaba, on May 7, according to the company. The ten manufacturers include household names in China, Joyoung, Midea and Supor.