AliPay posed an official announcement on Sina Weibo today to shut down offline POS-based business, because China UnionPay released stringent regulations on third-party bank card payment services (report in Chinese). AliPay launched this business in March last year with an ambitious plan to invest 500 million yuan ($81.15 million) in 3 years and to equip […]
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I Love Kindle, But I Really Don’t Think I Need A Paperwhite for China
It’s been a month since Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle Fire HD finally landed in China. The Paperwhite does have some localized features that Chinese users can share excerpts to Sina Weibo, the prevailing micro-blogging service in China, choose from three Chinese fonts or use the built-in Chinese-to-Chinese and English-to-Chinese dictionaries. But Kindle in general isn’t well-received for […]
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Kindle’s Fire On The Local E-Reading Market: Local Players Released New Devices
Kindle’s final arrival in China surely has put its local peers on alert. On the same day, one of the biggest e-reading companies Hanvon released its latest reading device “The Golden House” pricing RMB 849 (the same as Kindle’s Paperwhite). Today, e-commerce player Dangdang also updated its e-reader Doukan with a competitive price of RMB 699. […]
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Taobao Turns Ten: A Look Back
Taobao — “exploring treasures” in Chinese — now is a household name in China. Ten years ago, Alibaba wanted to try out the online auction by putting up a Nokia phone online. That phone turned out to be the first item on the customer-to-customer platform. eBay-like auction, however, never prevailed in China. Taobao simply became the biggest marketplace for online […]
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Digital books cost way cheaper than the print in China but are not cheap to create at all
Dangdang, one of the leading online book retailers in China, made 3 million Yuan in digital book sales in 2012 but spent approaching 5 million Yuan in formatting text files received from conventional publishers, according to Wang Xi, vice president of the company. He complained that what they got were half-products is frustrating. Chinese publishers […]
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Meilishuo: 32 Millions Chinese Users, 80000 Serial Pinners
[Editor: The article is written by Laure de Carayon (@laure2carayon) of China Connect (@chinaconnectEU)] China’s digital ecosystem is a vibrant scene. Among the (numerous) new players, Meilishuo, the Fashion social network with almost 5 millions followers on Sina Weibo, has a growing audience and major brands are joining. The following is the exclusive interview of […]
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Qunar CEO: We Aimed At 1% of China GDP
Qunar, Chinese online travel booking service seems to be growing to a ‘super’ company, even on a par with Ctrip in just a few years. The local magazine The Founder interviewed the team and this was the summary of the report. Overall, Mr. Zhuang Chenchao, CEO of Qunar was seemingly confident of the future as […]
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China E-Commerce in 2013: An Outlook
E-commerce might be one of the most eye-catching trades in 2012 with all the price wars, spars, and series of good or not-so-good rumors, and it’s evident that in the coming year the industry would be a good play, as long as you placed the right bet. In an aim to help you capture a […]
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How Does Douban Make Money?
Willingly or not, Douban, the interest-based social network, disclosed some metrics that it would rather not to, if news didn’t break out that several core engineers left in September. It turned out those employees were off to start up their own business, but the seeming public relations crisis forced Douban management to project a number for revenues […]
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Who’d be the Next Taobao for Offline Services?
When O2O (online to offline) commerce became the next hot topic, after group-buying, in China, it was taken by a lot of failing or declining businesses as life-saving straw, especially those who have anything to do with local economy, say, group-buying or classifieds services. It’s not hard to come up with a dream of becoming […]
