The competition in China’s e-commerce sector is exceptionally tough, and margins can be very tight – especially when someone starts a price war – so that a site really needs to differentiate itself nicely, to get repeat visitors and build customer loyalty.
iResearch has done a great job of evaluating the top ten Chinese B2C e-commerce in terms of ‘stickiness’ – ie: keeping people on your site, browsing around – and customer loyalty by repeat purchases. The only spanner in the works is that China’s largest online retailer, Taobao, couldn’t be included in the stats as it was impossible to separate the pageviews for its B2C TMalls from its C2C Taobao Market.
Note that these stats are not a popularity contest, or indicative of a retailer’s profit – Taobao’s platform likely wins those battles – but they’re a great way to see how Chinese consumers interact with a website, and help us to see what draws people to an e-commerce site, and how its products affect site usage.
1. Top 10 Chinese B2C e-commerce sites by visits’ stickiness
360buy.com and M18.com are rocking the monthly visits per user, but likely for different reasons: 360buy’s products are mostly household appliances and other pricey gadgets, that need to be considered very carefully before buying, causing a lot of pageviews per user. Whilst M18.com sells exclusively female fashion, so users’ stickiness is here explained by women being much more inclined to shop around on a site for a long time, and even engage in ‘window shopping’.iResearch, in its analysis of Joyo/Amazon.cn and DangDang.com‘s relative closeness, states, “[the] visits frequencies of Amazon.cn and Dangdang.com are very close because the services provided by the two websites become similar.”
2. Top 10 Chinese B2C e-commerce sites by customer loyalty
Keeping people on your site for longer can turn perusers into purchasers, but it doesn’t exactly equate with customer loyalty and repeat purchases. Indeed, a whole different set of criteria dictates an online retailer’s repeat purchase rate. In this table, two of the top three sites, RedBaby.com.cn, and YiHaoDian.com are selling consumable goods – baby items, and general foodstuff, respectively – which require frequent purchases.M18.com, then, looks strong, being the top non-consumable retailer keeping up a very high flow of returning customers from its exclusively female clientele.
Vancl.com – which I looked at in more detail earlier this week – is gaining ground in China’s B2C e-commerce sector, but still lags behind some smaller budget clothing retailers, such as OKbuy.com and M18.com.
To see the full results of iResearch’s analysis, and read-up on their methodology, too, head over to their full report.
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excellent post
Very interesting and good post for those of us who are in the ecommerce space. China seems to be up and coming more and more in ecommerce…just a great example is DangDang taking itself public in the NYSE. Many more American internet retailers will have to eventually break in this market also.