Dangdang.com Angers High Street Bookstores with 65% Book Discounts

Chinese e-commerce website Dangdang.com – which is best known for its books, thereby getting dubbed China’s Amazon by western media – has today been slammed by an alliance of high street bookstores for its current, 65% sales promo, which celebrates its 4th anniversary in business.

The bricks-and-mortar retailers, including State-owned Xinhua bookstores, are accusing Dangdang.com of “dumping” books at artificially low prices, in order to drive them out of business.

Formation of such an alliance – which the retailers are describing as an “anti-dumping union” – suggests that litigation might be in the pipeline, since the dumping of goods in a market in this way is in breach of anti-unfair competition laws.

Dangdang’s CEO, Lu Guo-qing, has not shied away from this incident, himself retweeting a news article on the subject a few hours ago on Tencent Weibo.

Dangdang.com IPO’d on the NYSE at the end of last year, and was immediately hit with a similar price war from smaller online rival 360Buy.com which is valued at $10 billion. On that occasion, Dangdang’s management reacted with some anger, and even reached out to some publishing houses to ask them to boycott 360Buy.com.

Now the boot is on the other foot, and Dangdang itself is pricing very aggressively.