Update on July 2, Monday: A Tencent rep told us that the partnership with Dangdang started on 29 Jun 2012 last Friday. She also confirmed that the book category — http://buy.qq.com/book/ — is powered by Dangdang.
Dangdang, the e-commerce site that sells mainly books and electronics, has announced its exclusive partnership with QQ Buy, Tencent’s very own B2B2C e-commerce platform. That means rival Tmall will not be able to host a Dangdang channel on its platform as long as this exclusive partnership with QQ Buy remains active. The deal means that all of Dangdang’s library of 790,000 books is now made available on QQ Buy – a site that is technically its rival.
A quick Baidu and Google search can’t seem to surface a Dangdang branded store on QQ Buy. So we will have to wait and see what the virtual bookstore would offer. But QQ Buy does have a pretty comprehensive book e-store section which might be powered by Dangdang’s products. We have reached out to both Dangdang and Tencent to verify if the book section is the result of the partnership and will update as we learn more.
QQ Buy was launched just last October as a rival to the market leader, Tmall. Tencent also has Paipai for amateur shopkeepers, which rivals Alibaba’s Taobao.
Tencent, best known for its QQ IM service, hasn’t been able to gain much of a foothold in China’s e-commerce space, though recent stats suggest it has at least climbed to a distant fourth place in the B2C sector with 2.34 percent market share. It has also recently restructured the company into six different units for various sectors. One of them is e-commerce which will allow a more concerted effort for its online shopping plans to flourish. And hopefully it won’t be too late.
Dangdang has been getting itself into a lot of partnerships of late, such as agreeing to let the consumer electronics retail chain Gome open up a store-within-a-store on its website. But in this Tencent deal, it’s Dangdang that’s jumping onto Tencent’s QQ Buy platform.
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