Chinese E-Commerce Site Jingdong Moves Deeper into the Cloud with Developer Tools

China’s Jingdong — the e-commerce site formerly known as 360Buy before a recent rebranding — is moving further into cloud-based services, according to a release yesterday that says the company has launched three new cloud services:

• JD Hosting, which is a web hosting service for Jingdong vendors
• JD Engine, an app development platform
• JZone, a social community for developers (basically just a collection of documents and a BBS forum)

The new services all seem to be a fairly obvious move towards “platformizing” the e-commerce site and allowing developers better access to develop new apps and better ways to integrate third-party products and vendors into the Jingdong ecosystem. Jingdong’s no Taobao, but it’s big enough that I’m sure some developers will be interested in the new tools.

You can rule international developers out, though, as for the moment these Jingdong platforms come in one language only: simplified Chinese. But given that the company’s recent rebranding seems to have come along with a new push to appeal to the international media, I wouldn’t be surprised if over the next few months other languages are added to the new platforms to make them more functional for non-Chinese developers who might want to get in on the Chinese e-commerce action.

In the meantime, if you can read Chinese or just want to try and click things at random and see if it builds an app for you, the services can be located on their own site, Jcloud. And if you’re looking for a more entertaining J-Zone that’s in English, I recommend this one (NSFW language).