Dangdang Gets Into Bed With the Enemy, Launches Storefront on Rival Tmall

One of Dangdang’s new storefronts today on Tmall.com site.

The Chinese web business is usually characterized by price wars, feuds, and bitching. But at least two e-commerce firms are getting on warmer terms, as Dangdang (NYSE:DANG) has just opened up a virtual storefront on rival site Tmall.

The thaw in relations will see Dangdang sell, according to the company, 800,000 book titles and 300,000 kinds of general items in its two new Tmall storefronts (see here and here). That second link, the Dangdang general store on Tmall, sells everything from gadgets to baby’s nappies, reflecting the many product verticals that Dangdang offers.

Alibaba-owned Tmall launched its open-platform storefronts in September of last year with an initial batch of 38 Chinese B2C e-commerce sites opting to open stores at that time. Now Alibaba says there are 87 partners. Dangdang was one of several noticeable absences at the time, but now the Amazon-esque site seems to have had a change of heart and decided that co-operation is a better strategy. Tmall is China’s biggest brand-oriented online shopping site, with 41.5 percent market share at the mid-point of this year; Dangdang is down in sixth.

Dangdang first signaled an end to its resistance towards its rival back in May of this year when it unblocked the Alibaba-run product search engine eTao. That was after more than six months of – along with several other dissenting sites – blocking eTao from indexing its products in an attempt to undermine the fledgling product search engine.

[Source: QQ Tech – article in Chinese]