Death ecommerce is the latest sector to feel China’s internet boom

Photo credit: Jonathan Kos-Read

Over the past decade, ecommerce has wormed its way into basically every level of Chinese urban life. You can buy your clothes online, buy your house online, order your food online, and book and pay for all of your transit and travel online, among many other things. But there’s one demographic that has been a bit slower to adapt to the ecommerce age: the dead.

It’s not difficult to understand why, of course. In general, the funeral industry is driven by older generations, who are less likely than young people to turn to the web for solutions when they encounter a problem. And China’s young internet entrepreneurs generally aren’t thinking about funerals and death when they’re coming up with hot startup ideas. The end result is that a lot of China’s funeral business is still done offline.

But there are a lot of problems with the offline funeral industry. It’s fragmented, meaning that finding and pricing something like an open burial plot can be a real pain; you might have to call around to dozens of different small places to ask about availability. And because offline buyers can only access local offerings and time is often a factor, it can get expensive. If there’s already been a death, the family doesn’t usually have the time or inclination to shop around for the best prices. And the elderly person in an assisted-living home planning their own funeral likely doesn’t have the mobility, inclination, or energy to spend months chasing down the most affordable options either.

The end result is that many of China’s elderly complain that they “can’t afford to die.”

Photo credit: istolethetv

Ecommerce steps in

Ecommerce is an obvious solution to the price problem. It could take days to call a dozen different shops to inquire about the cost and availability of caskets, for example, but you can get that same kind of information in seconds with an internet search. It should come as no surprise, then, that ecommerce vendors have stepped in to fill this void.

China’s big-name ecommerce firms all have significant offerings, of course. On JD.com you can buy caskets, urns, and other funeral-related items, and the most popular among them have been purchased hundreds of times. On Alibaba’s Taobao and Tmall platforms, the options are similarly diverse, and Taobao’s sales figures suggest the platform has sold thousands of cremation urns in the past month alone.

Burning fake “hell money” for the dead. Photo credit: Eddie Awad

Boutique experience

Buying from a big platform like JD or Taobao does allow you to find the best prices quickly, but it isn’t the perfect solution for everyone. It still requires you to identify each item that you need, source it individually, and then put all of that together – it’s more effort than some people would like to go to, especially when they’re bereaved. And you can’t find everything on the big sites anyway – neither Alibaba nor JD sells grave plots, for example.

For those people, botique funeral ecommerce shops like Yiko have sprung up. On Yiko, you pick and choose exactly what you need, or go with a more all-inclusive one-stop service package. You can search for available grave plots in major cities like Beijing, with prices, ratings, photos, and map integration all there to make it easy to compare options. You can buy all the items you’ll need, from urns to memorial rings and 3D printed models of the deceased, right on Yiko’s site. And you can book funeral services like interment or fengshui guidance through the company as well.

Startup services like Yiko have also taken a new approach to marketing that’s helping them catch on among the elderly. According to a recent PingWest feature, Yiko reps have become quite popular in one Chinese retirement home because they do things like sing songs with the residents, help them take photos, and openly discuss their options with them. This more fun-loving and frank approach is in sharp contrast to the approach of traditional funeral service marketers, which is often just wordlessly handing out business cards and grim flyers.

Inspired by death

Primed for growth