How Alibaba got people to open its shopping app 7 times a day

Original photo credit: Pixabay.

When it comes to ecommerce in China, Alibaba is king. The company has handled the move towards mobile gracefully, posting impressive mobile numbers in its just-released Q2 financials. But in the earnings call that followed Alibaba’s announcement, Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang shared another impressive accomplishment: users launch the Taobao app an average of seven times every day.

That would be amazing for pretty much any app, but it’s particularly impressive for an ecommerce app. So how did Alibaba do it?

The answer, according to Zhang, is social. Alibaba has added a number of social features to the Taobao app. Users can share products and product recommendations with each other. They can ask and answer questions with each other. They can participate in live streams with each other.

Taobao is more like a social commerce app rather than a marketplace.

“Actually, we tried to build up the connections not only between buyer and the sellers but also between buyers and especially the buyers with same hobbies and preferences,” said Zhang on the call. “They can comment with each other and they can share with each other. And this creates a lot of new demand from customers.”

“Taobao is more like a social commerce app rather than a marketplace,” Zhang said.

Social networking features are a part of Taobao’s DNA, of course. Years ago, the site’s chat-with-the-seller feature was one of the major reasons it was able to beat out foreign competitor eBay. Alibaba’s team rightly realized that Chinese people preferred a social buying experience offline, and the same was true online, especially in an age when ecommerce was still very new to most buyers and trust between buyer and seller had to be built. Now, Alibaba seems to be carrying on that legacy as it moves to mobile, adding features that make shopping on your phone even more like going to the mall with your friends.

Of course, it’s not all about social. Zhang credits the social changes for the rise in how often users open the Taobao app, but he said that another factor was good automated product discovery features:

We see users responding very well to a highly personalized experience on mobile Taobao. Product recommendations and the banner displays are automatically customized in accordance with individual user profiles. Merchants have also been empowered with a capability to customize the in-store displays by individual user profiles.

So here’s the cliffsnotes for making your ecommerce app sticky: make it social and make it personal.