Overseas goods a highlight of this year's deals
China's major online marketplaces such as Tmall and jd.com launched their annual mid-year promotion on Thursday, with increased offering of imported goods being a new highlight, analysts said.
Thursday (June 18) marks the anniversary of the establishment of JD.com Inc, which it usually celebrates with new promotions. But other e-commerce operators have also embraced the occasion, turning it into a mid-year event for the industry.
The companies launched attractive deals to lure consumers on Thursday. For instance, JD offered discounts of as much as 90 percent on some home appliances and its bigger rival Tmall used coupons and different kinds of gifts to attract buyers.
As of 4 pm on Thursday, jd.com had received 1.5 times the orders it received during the same period in the June 18 promotion in 2014, the company said in a post on its official Weibo account. This is the latest data publicly available by press time.
A JD delivery staff surnamed Sun told the Global Times on Thursday that his workload had increased by more than two-thirds during the promotion.
Tmall did not reveal its sales volume on Thursday as of press time.
The mid-year promotions had mainly focused on home appliances in previous years, but as the competition intensifies, other categories of goods, especially those from overseas, have also been included in the promotion, Zhang Xiangli, an analyst at Beijing-based iResearch Consulting Group, told the Global Times.
Demand for overseas goods has been on rise during the past few years. Jd.com started a service on April 15 to sell 150,000 kinds of overseas goods, with some imported and sold by jd.com and some directly delivered by overseas companies.
Other shopping sites like Tmall also provide similar services. In Thursday's promotion, Tmall exempted import duties and delivery fees for consumers who make orders for overseas goods.
The June 18 mid-year promotion and the "Singles' Day" sales carnival on November 11 have become two major promotion events for the e-commerce sector in China. The "Singles' Day" sales event was initiated by Alibaba Group, the parent company of Tmall.
Besides the big players, the two sales carnivals also witnessed active participation from the smaller shopping sites like dangdang.com and gome.com.cn in the past. But with the big firms eating into their market share, these sites have been gradually marginalized.
Currently Tmall is the clear market leader, with 58.6 percent market share in the first quarter in the online business-to-consumer (B2C) sector, followed by jd.com with 22.8 percent and vip.com with 3.8 percent, according to the data from iResearch in May.
"E-commerce sites that target a niche market, such as jumei.com which mainly sells cosmetics, could continue to have a place in the market, but the leading position of Tmall and JD is not very likely to be challenged any time soon," Feng Lin, a senior analyst at Hangzhou-based China e-Business Research Center, told the Global Times Thursday.
Data from iResearch showed that total transactions of online shopping in the first quarter reached 757.4 billion yuan ($122 billion), up 45.2 percent year-on-year. Also, e-commerce is becoming a major driver of domestic consumption, with the value of online shopping accounting for 10.7 percent of the country's total retail sales in the period, according to iResearch.
B2C transactions accounted for 49.3 percent of the overall online shopping in the first quarter, up 6 percentage points compared with the same period in 2014, according to iResearch.
Zhang noted that B2C is expected to grow much faster than the consumer-to-consumer (C2C) sector, as people now attach more importance to the quality and brand of the products they buy online.
Besides, Zhang noted that there is still great potential in the country's less developed rural areas, where people don't always have an easy access to the brick-and-mortar stores.
Both Alibaba and JD have stepped up efforts to expand their presence in the rural areas. Alibaba said in a press release e-mailed to the Global Times on Thursday that it will invest 10 billion yuan in the next three to five years to expand its network in the rural areas.
