Doing business in China...

Mar 24, 2014

We recently hosted our first Launch Pad event 'helping retailers international expansion take off' on the topic of doing business in China at the Soho Hotel in London. As I am sure many of you already know China has limitless opportunities but significant barriers to entry. Keen to find a solution which would work the wnDirect team set about researching into the region. 18 months later we have now launched wnOnline, a go-to-market package which enables retailers to access the region in as little as 2 months for considerbly less investment.

A number of key retail brands attended our event where we showcased wnOnline which has been launched in partnership with TMall and Web2Asia. The Chinese eCommerce market is dominated by TMall and Taobao. These two platforms own over 50 per cent of all the B2B and B2C transactions and house over 70,000 international brands and have 100,000,000 unique visitors every month so this is a very significant partnership for us.

Alibaba has seen transactions on its e-commerce platforms top that of Amazon and eBay combined, its also expecting to overtake Walmart in 2016 as the world's biggest retail firm.
Bain & Co Consulting

Recognition of the opportunities in China motivated us to further explore the region so that we could develop a comprehensive understanding of the market. China has very specific requirements with businesses requiring a Chinese business licence to operate there. Coupled with this the buying habits are very different from what is witnessed elsewhere in the world. It is vital that brands wishing to access the market not only understand this but appreciate the importance. These factors were key when developing our Chinese offering. We quickly realised that we had to develop much more than a delivery service but a mechanism for retailers to operate within this very specific market. In order to do this we decided to develop a partnership the experts in China who could bring this experience and cultural understanding to our logistics services.

We set our sights high and are delighted to be working with one of China's respected digital marketing agencies, Web2Asia. This is a powerful partnership which will enable retailers to have a presence on China's largest B2C retail platform Tmall, and therefore maximise the opportunity that the Chinese market provides without the significant financial or time investment usually required.

We believe that wnOnline represents a very powerful solution that will enable more and more brands to access the Chinese market. There is no doubt it offers significant opportunity but the risks and the challenges retailers have to overcome have switched many retailers off. Retail brands can take advantage of our investment and research which means they can bring their products to a potential market of over 1.4bn consumers now for relatively little investment. We believe this is going to have quite an impact with retailers.