E-commerce

In the first class, we mentioned about too many E-commerce key words and company, I believe many Chinese students were confusing and lack of knowledge with E-commerce. We just totally understand and feel terrible. There’s no word to talk about. On the one hand, we use different kinds of Internet from outside. That’s why I learned here: try to be more open-mind and professional. We now talked about Internet Company, Artificial intelligence, Internet technology and so on. We talked and learned about E-commerce. We want to know who our consumers exactly are, how we make purchase online, and why foreign e-commerce successful. On the other hand, Chinese students are not very shy or no talking. For example, in China, we just know BAT, which consists of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. We know about Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, but do not know it called GAFA. We talked about eBay, Facebook’s, Google, and Alibaba these companies.

If you don’t know about E-commerce, you can’t comment.

Anyway, this paper would be started as two aspects, E-commerce in China and my individual synthesis regarding the principles of e-commerce.

Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, he said that: ‘in the other countries, e-commerce is a way to shop, in China it’s a lifestyle.’ It’s true. Most of us don’t understand B2B, B2C; we enjoy buying and selling things online. We got 1.4 billion people. And we got 800 million people online, and 500 million people, already online shopping. Young people communicate online, shared experience, get ‘buy/don’t buy’ advice from friends, and build up record and relationship on social media platforms, even build up trust.

You can live a long time in China’s big city without any money or credit card. In Beijing or Shanghai, when you go to restaurant, market or shopping center, you just need to bring your mobile phone. We use Alipay. There are more than 700 million Alipay users in the world, China has more than 500 million Alipay users, and Wechat has 400 million people. It’s a huge number. We developed from nothing impossible to anything possible. In 2000, China had yet to develop any e-commerce applications, and had only 2.1 million total Internet users. Then we build up platform, logistic, credit system and so on.

There are four drivers of E-commerce growth in China: e-commerce platforms (Alibaba, Taobao, Tmall, Jingdong and so on), social media platforms (Wechat, QQ, Weibo), digital payments platforms (Alipay, Wechat), and mobile devices.

Taobao developed from nobody come to sell. But in 2003, we got more than 500 millions users, and everyday, 200 million people come to sell and buy on the Alibaba site. Last year, Alibaba sold 550 billion US dollars. Last year for one singles day, we sold 1.8 billion US dollars. We created 650 million packages in one day. And that day is represented by ‘ones’ (11/11). ’Singles Day’ seems to be a big festival for shopping.

For most Americans, they prefer Amazon than eBay. Amazon guarantees 2 days delivery anywhere in the United States, and free shipping. There are so many comments on commodity. People shared experiences and details. Their “product” includes fulfillment, packaging, customer service and return policies. But in 2012, China passes the US and become the largest E-commerce market in the world. China changed so much. The e-commerce was explosion in China.

In our class, we talked about E-commerce，Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google Alibaba these companies. Should we sell merchandises on platform or not? How do intermediaries create value, intermediaries and retailers will disappear or not? How to be more efficiency in delivery of E-commerce？Why could digital change traditional bank model and retail?

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