Barely a year after our experts described “The Future of Shopping: Where everyone is a retailer”, Alibaba is aiming to make exactly that happen – literally. The e-tailer is now encouraging all its (one billion!) Chinese users to open their own web shop on the platform.
Everyone is an influencer
Social shopping has been ‘hot’ in China for some time now: influencers are vlogging, streaming videos and posting on Instagram at will to recommend products to young consumers in particular. If their followers buy something, they get a commission. The influencers, called ‘KOL’ in China (‘Key Opinion Leaders’), are seen as experts in their field and have a lot of influence.
Now everyone in China can become an influencer with the help of Taoxiaopu, a new component of Alibaba’s Taobao app. The Chinese e-commerce platform is launching individual webshops for its customers, who can set up their own virtual shop window. In that window, they place products of professional traders or brands that sell through Alibaba.
When orders are placed through such a personal webshop, the order is immediately passed on to the professional seller, who takes care of further processing. Users do get a commission for every sale they make but do not have to worry about anything else.
Everyone is becoming a retailer
This way, Alibaba hopes to turn its 693 million annual users into real ambassadors, who stimulate their environment to shop at their stores. The system is, obviously, also free of charge, with additional rewards for those who are successful. Beginners get a test shop for which they can select 30 products. If they secure five transactions, they gain access to more than 10,000 products for ‘their’ shop.
Since the first trial run in April last year, Taoxiaopu has already acquired nearly a billion users, half of which are from China’s smaller cities. Alibaba is also not the only one with a ‘social’ shopping platform: it faces competition from member platforms Yunji and Beidian, but especially from newcomer Pinduoduo, which according to Tech in Asia already has 536.3 million users.
This is another example that social commerce seamlessly responds to important trends in retail, such as the need for (hyper-)personalization, a curated offer as a guide in the online chaos, the platform economy and the involvement of customers as (brand) ambassadors. What proof Alibaba has provided for RetailDetail’s very own book “The Future of Shopping: Where everyone is a retailer“!
