From six-minute deliveries to mobile only. LogTrade went to Alibaba territory, where we experienced digital exclusion and got to have a look at space-age interface integration.
Imagine that when you go to bed in the evening, it is 1998. When you wake up in the morning, 20 years have passed. That is a bit like how it feels to travel from Sweden to the Middle Kingdom in 2018.
In China, e-commerce vs. brick-and-mortar retailing is not even an issue, since the Chinese have never had the same relationship to physical retailing and banks that we have. Instead, they just took one large step forward and completely skipped this middle phase that keeps us in Europe and the rest of the western world discussing the implications e-commerce has on physical retailing. In the Orient, everything is considered just retailing. Period. And in most cases, the door to it is the phone. End of story.
LogTrade in Shanghai and Hong Kong. In future blog posts, we will be sharing our thoughts and conclusions about retailing in China and how both e-commerce companies and brick-and-mortar retailers in Europe and other parts of the world can learn from how the consumption chain works in China and Hong Kong. We will cover everything from Taobao, Tencent’s WeChat, and Alibaba’s Alipay to why people will wait in line for five hours for a cup of coffee. Last but not least, we will also write about the magnificent language of the interface and why maybe physical retailing should be integrated with digital retailing.
And we will write about brands, too, of course; why genuine goods are rule in China and do not chip away at Alibaba’s ego. Alibaba is actually quite different from Amazon. Maybe so much so that the two are not even comparable.
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//Vibeke and Sara
