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China Sets The World Record for the Biggest Sales Online in One Day

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Singles Day China

This was the doorway of an express company in Guangzhou on November 12th 2012. Its warehouse could not accommodate all the packages received from Taobao on “11.11 Singles’ Day – Online Shopping Festival”. Never heard of it?  On that single day, 72 million online-shopping-packages were sent out. This amounted to RMB19.1 billion transactions which is equivalent to about US$3 billion. The Singles’ Day promotion was created by Taoba and targets single men and women of China. It is neither traditional nor official  but for this one special day, Taobao’s Tmall  offered huge discounts to online shoppers. [Read more…]

China – the next multi-channel frontier

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Pioneers of the past were told “go west”. In the world of multi-channel retail, this has been very much the case in the last few years as the US has seen an explosion in online sales. Like most pioneers many have ended up with arrows in their backs so now, as China’s retail world is rapidly swinging towards multi-channel formats, the opportunity to take what has been learnt into a new frontier is huge. [Read more…]

How to build an online retail offer – a guide for CPG teams

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I’ve blogged a few times about the increasingly urgent need to develop an online retail offer but I’ve yet to give clear guidance as to what CPG manufacturers should be doing. Let me be clear in this, I have no doubt that leading manufacturers are already thinking hard about this but my perception is that most of this thinking is being done in global and regional offices far from the action. So here is my view of what should be done to address the opportunities and threats that the inevitable growth of online sales present [Read more…]

An Online Grocery Shopper’s Manifesto

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Even though in my day job I consult and speak on all things shopper marketing, I have a dirty secret: I hate shopping! Especially, I hate shopping for groceries. I hate the time it takes, the struggle to find just the thing I’m looking for, the frustration I experience when what I’m looking for has been deliberately hidden in another aisle. I hate the angst I experience in queuing (Am I in the right line? Why do I always choose the slowest one?) and I hate the sense exhaustion I feel when my family and I get home and have to unpack bags and bags of “stuff”. So why do I do it? Why not simply go online and get it all done over a cool glass of wine in my garden? [Read more…]

What Wal-Mart’s Latest Acquisition in China Tells Us About The Future of E-commerce

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I’m not a gambling man but I’m prepared to bet that many people who read of China’s approval of Wal-Mart’s acquisition of 51% of Yihaodian this week probably said “who?”. They would most likely be readers from outside China who have never heard of this super-star of e-commerce. [Read more…]