Omni Channel Commerce – Chinese Property Giant Announces New Venture
With companies now searching for new ways up to step up in the revolution of omni channel commerce, China’s biggest property developer Dalian Wanda Group has recently announced that they are starting a new venture with Internet giants Baidu and Tencent.
Baidu is currently the #1 search engine in China, and Tencent ranks as the fourth-largest company in the world after Google. Wanda will join these companies to integrate online and offline selling in an effort to compete with Alibaba, another major Chinese company whose platforms account for over 80 percent of Chinese online commerce.
“The development of… online-to-offline models is an inevitable trend in e-commerce,” said Dalian Wanda CEO Dong Ce, who added that the joint resources of the three companies would make Dalian Wanda the biggest of its kind.
The alliance will also change the landscape of China’s e-commerce market, and make the nation closer in step with the revolution of omni channel commerce, which concerns a seamless approach to the consumer experience through all available shopping channels, including mobile Internet devices, computers, brick-and-mortar, television, and radio.
Consumers today are expecting more from ecommerce than employees can possibly deliver, so it’s a very smart move for Dalian Wanda to stay ahead of the game. Wanda hopes more will become customers at its shopping malls, movie theaters and hotels through this new e-commerce platform.
The platform will give Chinese mobile internet users the option of searching for a nearby product or service—say a massage, or a movie, or a workout—finding a place that offers it, and making the purchase, through one integrated process.
Wanda said it estimates its shopping malls and other outlets will attract 5 billion customers a year by 2020, making the company the “world’s largest offline commerce platform.” Dong said the company expects to sign up 40 million e-commerce users this year and increase the total to 100 million by next year.
