China Digital
Chinese E-commerce Site Turns it's Customers into Models
The belief that many women like to check out other women’s appearances has recently been confirmed in a recent study. Vancl, a Chinese e-commerce site has been aware about this long before the study took place. They understand that woman have this instinctive desire to get ahead and as a result encourage their customers to post pictures of themselves modeling their attire. Everything from hair products to dresses, Vancl encourages their customer’s innate desire to see other women and be seen by other women. Vancl is like Uniqo in the sense that they sell their own brand of clothing, adding all these elements together what you end up with is an interesting e commerce social experiment. Where the customer of the bought item of clothing ends up being the model, potential customers can now see previous customers dressed in the item that they are thinking about purchasing. Although there are a few male users, so far Vincl market base users and consumers mainly consist of females. When a user clicks on a photo within Vancl Star, the user will be able to see their own photo and also a e-commerce listing for the product their wearing. This listing will also include both the ‘add to cart’ button and the price of the item. Vancl is a bit similar to Social media sites such as Twitter and Sina Weibo in the sense that the user will be able to have both fans and followers and other users clicking either the ‘likes’ or ‘favorites’ icon. The user also has access to her gallery of images as well as access to others. Vincl has made it easy for the user to share their photos by being connected to a range of Chinese Social Networks, such as Sina Weibo , Renren, and Tencents Qzone.! Awesome. This helps both the good looking user and product to get a bit of internet fame. Vancl Star has recently launched a mobile app for the Android system but are still in the process of working out the kinks in their app for the iOS based system. This in addition to their better known web app will hopefully equate to more growth for the future of Vancl. However in Shanghai’s cut throat e-shopping industry, recent data has shown that Vancl is actually struggling, despite their approach of using female customers to help advertise their products. If we look at Vincl latest market share figures this year in Q2, we can see that they have lost market share which resulted in a drop among the ranks of China’s e-commerce sites, pushing them back to 10th place! Ouch! Vancl may be the biggest Clothing internet retailer in the country, but they have many challenges to face within such a cut throat industry Vancl is hoping for a 50 percent growth this year but when one takes a look at the IPO one should understand that it’ll be a tough road ahead for Vancl.
Source: Tech In Asia
China Digital
Search Engine Usage Trends in China
In a recent study about the Chinese Internet user population, it shows that the Chinese internet population has emerged to a whopping 591 million members, that means that in every 1.6 seconds a new internet user joins the baffling large Chinese internet population. Go-Globe.com has recently released in infographic that provides a much more in depth view about the search engine usage in China. It covers everything from revenue structure to the market share of major Chinese search engines, etc. When see that almost 500 million users spend the majority of their time engaging in activities relating to search services, online video watching, news and information and e-commerce. As a result of these activities search engine revenues are being foreseen to skyrocket in the next 4 years form a recorded 28.06 billion dollars in 2012 to a 75.35 billion dollars in 2016. Wow! Currently the leader of the Chinese Search Engine is Baidu taking about 65.74% of the population and market share. The runner up is 360.cn racking up 16.58% Go-Globe took a close look at the revenue structure of major search engines and found that 76.5% of their revenue came from keyword advertising and 14.6% came from display ads from ad networks and 5.3 form navigation advertising. This information tells us that keyword advertising is still king. When it comes to mobile search traffic the momentum is definitely picking up, in 2012 we see that mobile search traffic maintained 94% with a decline of 20% in PC search volume. In 2012, the date shows that 96.9 of Chinese internet users uses Baidu’s mobile search. When it comes to mobile search engines Baidu is Number one. Another interesting thing Go-Globe found was that when it comes to search volume between mobile phones and desktop the desktop showed 85.2% frequency as opposed to the 56.2% frequency in mobile phones, which means that the population of mobile phone users is growing in China. The average search frequency of Chinese Internet user’s ranges show that about 17.5% of the Chinese internet population search more than 5 times a day, 22.9% bout 1 to 4 times a day and 8.8% search several times a week. The other 50.7% only occasionally search. That’s a lot of searches! Online shopping ranks high in the most information searched for by Chinese Search Engine users with a 44.6% of the population using their laptop device and 22.9% using their mobile device. With these statistics and data one can assume that the demand for online shopping is in expansion and will continue to grow with staggering numbers in the foreseeable future.
Source: iresearchchina
China Digital
66% of Asian Businesses Plan to Increase Digital Marketing Spend
According to research done by Econsultancy and Asia Campaign-Pacific, 66% of Asian businesses plan on increasing their budgets for digital marketing expenses in the next twelve months. Comparing that percentage to the 19% of Asian businesses who plan on increasing their offline marketing budgets, we can see how the focus of marketing is shifting. At present, Asian businesses spend approximately 29% of their total marketing budgets on digital marketing. As far as the ROI goes, 66% of the companies surveyed have said that up to 50% of their total revenues come from digital marketing, and about 16% say that they derive more than 70% of their revenues from investing in digital channels. So, based on this data, businesses are earning approximately 31% of their revenue from such investments.
Source: Tech In Asia