Should shops stick to their own lanes? Amazon dominates the online world of ecommerce but ended up shuttering its till-less Amazon Fresh stores, including all 19 in the UK, five years after opening them. Shein, big in fast-fashion ecommerce, incited a backlash when it set up shop inside Paris’s chic BHV department store.
Not so in China, which arguably wrote the playbook for “online-to-offline”, known as O2O. JD.com, an ecommerce group best known for electronics, added food deliveries to its roster earlier this year. Both it and Alibaba have gone full throttle on omnichannel, with stores where customers can eat, order, pick up or request delivery.
Specific Chinese characteristics explain some of this. These include the technological leapfrog effect, which took shoppers directly from cash to phone swiping, and ubiquitous super apps. Massive urban populations help too, especially on speedy deliveries. China has 800-odd cities with more than 1mn people against America’s dozen or so.