Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC)

Based throughout the world and Hong Kong the HKTDC supports business developing trade with the Chinese market.

HKTDC holds many day conferences world-wide. We would recommend attending one of these conferences to learn more about China and Hong.

HKTDC support businesses looking to trade in Asia. In some cases this supports includes a grant. If visiting Hong Kong arranging a meeting with HKTDC. We always found it to be interesting to understand "first hand" what Hong Kong is developing and HKTDC has an extensive business contact list.

Chinese British Business Council (CBBC)

Based throughout the UK and China the CBBC supports business developing trade with the Chinese market.

Please have a look at their website for ideas and information.

Most countries / cities have supporting councils / organisations for local and international trade. We happy to add appropriate links to these pages. Please email any links you may have for consideration: Request website link

Understanding Pinyin (BBC)

There are not PC key boards with Chinese characters available for general typing. The key board would have to be very large to hold the 1000’s of characters required.

While voice recognition and PDAs (mobile and Tablets) enables you to draw the Chinese characters using the standard Latin characters and Pinyin does enable Chinese people to type very fast in Chinese and creates the ability for none Chinese speakers to read Chinese. E.g. many of the road signs in China are written in Chinese and Pinyin.

The BCC website has a few well written pages on Pinyin which in very helpful getting started with the Chinese language.

Baidu

Baidu was the Google replacement in China. It filled the gap left in the market by a “blocked”. In China. The issue with Baidu, if there is, you cannot determine in the results which are Ad placements and which listing which best matches your results. This is different to Google where Ads are clearly marked.

Shenma

Shenma will believe is the most interesting development in search engine in the last year. Shenma, part of the Alibaba family, is trying to bridge the gap between a traditional search engine and e-Commerce site; Tmall, JDBuy, Amazon, etc. and more interesting independent on-line store. Their growth of the Chinese search engine market, 10% (April 2018), in just over year. With fast market growth, Shenma is finding traction market.

Qihoo

QiHoo360 started in PC security. In part, it could be compared to Norton 360. The major difference, is it is free of cost it and has access to you PC software data which is uses to make recommendation and display adverts. Many Chinese PC install 360 to protect their PCs / mobiles from hacking which it is has been successful in preventing. In doing so, when 360 Search Engine installed on PC their search engine in promoted, like Microsoft used to automatically install their IE browser.

Sogou

Sogou is part of the Tencent software collection. Sogou links to the rest of Tencent software product range e.g. QQ and WeChat. Given this integration with WeChat and QQ the Sogou growth in the Chinese Search Engine has not happen. This we believe is due the growth in use of Tencent WeChat platform which contains its own search engine.

Tmall and Tmall Global

Tmall is part of the Alibaba group. These e-Commerce services was created from Taobao. Alibaba wanted to create an e-Mall for more “Upmarket” / “exceptive” goods.

It started with Tmall for Chinese domestic market and then Tmall global for the international products.

While Tmall global is based in Hong Kong when you search in Tmall in China you see links to Tmall Global products therefore opening the Chinese market to overseas e-Commerce.

Taobao

Taobao is part of the Alibaba group. This was one of the original Chinese domestic e-Malls’

Taobao also started “Batchelor Day” in Chinese. This was started before the USA created Cyber Monday. Batchelor Day is on the 11th November each years and creates a billons of $US of on-line trading in a single day.

Day all Chinese e-Malls are part of “Batchelor Day” including overseas business trading in the Chinese market.

WeChat

Calling WeChat an e-Commerce site may upset persist as WeChat defines its self as a “services platform” not specifically a shop or social media.

In the same way you can create your own store inside Tmall, Amazon, etc. you can create a store inside WeChat. There are two main difference:-

• Each store is individual and the store products are not sold against each other. Therefore it is not e-Mall, i.e. not an on-line department store.
• Each store is independent and do not share the same service levels, processes and procedures. Their social median customer satisfaction keeps the stores or good trading practices.

Chinese business have very successfully created stores inside WeChat is owned by Tencent.

It is not clear at this stage how overseas companies can use this platform inside China as trading rules and regulations only allow trading inside China on the internet if you own a Chinese business.

JDbuy

JDBuy is partly owned by Tencent group who also own QQ and fast growing WeChat.

Tencent have integrated WeChat and QQ into JDBuy.

The growth in the use of WeChat has resulted in very large growth in the use of JDBuy.

Based on current growth, JDBuy could overtake Tmall and Taobao as main e-Mall platform in China.

China Amazon

China Amazon was one of the first e-Malls in China. It is Joint Venture business between Kingsoft, Chinese business originally trading on the internet as Joyo.com, and Amazon.

In the early days of trading it was very successfully.

This business was taken by Taobao, Tmall, and JDBuy mainly due to better operating process, end to end integrated system, e.g. social media, payment gateways, and marketing. Between Alibaba and Tencent they have over 80% of the internet users in their databases.

China Amazon is still trading in China with less than 2% of the e-Commerce market.

DangDang

DangDang has been trading on the internet in China sinace 1998.

It's main products range is books, music, and software. DangDang also has a large range of fastion products.

DangDang is part of the small e-malls in the Chinese e-Mall market.

Suning

Suning started online selling electronics goods.

These days Suning sells a full range of products and merchandising.

Yihaodian

Yihaodian was developed as an on-line food and daily groceries by Walmart.

Walmart have sold the business to JDBuy and return have shares in JDBuy.

This e-commerce store is design as a mobile site / APP. It does not look good on a deak top.

Jumei

Jumei successfully trades in cosmetic products.