Tmall

Tmall.com is a business-to-customer (B2C) e-commerce retail website managed by Alibaba Group, and it is China’s biggest B2C platform. Tmall.com is used mainly by brand cautious users primarily interested in lifestyle and fashion products.

Tmall.com was launched in 2008 to provide a high-end shopping experience to Chinese users searching for high-quality branded products. The platform is open to China’s registered brands. Still, it has a global version of Tmall Global designed to help international brands not registered in China to sell products directly to Chinese users.

Domestic and international brands create a storefront on Tmall.

com to provide customers with more personalized experiences. After launching the storefronts, businesses are granted permission to design their themes, giving them the impression that they operate their B2C websites. As of March 2019, Tmall.com had 180 000 brands listed in 3700 categories on its platform.

As of February 2018, Tmall.com had a staggering 500 million users on the platform and hosted over 250000 brands on their e-commerce space by March 2020. In February 2019, the websites occupied 61.5% of China’s B2C e-commerce market.

Tmall.com’s market strategy is focused on referrals, with 50.82% of the traffic coming from referrals, with s.taobao.com as the leading referring site with 60.04%. Another marketing strategy employed by Tmall.com is direct with 45.21%.

In 2017, Alibaba Group established Tmall Innovation Center (TMIC), a retail innovation arm of Tmall.com. By June 2018, TMIC had corroborated with 800 brands. This arm was designed to help Global Startup businesses enter the Chinese market and multinational companies innovate more. In 2020 alone, 45% of U.S based brands joined the Tmall.com platform, with 80% of international brands on Tmall.com having no physical presence in China by December 2016.

TMIC helps brands identify opportunities by examining market data through online surveys and offline product testing. TMIC also allows businesses to analyze customer data and insight from the Tmall.com platform to design and develop products that appeal to Chinese customers. To help brands succeed in the Chinese market by consulting on best market entry strategies, marketing research, product selection, and sales projections.

Alibaba Group understands the Chinese population’s customer needs, and Tmall.com provides its customers with the best selection in various categories to satisfy their product needs.

Tmall.com platform is straightforward and financially attractive for local and international brands to join. Business brands that sell through Tmall.com receive 60 -70% of the retail price. However, the Tmall.com fee structure depends on the different business solutions.

The long-term goal of Tmall.com is to be the leading platform in providing businesses with the necessary infrastructure to do e-commerce.

The whole www.tmall.com website is in the Chinese language. Tmall.com was designed to serve the local Chinese and international businesses to sell their brand name products to customers in Greater China.

In 2018, 80% of brands used the Tmall.com platform to launch their new products to the Chinese market, earmarking its ability to identify new market demands. The gross merchandise value transacted via Tmall.com stood at $534 440 million in 2020.