Firms join Chinese e-commerce carnival

An increasing number of foreign companies are joining the boom of the e-commerce industry in China, attracted by the profitable opportunities to develop new services in the fast-growing industry.

A wide range of companies from different sectors, from overseas retailers to Internet technology and advertising enterprises, have joined the wagon of the online shopping industry in China.

"To capture the opportunities in the increasingly competitive retail market, organizations must realize the importance of digital capabilities," said Vanessa Zeng, senior analyst at Forrester Research.

Technological innovation has been key in transforming the way e-commerce companies deal with internal information and customer service.

US-based Zebra Technologies Corporation notes that e-commerce industry has proved to be a crucial sector for the company's expansion in China.

Ryan Goh, vice-president of sales and general manager of Zebra Technologies Asia Pacific, explains: "We provide the technology for companies to track items at the warehouses so that they can meet the customers' needs and requests. We can also help customers to track the parcels with our bar code technology".

"China is a very interesting market for us. Although GDP growth is slowing, the domestic market size is still huge. We believe there is still enormous potential for us here".

"There are a lot of applications that we have developed in the US and in more mature markets and that we have not implemented in the Chinese market yet. We can still bring more efficiency and productivity to this market", noted Ryan Goh.

Despite the economic slowdown, China's online retail spending is expected to keep growing and to surpass $1 trillion by 2019, amid an increasing use of mobile phones for online shopping, according to consulting firm Forrester Research.

An increasing number of foreign apparel and footwear companies are signing agreements with China's largest e-commerce players Alibaba and JD.com to sell their products through these platforms. Although these retailers have their own traditional shops and online stores, they have opted to open storefronts in these platforms amid its popularity in China.

Spain's Inditex and Britain's Burberry and ASOS are some of the foreign retailers that have signed deals to sell their clothes in Alibaba's Tmall marketplace.

In March this year, Britain's parcel and delivery group Royal Mail announced that it was also opening a store on Alibaba's Tmall to sell British goods to Chinese consumers, allowing British retailers to have a presence on the largest business-to-consumer retail platform in Asia.

The storefront inaugurated in March will offer British retailers and exporters an accelerated opportunity to access the China market, the company said.