Fair's e-commerce platform helps buyers and sellers find each other

A foreign buyer browses the e-commerce platform of the Canton Fair for products his company wants in Guangzhou, Guangdong province. [Photo by Qiu Quanlin/China Daily]

Internet technologies will lead to new ways of making deals between overseas buyers and Chinese exporters at the Canton Fair, which has introduced an e-commerce platform to help boost trade, according to a company executive.

"The e-commerce platform, as an important supplement of the 60-year-old fair, will help increase trade efficiency for traditional Chinese exporters and global buyers," said Li Xiaobin, vice-president of Canton Fair E-Commerce Co Ltd.

Organizers of the Canton Fair, or the China Import and Export Fair, launched the e-commerce platform－e-cantonfair.com－in 2013.

"We have introduced a series of new measures, based on big data technologies, to facilitate efficiency of making deals between buyers and Chinese exporters," said Li.

According to Li, a mobile app of the e-commerce platform was launched for global buyers at the 120th Canton Fair, which was being held in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province.

"Buyers are allowed to browse products online, which are marked with QR codes, and visit the exporters' booths quickly," said Li.

Buyers can also publicize their requests for products and can be quickly contacted by exporters, according to Li.

According to Li, the e-commerce platform includes more than 4,500 traditional Chinese exporters and nearly 200,000 global buyers, with about 80,000 deals being reached online a year. In contrast with other e-commerce platforms, which focus on business-to-customer model, most deals done on the Canton Fair's e-commerce platform are large business-to-business agreements, according to Li.

"The traditional Canton Fair, China's largest trade event, has already developed a large number of global buyers and laid a solid foundation for us to help Chinese exporters find potential clients online," said Li.

Pan Xianhui, a sales manager of Ningbo Violet Lighting Electric Co Ltd, said promotion on the Canton Fair's e-commerce platform would be a further step for the company to meet potential buyers.

"We are optimizing information of products on the platform, looking for more overseas buyers," said Pan.

The company, in Ningbo of Zhejiang province, is a manufacturer of outdoor lamps and lanterns and other electric appliances, and sells about 90 percent of its products to overseas markets, according to Pan.

The company's sales declined by about 10 percent year-on-year to about 200 million yuan ($29.7 million) in the first three quarters of this year.

Pan attributed the sales drop to slowing global demand, shifts of manufacturing to neighboring countries and regions, and increased domestic production costs.