Online retail giant Amazon has opened another shop on Alibaba’s Tmall marketplace in China. The company, who is one of Alibaba’s main rivals, is stocking food, toys, kitchenware and woman’s footwear as part of its latest attempt to gain ground in China’s huge retail market. The company opened a Kindle store on Tmall.com last year, having had an online presence in the country since 2011.
Half of China’s business-to-customer transactions go through Tmall. Experts say that big-name companies would be foolish to ignore China’s lucrative e-commerce market. Tmall is an online marketplace for Chinese retailers that provide payment processing services whilst selling none of its own products. Amazon bought Chinese entertainment company Joyo.com in 2004 before rebranding it as Amazon.cn in 2011. The new shop is being seen as valuable new channel for engaging with Chinese customers.
Other Western companies with a presence on Tmall include Asos, Inditex and Burberry. Despite the rivalry between the two companies, an Alibaba spokesperson said: “We welcome Amazon to the Alibaba ecosystem and their presence will further broaden the selection of products and elevate the shopping experience for Chinese consumers on Tmall.”
Alibaba recently announced plans to take on Amazon’s cloud computing business by opening a data centre in Silicon Valleym with its Aliyun division already being a competitor to Amazon Web Services in China.
