Chinese Marketing Practices

1. The business model: in China, the most popular e-commerce open source program is ECSHOP, the business model is to have free version and business version. Business version will provide technical support, but there is no important different features. They also sell webhosting, and customized development. Western one is taking prestashop (a french one) as example, it provides basic features freely, but charge money for some modules and templates, like filter, payment, logistics, etc., also the basic features have already some of these modules, but if you want to easily code some features or have some advanced features, you can pay for the modules that you like. Modules are provided by prestashop or community, some of them are free, but mostly they charge money.

2. Prestashop is better in modulization.

3. Western e-commerce open source programs including zencart, magento, prestashop, are more friendly in SEO than chinese ones.

Author: Lei YANG

Almost all Chinese SNS has the same layout, and similar features. However, recently one SNS website aiming to make friends (dating) is a little bit different.

Background info: taobao.com accounts for around 82% of e-commerce in China, and people called commodity there as ‘treasure’, therefore, ‘treasure’ is the symbol of commodity on the Internet business.In Chinese, the handwriting and pronunciation of ‘treasure’ is the same as ‘baby’, in pinyin, it’s ‘bao bei’, and taobao’s bao represents ’bao bei’, therefore, Chinese give taobao’s tao the meaning of ’looking for’ as a verb. 

51taonan.com, a ‘feminist’ SNS website which is the supermarket only for women, all ‘bao bei’ are men. 51 in Chinese means ‘I will’, ‘tao’ still means ‘looking for’, and ‘nan’ means ‘men’. It’s in fact the dating site, but the manner of dating is that women choose their ‘bao bei’ and put them into cart. The layout is friendly to find men, like, on the left column at homepage for women, there are’bao bei’ at the same city, and ‘find bao bei’ at top banner which leads to advanced search. There are still lots of interactive features and feeds like normal SNS website, but more focus on looking for, interacting with, and dating with men.

The site is still new, its slogan is ‘we are not looking for men, but looking for romantic’, which tells us, the more fanny thing is about the precess but not only the result. It has been released at the second half of Jan this year, and has now 26K+ daily average IP, and 448K+ daily average PV according to alexa.

More information about this site, please refer to: http://www.globaltimes.cn/www/english/metro-beijing/lifestyle/education&careers/2010-02/507799.html

Source: CNNIC

According to CNNIC, Chinese netizens reached 384 million by the end of December 2009, which increased the penetration to 28.9%. Mobile netizens increased 120 million during one year, and reached 233 million users, which is 60.8% of all netizens. There are 30.7 million users that surf internet only through the mobile, accounting for 8% of all netizens.

Broadband users reached 346 million, increased 76 million compared to the year of 2008. Countryside netizens keep increasing also, and reached 106.81 million, accounting for 27.8% of all netizens.

According to CNNIC survey, 83.2% of netizens choose to surf internet at home, 30.2% choose to access internet at office. The top usages of internet in 2009 are online music (83.5%), news (80.1%), search engine (73.3%). However, the e-commerce related usages increased dramatically last year, by 68% on average. Payment usage increased by 80.9%, which is the fastest one. Travel booking, stocks online dealing, e-bank, and online shopping users increased by 77.9%, 67.0%, 62.3%, and 45.9% respectively. According to CNNIC, online shopping transactions scale reached 250 billion RMB in 2009, and will increase more in the coming year of 2010.

Author: Lei YANG

1. CMS (Content Management System):

 1) PHPCMS www.phpcms.cn/

 2) DEDECMS www.dedecms.com/

 3) PHP168 www.php168.com/

 4) SupeSite www.supesite.com/

 5) Empire CMS www.phome.net/

 6) KingCMS www.kingcms.com/

 7) AKCMS www.akcms.com/

 8)  BlueCMS www.bluecms.net/

2. SNS

 1) UCenter Home (php+MySQL) u.discuz.net/

 2) SpaceBuilder (asp.net) www.spacebuilder.cn/

 3) ThinkSNS (php+MySQL) www.thinksns.com/

3. shop/e-commerce (B2C, B2B)

 1) ECSHOP (php+mysql) www.ecshop.com/

 2) ECMall (php+mysql) ecmall.shopex.cn/

 3) YxShop (net+sqlserver) www.yx-shop.cn/

 4) Destoon B2B (php+mysql) www.destoon.com/

 5) MvMmall (php+mysql) www.mvmmall.com/