JD.com sets new record for June shopping fest, launches like Prada flagship were key

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Jun 19, 2019

JD.com's ‘6.18’ shopping festival this week hit a record-breaking $29.2 billion in total sale transactions, driven by new product launches “as well as Chinese consumers’ continued interest in and pursuit of higher quality,” the company said on Wednesday.

That desire for quality was also helped by the arrival of new-to-JD brands launching during 6.18. Prada opened flagships for its Prada, Miu Miu and Car Shoe labels and Farfetch also recently launched its flagship, instantly adding 3,000+ brands to the overall offer.

JD fashion and lifestyle international business president Kevin Jiang said: “International brands are increasingly recognising the power of JD when expanding into China’s burgeoning luxury market, and we look forward to helping Prada connect with China’s sophisticated consumers.”

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The company also said the shopping jamboree that ended on June 18 saw evolving consumer behaviour as shoppers from lower-tier cities “traded up” and “showed greater interest in brands,” similar to consumers in higher-tier cities.

Brands have spent years targeting the huge number of increasingly affluent consumers in top-tier cities, but with the many more shoppers based elsewhere also growing more affluent and brand-aware, the business opportunities are huge.

JD said transaction volume growth was twice as high in lower-tier cities than the overall growth on the website and the percentage of new users from lower-tier cities was also much higher than the percentage of new users overall. 

It also said that two sales and marketing campaigns involved participation from over 100 million users. One was a “birthday red envelope” campaign, which encouraged and rewarded consumers for sharing on social platforms. The other engaged users to share, vote for and win shared rewards for their cities.

It’s also interesting that the company has been using “a powerful way to market to Chinese consumers”, called consumer-to-manufacturer (C2M). This uses big data and consumer insights, to help brands adjust their manufacturing and marketing approaches “with the goal of providing consumers with products they want before they even know they want them.”

The 6.18 event saw the transaction volume of new products and C2M products rising 289% year-on-year, it said.

JD added that its technology enhancements were key for the event too with 91% of orders that came from its fulfilment centres being delivered same-or next-day. And its smart customer service robot fielded more than 32 million enquiries, “of which it solved 90% of those independently, freeing up human customer service for more complicated enquiries.”