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Amazon Quits China Market

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Re: Amazon Quits China Market

#101

Post by cthalupa »

zzh8829 wrote: post #47
JamesBarney wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious is this because jd.com is far ahead of American Amazon or because Chinese Amazon is far behind American Amazon?

Having lived in both China and US/Canada, I would say jd and taobao is far ahead of American Amazon. Some key differentiators include delivery speed, UI/UX, product offerings and the ability to chat with merchants instantly.

Amazon has same day delivery and prime now in a lot of the US - I can get the same order before 10 get before 18 from Amazon in my town.

I don't have a ton of experience with UI/UX on JD or TMall, but my experience with alibaba and aliexpress hasn't left me particularly impressed there. But I also have no problem with Amazon's interface and experience in general, which I know lots of people don't like.

Product offerings have never been an issue for me. The overwhelming majority of my online purchases come from Amazon, and the ones that haven't made recently have been pretty niche - handmade Japanese chef knives, limited run board games, manufacturer direct audio equipment...

I can get assembly for furniture, etc., as an add-on for a lot of purchases on amazon, which someone mentioned as a differentiator in another thread.

I can't talk to the merchants instantly, but I don't know that I really want or need to. I rarely have a question for them, and when I have, I generally don't want to get bogged down in a live chat or phone call or whatever, so the email system on Amazon works fine for me.

Re: Amazon Quits China Market

#102

Post by throwaway44562 »

cletus wrote: post #36
fantasticsid wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They failed because they were not able to adapt to the Chinese market/have any competitive advantage against alibaba or JD which is the point the article is trying to make. None of what you mentioned is alluded in the article.

My contention is that wouldn't matter. If they did adapt to the Chinese market and seriously started to eat market share from the likes of Alibaba I GUARANTEE you the rules would change to Amazon's disadvantage.

Nah, I doubt it. Just look at how successful Apple and Microsoft are in China.

Other brands too. You don’t see the government changing the laws so Li-Ning can beat Nike.

Re: Amazon Quits China Market

#103

Post by chapium »

sytelus wrote: post #30
cletus wrote: post #3

This is why I don't get why companies--tech giants in particular--kowtow to China in the hopes of getting access to the Chinese market. It will never happen. At least, it won't be open access. You'll have to play by Chinese rules (ie integration with the Great Firewall, storing data in China, probably integration with social credit and so on). Worse, there might be (basically forced) "IP transfer". Even after all tha…

Perhaps you didn’t read the article. This has nothing to with government interference. Local players in China are very strong with likes of Alibaba doing massive shopping festivals that easily rivals Thanksgiving. Two day delivery is China is considered slow and nothing to be proud about. On the top of this, it looks there were control issues where leaders at Amazon.cn weren’t empowered to make decisions. I actually…

My inlaws got antsie when a delivery took 4 hours to show up. Home delivery is very fast in China.

Re: Amazon Quits China Market

#105

Post by doktrin »

product50 wrote: post #32

Amazon has literally won everywhere else in the world. But in China they were slow at execution? Does this read right to you? Or maybe there is a regulatory angle which no one is talking about because...China.

> Amazon has literally won everywhere else in the world.

Disagree. I live in northern europe and haven't used Amazon since moving here. Every single product is "doesn't ship to your location" etc., there are domestic and local competitors that are superior - to say nothing of the China based suppliers, and of course amazon has sub-par customer service even in the US - but there at least their infrastructure and product catalogue let them carry the day without breaking a sweat.

I'm sure that if you live in a market that is well served by Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.de they offer a user experience that's at least broadly similar to that in the US, but e-commerce is an evolving beast. As far as I can tell amazon hasn't changed meaningfully in the last 5 or 6 years (and their website is famously, almost comically, static), only a matter of time before someone else starts beating them at their own game even in core markets.

Re: Amazon Quits China Market

#106

Post by adventured »

paganel wrote: post #45
product50 wrote: post #32

Amazon has literally won everywhere else in the world. But in China they were slow at execution? Does this read right to you? Or maybe there is a regulatory angle which no one is talking about because...China.

> Amazon has literally won everywhere else in the world I've mentioned it in another comment, too, but Amazon is not present in my Eastern European country (Romania), where Alibaba beats them by a large margin (even though they're also not officially launched here). I've just done a quick search and it seems Amazon is not winning it in Russia either, nor in Ukraine, to say nothing of India. As such, to say that they…

> and it seems Amazon is not winning it in Russia either, nor in Ukraine

Russia is a very protected hyper nationalistic market, in exactly the same way China is. Their culture is segregated off from much of Europe in terms of being 'westernized.' Instead of westernized, it's a quasi separate, rather differentiated Russian culture (all the way down to the music). It's why Russia has Mail.ru, VK and Yandex, instead of eg Google dominating on search.

Ukraine is a partial extension of what is dominate in Russia, so for example VK and Yandex are very popular in Ukraine as well. Most of Ukraine fluently speaks Russian, and they've been culturally and politically dominated by Russia for a long time. This is why there has been a push by some prominent nationalist politicians in Ukraine recently ("Army, language, faith") to emphasize their own culture and language, and de-emphasize Russian culture and language. If you go to Kharkiv - Ukraine's second largest city, near the border with Russia - the people there often can't speak their native Ukrainian (they can usually read it), everything is in Russian.

Re: Amazon Quits China Market

#107

Post by johnchristopher »

chapium wrote: post #103
sytelus wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you didn’t read the article. This has nothing to with government interference. Local players in China are very strong with likes of Alibaba doing massive shopping festivals that easily rivals Thanksgiving. Two day delivery is China is considered slow and nothing to be proud about. On the top of this, it looks there were control issues where leaders at Amazon.cn weren’t empowered to make decisions. I actually…

My inlaws got antsie when a delivery took 4 hours to show up. Home delivery is very fast in China.

What kind of thing were they ordering and what was the distance traveled by the package, if you don't mind my asking ?

Re: Amazon Quits China Market

#108

Post by baybal2 »

cromwellian wrote: post #89
baybal2 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alibaba outsourced logistics to a big extend. There is their own Cainiao, but it is just a franchise front for small delivery companies. They pay market rate, and that's nothing unreal when most Chinese live in densely built up apartment blocks (a big difference from USA)

The density only partially helps, because there is still an overhead in even a single delivery that has to be paid. I'll give you an example, 饿了吗 will deliver food for 5-10 RMBdelivery fee in Shanghai. I would often order say, 生煎包 for 8 RMB and pay 5RMB delivery. A guy on a delivery bike would take like 15-30 minutes to deliver, and I often noticed they only delivered one order in my condo (his bike had nothing else…

The lunch delivery market is not what I meant, but more conventional ecommerce. I know for sure that in that market, companies do make break even.

In Russia, we had same day delivery even in very first eCommerce site back in nineties, and even e-groceries. That was just much a much smaller market, and the fact that 90% of country's economy was in Moscow back then was helping.

China today is not much different with 5 megacities making 90% of eCommerce trade volume.

Are stationed in China?

Re: Amazon Quits China Market

#109

Post by ajross »

sytelus wrote: post #30
cletus wrote: post #3

This is why I don't get why companies--tech giants in particular--kowtow to China in the hopes of getting access to the Chinese market. It will never happen. At least, it won't be open access. You'll have to play by Chinese rules (ie integration with the Great Firewall, storing data in China, probably integration with social credit and so on). Worse, there might be (basically forced) "IP transfer". Even after all tha…

Perhaps you didn’t read the article. This has nothing to with government interference. Local players in China are very strong with likes of Alibaba doing massive shopping festivals that easily rivals Thanksgiving. Two day delivery is China is considered slow and nothing to be proud about. On the top of this, it looks there were control issues where leaders at Amazon.cn weren’t empowered to make decisions. I actually…

> Two day delivery is China is considered slow and nothing to be proud about.

Within Beijing/Shanghai/Guangzhou, I'm sure that's true. Can Alibaba get a package delivered to Tibet in two days? Really this is just expressing the fact that effectively all of China's industrialized economy is concentrated in three urban centers.

Re: Amazon Quits China Market

#110

Post by intuitionist »

ajross wrote: post #109
sytelus wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you didn’t read the article. This has nothing to with government interference. Local players in China are very strong with likes of Alibaba doing massive shopping festivals that easily rivals Thanksgiving. Two day delivery is China is considered slow and nothing to be proud about. On the top of this, it looks there were control issues where leaders at Amazon.cn weren’t empowered to make decisions. I actually…

> Two day delivery is China is considered slow and nothing to be proud about. Within Beijing/Shanghai/Guangzhou, I'm sure that's true. Can Alibaba get a package delivered to Tibet in two days? Really this is just expressing the fact that effectively all of China's industrialized economy is concentrated in three urban centers.

Are you counting Shenzhen as part of Guangzhou? Surely it’s a center of the Chinese industrial economy.

And while they might not be industrial centers, there are tens of millions of middle-class Chinese in places like Chongqing, Wuhan, Nanjing who presumably order stuff online sometimes.

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