中国零售商推出网上购物新模式

China's retail tycoon Suning, which has a history of 23 years, proposed Cloud Shopping scheme this year. It wants to integrate online and offline retailing businesses, to create new values for consumers and the industry.

Sun Weimin, the vice-president of Suning describes the new mode of shopping as "brick and mortar stores + e-commerce + retailers".

"Suning's Could Shopping consists of two parts: first, we will combine online and offline channels and networks together. Next, we will progress from the old combinations of services and products to the combination of prices. Through these measures, our online and offline services will be officially combined. That is to say, we will have built a new Online-to-Offline or O2O compounded platform. This is the first stage in the development of Cloud Shopping."

Sun Weimin notes that Cloud Shopping is an open resource platform for everyone in the industry.

"Suning's Cloud Shopping is building an open platform with online and offline channels. We want this platform to open in both ways. Hence we say O2O plus openness. This is the basis of Cloud Shopping. So what is this open platform? We use our resources: brick-and-mortar stores and online stores to gather consumer data to support this platform with logistics and money. We then share all these resources with our partners who include manufacturers, dealers and retailers; they can all sell on this platform. We will provide consumer flows, logistics, money and data and then realize our own values."

The Chinese government also favours such complementary advantages.

Wang Desheng, a senior official from the Ministry of Commerce says the combination of online and offline retailing is mutually beneficial for e-commerce and the traditional retail market.

"The combination of online and offline retailing complements each other's advantages. Traditional retailers are speeding up their online services. Some build websites themselves. More prefer to combine online and offline services to gain new strengths. For online retailers, they will improve their public image and user experiences on the basis of their original strengths."

Suning is also advancing in the international market.

It merged with Japanese appliances chain Laox in 2009, making it the first Chinese company ever to do so. It also merged with Hong Kong's electronics chain Citicall in the same year.

Sun Weimin says that international development is good for building experiences as well as promoting Chinese products.

"China has the fastest growing market with the most potential in the world. Our focus remains in China. We entered Japan and Hong Kong in 2009, as a trial for our international expansion, especially with respect to Japan. We want to learn from Japan's developed retail market and at the same time, consolidate our domestic business with Japanese design, branding and management experiences. We are also using the platform in Japan to promote Chinese products to the world."

According to Suning's plan, it will explore the market in Southeast Asia this year and European and American markets in 2015. Its O2O platform may be able to break past the traditional boundaries of geographic restrictions.

For CRI, this is Lucy Du.