JD.com partners with Shopify to give merchants access to Chinese shoppers

Chinese retail giant JD.com is partnering with e-commerce service platform Shopify to allow merchants access to JD.com’s users. American Shopify stores will be able to start selling their products in China within four weeks compared the normal registration period of one year to launch direct sales.

Under the partnership stores will be able to list their products on the JD Worldwide e-commerce platform, which has 550 million active customers.

AP News reported the service will take advantage of JD’s network of 1,300 warehouse and 200,000 delivery personnel in China, the companies stated. They also said it will provide translation and other support networks.

JD.com reported sales rose 33 percent over a year earlier to 218.7 billion yuan (34.4 billion dollars) in its latest quarter.

The future of e-commerce is the marketplace model

The unstoppable rise of the online marketplace model, operated by the likes of Amazon, JD.com and eBay, is driving the largest fundamental shift in consumer spending since the emergence of eCommerce in the 1990s, a report by OC&C Strategy Consultants has found.

OC&C’s report, Trading Places, predicts that by 2025, spending through the leading online marketplaces will overtake the vast majority of eCommerce outlets in established retail and travel categories. When considering aggregate spend, marketplaces in those categories are set to catch up with direct eCommerce ahead of 2025. In 2020 alone, marketplaces accounted for over 1tn dollars of total western consumer spend in these categories, and 40 percent of total consumer spend online.