At the start of my Carefree Living Blog posts, I mentioned I’d be focusing on anything nice in life, including what facilitates it. With that, one of most post focus and categories is Online shopping. Amongst the first lot of posts back in 2015 were on online shopping and Taobao (basics of how to start off- set up an account, What and what-ifs in Taobao shopping, Kick-off to buy, Taobao does not have fake products?, and how to instant chat with sellers to get any related info and help), anyone who wants to jump onto the bandwagon of online Taobao shopping (with more than 1 billion goods listed) can refer to the above links for step to step instructions.
In this post, I’d like to expand on the other big names in e-commerce or online shopping platforms in China – TMall and JD, and what are the differences and commons. Firstly, these represent 2 major e-commerce platform competitors in China, with Tmall and Taobao- both operated by Alibaba (which also operates AliExpress- another e-Commerce platform targeted mainly at overseas and b2b market) under Jack Ma; the 2 T’s together it takes about 50% online market in China, with record-breaking sales every year, and every sale events usually matched with major national holidays (CNY, Labour Day, Double 11 Festival – bachelor’s festival, Double 12 (Dec 12 Festival), etc). JD (or JD.com | 京东) is Pony Ma’s (who owns about 20%) or Tencent’s platform- it takes about 25% of China’s online e-Commerce. Refer to this for more details of the market shares, etc. The backbones of these 2 competitors would explain the differences between them below.
Tmall.com or Tian-mao (天猫) is actually a recent latecomer that was launched in 2008. This is directly competing with JD on ‘luxury’ brand-name products (e.g. you can buy Dyson electrics on TMall’s Dyson Flagship store there). Taobao users are usually confused (or simply don’t bother) about the differences with Tmall, in fact, Taobao simply and very often transfer buyers from Taobao to TMall without asking the buyer or buyer basically don’t know (nor care?) as the only difference may be just the slightly different name/logo and the slight page theme color change from orange to red. But usually, users would not normally be directed back from TMall to Taobao- I surmise that this may be related to some hidden sale strategies. The reason why I said buyers may not bother or even notice these subtle differences between the 2 arms belong to Alibaba is that every backend support seems to be the same – same Taobao account accesses both, same payment methods, etc. The only difference may be dealing with different individual sellers for different products. Taobao is the biggest eCommerce website in China, together with Tmall, it accounts for around 80% of the market. What sets Taobao apart from other established eCommerce websites is that it’s a C2C (consumer to consumer) website and was started years before Tmall and its competitors.
Now on JD – I mentioned that Taobao has more than 1 billion goods item listed (although some are repeated and being sold by different suppliers or stores with quite different prices (those with significantly different prices (for the same item) would be differentiated by different conditions – e.g. warranty, some refurbished, some fake(?), etc); JD, on the other hand, has considerably less, and it typically focuses on electronic (3C) and consumer products. Some other differences are listed below for comparison. Of worth to note is that China tops the world in moving into a cashless (and even credit-card less) society with almost all payments made by digital wallets (just mobile phones) with the 2 said e-commerce mother companies as key players again.
The mobile payments market is controlled by Ant Financial’s Alipay, which held a leading 53.8% market share in Q4 2018, and Tencent’s WeChat Pay, which, along with fellow Tencent-owned payment service QQ Wallet, commanded a 38.9% share. All powered by mobile payments (you only need your mobile phone- no wallets, no credit cards, no cash needed). One can buy or pay for anything (from a popsicle to a luxury car, including donations to street-side beggars) in China by scanning QR codes using their mobile phones via AliPay or Wechat Pay.
In Q4 2018, China’s third-party mobile payments industry was estimated to be worth 47.2 trillion yuan ($6.8 trillion) per Analysys, as cited by TechNode. This eclipsed the country’s total retail sales for all of 2018, which came in at 38.1 trillion yuan ($5.5 trillion). And starting from November 2019 (hence this post), both are accepting international credit cards and opening the platforms to foreign sellers (typical international renown brand names) to enter into the Chinese consumer market and beyond. Tmall has been expanding its coverage to outside China and has already got strongholds in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, and SE Asia (Malaysia, Singapore), ditto for JD. But as of May 2020, Tmall has announced and is promoting ‘real and serious’ expansion into the ‘World’ (including Korea, Australia, New Zealand) with more items and much-improved delivery logistics (which I think is key to success) such as Free Postage for some, official grouped deliveries (to save delivery costs), local products (e.g. items for sale cover fresh local produce in Melbourne and Sydney (coming soon)). On the other hand, JD has sites for Thailand, Indonesia, Russia, and Spain.
| Market share (in China) | Items Focus | Quality focus | Delivery | Prices for same items listed | Flexibility | |
| Taobao/ TMall | 50% | clothes, smaller items, … basically anything you can think or cannot think of. Some brand name goods with the labels removed | less emphasis, but very customer oriented with almost always instant replies on queries since many are smaller family owned businesses, some without any shopfront | varies | typically cheaper (extremly competitive) | typically better |
| JD | 25% | consumer items, electronic goods (3C), brand name goods | more (seen to be more reliable) | typically faster | typically relatively higer | Good |
| Mother company | Payment backbone – users connect their credit/ Debit cards to their Alipay or WeChat wallet | Cards accepted | |
| Taobao/ TMall | Alibaba (Jack Ma) | AliPay (支付宝) – Ant Financials (53.8% market Share) | Visa, Mastercard, Japan’s JCB and Singapore’s Diners Club cards. |
| JD | Tencent (Pony Ma) | WeChat Pay (微信支付) – Tencent’s (along with fellow Tencent-owned payment service QQ Wallet, commanded a 38.9% share) | Above + American Express |
Credits and Sources
China, G. (2019). Top Difference Between Taobao, Tmall & JD.com? – Marketing China. Retrieved 7 May 2020, from https://www.marketingtochina.com/e-commerce-in-china-know-your-marketplaces/
Kharpal, A. (2019). Tourists to China can finally use the country’s massively popular mobile payment systems. Retrieved 7 May 2020, from https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/06/alipay-wechat-pay-allow-tourists-in-china-to-use-foreign-cards.html
Yes, Foreigners Can Use Alipay — This Is How | SmartShanghai. (2020). Retrieved 7 May 2020, from http://www.smartshanghai.com/articles/smsh/yes-foreigners-can-use-alipay-this-is-how
7 Top Selling Products on Taobao.com. (2019). Retrieved 7 May 2020, from https://www.export2asia.com/blog/taobao-top-selling-products/
REPORT: Chinese fintechs like Ant Financial’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat are rapidly growing their financial services ecosystems. (2020). Retrieved 7 May 2020, from https://www.businessinsider.com/china-fintech-alipay-wechat?r=AU&IR=T