Our China Blog
No More Cash: Chinese Payment Systems Usher New Era
Chinese digital payment systems are helping to create a true cashless society and it’s happening faster then anywhere else in the world.
The rapid adoption of digital payment systems continues to transform Chinese economy and society in unprecedented ways. Nowadays, handling cash seems like a thing of the past with nearly everyone in China using one of the two main payment systems: AliPay or WeChat Pay.
When is comes to digital payments, China is, undoubtedly, the technological leader. Once Chinese payment systems have become the primary payment method online, brick-and-mortar stores started to adopt them for offline payments as well.
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5 Unique Taobao App Features That Boost Sales On Mobile
More than half of the sales on China’s largest ecommerce platform, Taobao, are going through its mobile app. Browsing through Taobao products on a smartphone has become one of the most popular past times of Chinese mobile users after using WeChat. Here are the five top unique Taobao app features that are the largest contributors to its efficiency and popularity.
5 unique Taobao app features that drive its mobile sales
Picture search function read more…
Behind Douyin Success Story: How Did It Pull It Off?
Douyin (a.k.a. Tik Tok) is the most successful Chinese digital phenomenon that seems to spring out of nowhere to dominate the pastime of Chinese youth. According to the American research company Sensor Tower, the international version of the app was the most downloaded iPhone app worldwide, totaling 45.8 million and surpassing Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Let’s have a closer look at Douyin success story and the reasons behind it.
Douyin, which literally means “shaking sound” (or “vibrato”) in Chinese, has, without a doubt, created some major shockwaves in Chinese digital world and has become the top success story, particularly in short videos space. read more…
6 Bizarre Body Image Weibo Trends That Went Viral
Last few of years have seen the rise of several bizarre body image challenges that went viral on Weibo, one of the most popular Chinese social media networks. Those Weibo trends attracted millions of views, likes and retweets as well as great deal of criticism and mockery. Let’s have a look at some of the most popular ones.
Six most popular body image Weibo trends
Weibo trend #1: hairy armpits selfies
Baidu SERP: How to Take Advantage of Baidu Zhidao Marketing
Baidu Zhidao is China’s equivalent to Quora or Yahoo Answers and one of the most linked knowledge base sources. Baidu Zhidao Marketing is an alternative way to get to Baidu top search results.
What is Baidu Zhidao
Baidu Zhidao (百度知道) literally means Baidu Knows is a Chinese language collaborative Web-based collective intelligence by question and answer which is built and run by Baidu. read more…
Understanding Baidu SERP: Increase Exposure with Baidu Baike Marketing
Baidu Baike is China’s answer to Wikipedia and one of the most trusted source for information. Baidu Baike Marketing offers brands a backdoor access to Baidu top search results.
As China’s largest search engine, Baidu handles approximately 3.3 billion queries per day. In comparison, Google is only slightly ahead with 3.5 billion queries per day globally. Unlike Google, vast majority of Baidu searches come from China. read more…
Choosing Between PPC vs. SEO for Chinese Market
SEO and PPC are the two basic options for boosting traffic to your website. Choosing between PPC vs. SEO for Chinese market is often a difficult decision to make.
Up until the middle of 2016, Chinese PPC, especially with Baidu, was, on average, delivering better returns than SEO. This was due to several factors:
- First, the search results, especially for popular terms, were dominated by paid ads. In some cases, hardly any organic results would be displayed in the first page;
- Second, there was little visual distinction in Baidu between paid and organic results and most people couldn’t even tell the difference.
Basics of China Keyword Research: Measuring Search Trends
One of the foundations of successful online strategy in any market is keyword research and China is no exception. Since the familiar tools such as Google keyword planner are irrelevant here, China keyword research must be done with the local equivalents.
How WeChat App Is Changing Restaurant Business in China
WeChat app is transforming daily lives of millions of people in China. This is how it helps restaurants to run more efficiently and deliver better value.
Recent proliferation of Western style coffee shops and fancy restaurants gave rise to the new trend of ordering food and drinks with WeChat rather than using traditional menus.
Besides the fact that WeChat app is already installed on practically every smartphone in China, vast majority of users have also connected their accounts to bank cards and use WeChat Pay on regular basis. read more…
Why O2O in China Keeps Growing
O2O, which stands for Online to Offline (or, sometimes Offline to Online) has been one of the hottest topics in marketing in the last couple of years. It has been identified as a trillion dollar opportunity by TechCrunch as well called the industry’s stupidest acronym by Tech in Asia. While some marketers still disagree on how the term should be used, O2O in China has been growing by leaps and bounds and is getting ahead of most other markets.
Basically, anything in the digital world that brings customers to the physical stores or makes them buy products and services that are traditionally sold offline can be classified as O2O. read more…
Prospects of Facebook Marketing in China
As almost everyone knows, one of the unique features of Chinese digital marketing landscape compared to the rest of the world is seeming irrelevance of Facebook, one of the world’s largest digital advertisers. As a result, Facebook marketing in China isn’t a channel that marketers would typically consider adding to the mix. The platform has been blocked by Chinese government since 2009 and the only way to access it from the Mainland is by using VPN service.
Eight years of Facebook’s absence in China gave more than enough time for local competitors to emerge and, ultimately, dominate the market. While some of the earlier Facebook Chinese clones fell into relative obscurity, WeChat and Weibo took the lead and have reached the position of almost unrivaled dominance. read more…
Infographic: Online Behavior of Chinese Millennials
In this post, we’d like to share a new Infographic by Hylink on Chinese Millennials – people born in between early 80s to early 2000. Just it is the case with other countries, Chinese millennials are often described as “digital natives”, having grown up along with the development of new technologies.
What is unique in China’s millennials who are born around 90’s is the their size – 211 million which is already 5 times larger than their US counterparts. Perhaps not surprisingly, they are also glued to their phones – 50% reported checking their cellphones every 15 minutes.
Social media is the main source information for 70% of Chinese millennials and they spend almost twice the time of Americans watching online videos. read more…
How to Succeed in B2B Sales in China
Selling to Chinese businesses can be a daunting task, especially for a Western company which is not experienced enough in operating locally and expecting Chinese following the decision making process that is common in North America or Europe. One of the principal differences is the fact that most Chinese businesses are not run in the same structured manner as in the West, which also defines their purchase cycle.
First of all, in B2B settings, many stages of this cycle run concurrently rather than sequentially: request for a quote can be issued before all the potential suppliers are contacted and shortlisted or the spec is finalized. read more…
How international businessmen can improve their Chinese？
Having witnessed the rapid growth of China’s economy over the past decade, more and more foreigners started to consider going to China to develop their careers.
Infographics: Chinese Internet Ecosystem And Stats
Chinese internet ecosystem has always been a whole different world with none of the platforms imported from the West ever managing to have any impact on this market.
China Coronavirus Outbreak: Separating Facts from Fiction And Our Analysis
There is a hardly a bigger story than the recent China coronavirus outbreak. The news and stories online and especially in social media range from doomsday scenarios to “just another harmless flu” with various conspiracy theories in between.
In this post we gathered some up-to-date stats and a translated piece from respectable Caixin site followed by our own analysis.
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Infographic: China Internet in One Minute
What’s happening in one minute on China Internet? Actually, quite a lot! The folks in TechInAsia went on to to figure that out, producing this impressive infographic. It sums up some of the action that takes place in China’s digital online world in just 60 seconds.
Here are just some of the most impressive nuggets on what has happened on one minute on China Internet:
10 Interesting Facts About China’s Richest Man Jack Ma
Jack Ma, the legendary founder of Alibaba and China’s richest man has just announced his retirement. Here are some of the less known facts about him.
There are many things that make Jack Ma unique among China’s business elite, such as his humble upbringing and lack of political connections from the start. Also, as opposed to most founders of successful internet and tech companies in China such as XiaoMi (Lei Jun), Tencent (Ma Huateng) or Baidu (Robin Li), Jack Ma never had any technical background or training.
10 interesting facts about Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma read more…
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