Digital business development on the Chinese Market
Digital business development on the Chinese Market
What you should know if you have the Chinese market in scope.
Last June I was at the Magnolia CMS conference in Basel, Switzerland, and during a presentation about user journeys there was an interesting question from the audience. "Why is my website not found on google in China?" I was astonished by this question. Is it this bad? How come people working in the digital industry don’t know anything about the different markets they operate in? Thinking that the whole world is the same if it comes to the digital channels.
From my experience, international enterprises do know about the problems with their sites in China, but they do not have real knowledge about it, let alone act upon it. Which sounds strange, because for most companies we have come across, China is a big grow market.
The situation during the conference, was of course meaningful, instead of a laughing audience, there was silence. The presenter gave the only right answer: ‘Because Google is blocked in China’.
So, what should you know about China and presenting yourself on the digital channels in China?
Great wall of China
In the digital era, China once again has built a great wall around China, the great firewall of China. This has all to do with the censorship in China, which has significant influence on the way your site will be available to potential customers. Not only Google is blocked, but a long list of sites like Youtube, Facebook and Twitter are all blocked as well. So, first of all, a lot of channels that we use and depend on in our digital expressions are simply not available in mainland China.
But this is not the only problem of the firewall, the firewall also slows down all internet traffic, which means your site will load very slow in China. This means that if prospects have found your site, you will already lose a lot of them before they will even read any content because they have to wait 40 seconds on load. This can be solved by either hosting locations in mainland China, or using a CDN solution that has coverage in mainland China (for example Akamai CD). For both solutions an ICP license is required, which will take around 30 days to acquire.
Different User journey
Because of cultural and technology differences, the user journey is quite different in China from the ones in Europe and America’s. The digital channels are used quite differently (like mobile, web, email). For example, Chinese people don’t leave an email address on any website, text messaging is almost not done, it’s all voice messages. Don’t you use QR Codes because they are a failure? Not in China! The social landscape is very complex and changes more rapidly. For everything we use on a daily basis like Youtube, Facebook and Google there are counterparts in China.
Counterfits of all kind of brands and products is also a problem within China itself, so verifying you are dealing with genuine products is part of the user journey as well.
Chinese counterparts
We are so used to big players as Google, Ebay, Youtube and Facebook that we can hardly imagine they simply do not have any market share in other parts of the world. However, in China all these services have counterpart. Alibaba is well known by now, but there are several big players that are active in the Chinese market. Baidu is the counterpart of Google search, and has the largest market share. Compared to Google they are not that dominant, but with a market share of around 50% they are the largest, followed by Qihoo 360 search and Sogue. So, if you are talking about SEO/SEA, these are the search engines to look at. Qihoo 360: the leading browser. Although western IE still has a considerable market share, the main browser is 360. Alipay: doing online sales? Alipay is the leading payment provider. Comparable to Paypal. It supports major creditcards and other payment methods. To give an idea of how big they are; they handle three times the amount of transactions handled by Paypal. Alipay is part of the Alibaba ecosystem. For video there is Youku.
Youtube’s counterpart is Youku. Then we have WeChat, and this is not just the counterpart of Whatsapp.
WeChat:
This is one of the most important digital channels currently in China, so it deserves a little bit more explanation. What started off as a social app, somewhat similar to whatsapp and facebook messenger, is now a comprehensive app, basically combining functionality that we are used to have in different apps. Sending messages, checking in to a flight, booking a karaoke session, ordering food, configuring a new car, buy and sell stocks, it can all be done within one app. With over 600 million active users it’s one of the primary channels. For omni-channel it’s very important as well, because of loyalty programs, brand messaging and, what’s important for your website; about 60% of traffic will come from WeChat.
During the convention it was nice to see that Magnolia CMS now has an API to WeChat, making integration between website and WeChat possible. But still there, if clients ask for integration with WeChat, the answer will be: which part of WeChat?