Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, is looking to provide same and next day deliveries to more than 600 million mainland Chinese consumers, with the opening of its own flagship online store on JD.com on Thursday.
That launch comes nearly a year after Walmart and JD.com, China’s biggest online retail service provider by revenue, formed a strategic alliance and more than a month since Walmart’s British supermarket chain Asda opened a store on the same platform.
Ben Hassing, the senior vice-president of e-commerce at Walmart China, stated thatWalmart is committed to providing the most trusted retail experience to consumers in China.
It assured mainland customers they would be buying only authentic, quality goods with categories including food, consumables, general merchandise, toys and apparel since all items are sourced through the same supply chain system that Walmart China’s network of stores use.
Walmart have made a US$50 million investment last October in New Dada, the joint venture between JD.com and delivery specialist Dada that operates the mainland’s largest on-demand logistics and online-to-offline grocery platform.
By the end of March, New Dada had partnered with 80 Walmart stores and 165 Yonghui Superstores to provide consumers with one-hour home delivery of groceries ordered through the JD Daojia Dada app. JD.com invested 4.3 billion yuan (US$624 million) to acquire a 10 per cent stake in Fuzhou-based Yonghui in 2015.
JD.com had 236.5 million active customer accounts at the end March. Orders placed through mobile accounted for 81 per cent of the total orders fulfilled by the company in the first quarter.
The deeper alliance between Walmart and JD.com could help bolster e-commerce spending on the mainland, already the world’s largest online retail market.
JD.com posted total revenue of US$28 billion last year, compared with rival Alibaba Group’s turnover. On the other hand according to Forrester research Mainland China is forecast to become the first market to reach US$1 trillion in total online retail sales by 2020, driven by a rise in mobile e-commerce transactions.
