The_Future_of_Global_Retail_Preview

INTRODUC T ION

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own small clothing shop in a wholesale market. The shop was so successful – and Viya so adept at selling – that she went on to open up a dozen clothing stores. She continued to enjoy success until an incident occurred that made her rethink her business model and start anew. A customer came into one of her shops and tried on several outfits. Instead of making her purchases at the counter, however, she turned to her phone and opened up the Taobao app (a digital shopping platform owned by Alibaba) and placed an order online so she could get a better deal. Viya was furious. It was a rude awak- ening. In 2012, she decided to close all her offline stores and move entirely online. The online business proved hard, however, and the early days were, she said, “the darkest period of my life”. She lost hundreds of thousands of dollars from overstocking. Although her online traffic gradually began to grow and sales volumes slowly increased, she was still losing money due to the high merchandise return rate caused by lack of quality control. She had to sell a house to pay her debts. But she persevered. In 2016, Taobao launched a new live-streaming service, Taobao Live. They telephoned Viya and invited her on board. In one of her 2017 live-streaming events, she sold RMB70 million (US$11 million) of Haining fur clothing in just five hours and became Taobao’s top seller. 2 To this day, Viya remains Taobao’s number one live streamer, and it seems there is nothing she can’t sell, whether it’s 430,000 kilograms of rice in 1 minute, 814 houses in 20 minutes or, even more astonishingly, a rocket-launching service worth RMB40 million (US$5.7 million). In the United States, there is a Black Friday. Not to be outdone, China created the Singles’ Day. The date, November 11, was chosen because the number “1” resembles a “bare stick” – Chinese slang for an unmarried man – and “11/11” resembles a row of four single people. The event, also known as the Double 11 sale, is now the world’s largest online shopping fes- tival. Although the original idea was to celebrate singlehood, the discounts were soon extended to anyone looking for a good deal. Vendors compete against each other with aggressive discounting, and the whole nation goes into frantic shopping mode for the day. On Singles’ Day in 2019, Viya sold more than RMB3 billion (US$435 million) worth of products 3 – more than 1% of Taobao’s total sales of RMB268 billion (US$38 billion). By the end of 2019, she had reached an annual revenue of RMB30 billion (US$4.35 billion) 4 – almost on a par