Tmall Opens a New Bridge for SMEs

In the last interview carried out a few months ago with Christina Fontana, Head of Fashion and Luxury Europe at Alibaba, we spoke about the Chinese consumer in the digital luxury era and opportunities for Italian luxury companies. «We have been collaborating for years with top luxury brands from all over the world, many of which are already on our Tmall B2C platform and we have interacted with them to understand their worries and their needs. This is why we launched the Tmall Luxury Pavillion in 2017, an app within Tmall exclusively for luxury brands that ensures them maximum control of their brand image and customer experience. Since the end of 2018, the luxury brands on Luxury Pavilion (more than 110) have also had the chance to select the new store format, called Maison, which allows them to personalize the digital editorial content and their Luxury Pavilion window to totally respect not only their brand image but also their tone of voice and heritage and to offer access to Alibaba’s most recent technologies, such as 3D pop-up shops. When we speak of China, we have to remember that Chinese consumers are “mobile first”. According to market estimations, on-line purchases made on cell phones will represent 74% of China’s total e-commerce by 2020. On Alibaba platforms, transactions generated on mobile devices count for about 90%. Moreover, 65% of cell phone users in China use their smartphones as a wallet and many consumers take their smartphones directly in hand without even connecting to a website».