Founder and chairman of JD.com Richard Liu have always sought to make the customer experience the backbone of his company. When he started the business as a small booth in an electronics bazaar in the late 1990s, it was his devotion to providing quality products instead of the counterfeit and poor quality pieces most often found in markets at the time that saw it grow into a chain of a dozen brick-and-mortar electronics stores in just five years time. Recognizing the ability online shopping had to empower consumers earlier than most, in 2003 he transitioned his business completely online and in doing so built it to be one of the world’s largest e-commerce companies.
Expanding the JD.com
Since then, JD.com has only continued to improve on its ability to provide customers with a better and more convenient online shopping experience. In 2010 it became the first e-commerce company in the world to launch same-day and next-day delivery services, and today has the ability to do so for over 90 percent of its orders. As customer needs evolve so too has JD.com sought to find solutions to meet them, with their most recent push being towards omnichannel expansion?
In 2016, JD.com launched its first physical retail store in over a decade. It has since expanded to a wide variety of physical stores such as E-Space, JD Home Appliance Store, JD Pharmacy, JD Convenience Store, and JD Auto Service. In total, JD.com now has over 15,000 stores across China, covering 25,000 towns and countries as well as 60,000 administrative villages. More than just retail locations, these stores are fully integrated with its website, allowing customers to have a shopping experience with seamless transitions from online to offline and vice versa.
JD.com’s most recent omnichannel enterprise has been “The J Shop,” an upgraded format for the company’s fashion and lifestyle business. The online channel of The J Shop is available on the company’s app, featuring interactive shopping experiences and exclusive online offers such as gift sets and limited edition items. It brings together some of the top beauty and lifestyle brands both domestic and globally and with them their most popular products, and has set in place strict quality control standards to guarantee a reliable and superior shopping experience.
Improving the Customer Experience
In tandem with the launch of the online channel, JD.com also opened The J Shop physical stores in four cities across China. Located in Xi’an, Shenzhen, Chengdu, and Yinchuan, these pilot locations provide a fresh and exciting experience for JD.com customers, with the 335-square-meter store in Xi’an carrying roughly 300 brands in 150 categories of goods including cosmetics, kitchenware, home textiles, and more. There is also a live-streaming studio located inside the store, enabling customers to not only view the live stream in real-time but even join in themselves and interact with some of their favorite live streamers for a more comprehensive shopping experience. In a true omnichannel experience, customers can make purchases in the store immediately but also have the option to scan the corresponding electronic label on the product and purchase it online.
The other three stores are a collaboration between JD.com and the Italian luxury retailer COSCIA. These locations offer nearly 2,000 select products in categories such as luxury, designer brands, and lifestyle. The operational advantage of COSCIA’s position as a chain store provided the company with the perfect partner through which to pilot The J Shop in other areas of the country.
JD.com has also made known its intention to include more omni-channel experiences than ever before in its annual 618 Grand Promotion this year. The super sale of the season celebrating the company’s birthday, the festival has become a massive international shopping event that now even sees participation from other competing retailers. JD.com’s on-demand retail service “Shop Now” has seen its transaction volume triple year-over-year in the first quarter of 2022, and is currently connected with more than 150,000 offline retailers including Walmart stores, Apple authorized resellers, SEPHORA, allowing customers to receive a wide variety of products to their doorsteps within the hour, but often even faster. By accessing JD.com during the 618 Grand Promotion this year, customers in a number of cities can also get exclusive coupons to use towards millions of brick-and-mortar stores, ensuring they are always shopping in the way that is most conducive to their personal lifestyle.
QR Code
The omni-channel experiences being provided by JD.com aren’t exclusive to China. In the Netherlands, JD.com recently launched four robotic shops called “ochama,” combining the words “omni-channel” and “amazing.” Located in Leiden, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Utrecht, the shops merge online ordering with pick-up locations and home delivery service and are the first physical retail stores JD.com has opened in Europe. On the schema app, customers can find a wide range of products such as fresh and packaged food, household appliances, beauty, motherhood and childcare products, fashion, and home furnishings. Once ordered through the app, the fleet of robots located in ochama’s automated warehouses receive the information and begin to pick, sort and package the order. All a customer has to do is go to their nearby ochama pick-up shop and scan the QR code provided at checkout which will prompt their order to be delivered to them by conveyor belt. Alternatively, customers can simply have their order delivered to them, creating a truly seamless shopping experience in which the customer can decide what is best for them.
JD.com also has a number of other omni-channel endeavors it has installed over the past few years. JD Mall, the upgraded version of the company’s original E-Space omni-channel retail experience store, is a 42,000 square-meter store in Xi’an. Occupying five floors, the store has over 200,000 items available from over 150 brands both international and domestic. Through a WeChat Mini Program created for the store, customers can scan QR codes for each item they wish to purchase and place orders. Additionally, JD Mall features tech devices and experiences such as holographic projection, virtual reality equipment, intelligent robots, a live-streaming room, and a transparent computer room. There are plans for another JD Mall in Nanjing and others are anticipated in the future.
Final Words
JD.com has even created an omnichannel fresh food store called SEVEN FRESH. Currently operating 48 stores in 13 cities across nine Chinese provinces plus Beijing, the stores have seen a year-over-year gross merchandise volume growth of 95 percent and plans for this year include opening an additional 27 locations in northern and southern China. Additionally, JD.com has worked to integrate omni-channel approaches into the SEVEN FRESH business model, recently giving customers the ability to have their on-demand delivery orders from stores within a radius of three kilometers delivered to them within 30 minutes.
The future of retail is taking an omni-channel approach to it, in which there is a convergence of the experiences provided by offline locations and the convenience of online shopping. JD.com has built a name for itself as an internet company, but as it continues to expand its omni-channel offerings, this view is certain to shift even more in the coming years to a new breed of retailer which empowers its customers for the better.
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