How Amazon Lost in China
This is how Fortune newsletter explains how Amazon lost out in China on its ecommerce operations.
Amazon’s failure to gain traction in China is a riddle...The U.S. online colossus came to China in the early 2000s, then ramped up its investment in 2004 with a $75 million purchase of Joyo.com, China’s biggest online bookseller at the time. Amazon built warehouses and data centers and created programs to help Chinese merchants sell on its site. But it refused to compete with local rivals who offered free shipping and overnight delivery without requiring minimum orders. This analysis ... blames the Seattle powerhouse’s defeat on dreadful web design. Amazon’s share of China’s $378 billion e-commerce market is less than 1%, according to iResearch China
How did the Chinese do it? Many Chinese experts have linked the success in entities like Alibaba, JD.com and Luckin to China’s “996” [9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week] work ethic. Founders of Alibaba and JD have defended the 996 culture also.
It is amazing what the impacts could be - making Amazon look lost in one of the world's largest markets! Maybe Nigerians need to work harder!
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Linkedin Summary
Amazon's market share in China dropped to 0.8% from 20% about six years ago. China has not restricted Amazon at the level FB, Google, etc had experienced. Amazon lost purely on market forces working.
They have put many reasons including Amazon making its website look clean (a big business mistake in China - Chinese like clustered and buggy sites). But I like this one most: Amazon "refused to compete with local rivals who offered free shipping and overnight delivery without requiring minimum orders"
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