BUILD INTIME OFFLINE

Retail sales stayed hot, with the Miaojie app taking preorders online during Covid-related lockdowns and beauty counters turned into makeshift mini-distribution hubs, upon store reopening, to shorten inner-city delivery. Over 6,000 sales reps turned to livestreaming to maintain connections with existing customers and reach younger, more digitally native consumers.

BUILD INTIME OFFLINE

Its merchant-facing side of the app doubles as an all-in-one operating system, offering everything from livestreaming, customer communication, online and offline order processing, inventory management, payments, shipping, after-sale services online and more.īy leveraging Alibaba’s technologies and logistics, the app-enabled beauty counters to transcend physical retail spaces. Prior to the pandemic, the retailer had brought most of its retail value chain online. Intime has been merging its offline department sales and operations through Miaojie since 2017. However, with foot traffic reduced early in the year, due to lockdowns, these new, pandemic-motivated consumption patterns would have been impossible to capture without Intime’s online shopping app, Miaojie, which now has over 20 million paid members in China according to the company’s latest statistics. Chinese consumers are comfortable paying over-the-counter for products with steeper price tags than online, mainly for the factor of authenticity and instant gratification, explained Zhao Chen, head of Intime cosmetics.

According to the latest annual report from China Outbound Tourism Development, Chinese tourists made 155 million outbound trips in 2019, and last year, the pandemic swayed this group and their strong buying power to spend domestically.Īs authorized sales channels, high-end department stores like Intime were the next best thing to buying imported luxury goods abroad. Over the past 12 months, China has seen a boom in the market for high-end, imported products, with double-digit growth in luxury goods during the pandemic. For Intime, everyone from CEO to store staff embraced digitization very early on, when few believed in the power of new retail.”Ĭapturing China’s Consumption Boom at Home “At Alibaba, we always say believing is seeing instead of the other way around. “We were lucky to come out on top of this crisis thanks to years of digital innovation and transformation,” said Yan Xuekun, Intime CTO. Three beauty and cosmetics brands, including La Mer, Lancôme and Estée Lauder, each surpassed RMB100 million, and 22 other brands, including those from Japan and Korea, each exceeded RMB10 million in over-the-counter and “ship-from-counter” sales online. Digging into those figures, Intime also demonstrated that physical stores can be a valuable asset for e-commerce, especially in the post-pandemic world.ĭespite ongoing Covid-related disruptions and a slowdown in global retail, the Alibaba-backed department store chain effectively fused its online and offline assets into what’s referred to as “New Retail.” The digital transformation of its 65 locations didn’t just allow it to weather the effects of the pandemic, it also created opportunities to revitalize hundreds of beauty counters across China. The Alibaba-owned department store was the world’s top-performing retailer for 13 of its international beauty and cosmetics tenants in 2020, according to a set of brand statistics Intime released in January. Reports on the demise of China’s brick-and-mortar department stores from Covid and online shopping, it turns out, are highly exaggerated – at least when it comes to Intime.

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