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Alibaba & JD fight for bigger market pie

0 Comment(s)Print E-mail CCTV.com, November 7, 2015
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There's just less than a week to go before China's biggest online shopping day, the Double Eleven Shopping Festival. It's a one day shopping frenzy that dwarfs even America's Black Friday and Cyber Monday. As the competition is ever more heated each year, it can sometimes get dramatic and colorful between rivals.

It's a fight between a dog and cat, if you look at the logos of JD.com and Alibaba's Tmall. With the latest in the saga being that JD.com launched an official complaint at the State Administration of Industry and Commerce. They say Alibaba coerced its sellers not to sell on other platforms.

An email that JD showed to CCTV reads, "Their platform told us if we don't participate in JD's promotion activities, our booth will be secured, but if we do, our booth will be changed. So we gave up on joining any of JD's double eleven festival activities."

"The State Administration of Industry and Commerce unveiled a policy saying a platform cannot prevent sellers from giving discounts on other platforms during the sales season. The policy came into effect in October. Alibaba has violated this," said Li Xi, vice president of JD.Com.

But Alibaba doesn't agree. In a statement, it said that JD and Alibaba are in different markets.

The competition has also been taken to the street as Alibaba has asked quite a lot of express courier companies to paint Tmall's logo and color on their vehicles, to look more like those of JD.com's.

And this year, Alibaba announced that it will even throw a gala at the iconic Water Cube in Beijing, a traditional stronghold of JD.

On Wednesday, JD fought back saying that they too will have a gala, with the team of the wildly popular show: the Chinese version of "the Voice".

Since the Double Eleven Shopping Festival was born in 2009, it's growth has been staggering. Tmall's sales volume on that day in 2009 was 52 million yuan, and last year, it hit 57.1 billion.

But as the market matures, and competition increases, staying afloat is still a battle.

"Baidu, Tencent, everyone is having a hard time, a lot of hard-work and you can't predict the future," said Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba.

As the war rages on, it seems the biggest benefactors may be the consumers.

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