China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba and leading retail conglomerate Bailan have announced a strategic partnership to explore new forms of retail.
The move sees Alibaba expand its offline presence, leveraging Bailian’s 4,700 bricks-and-mortar stores across 200 cities stores to create an ‘omnichannel’ shopping experience.
The two companies will combine customer data and explore new technologies such as facial recognition and geolocation, and explore big data-driven sales and customer management systems. Bailian and Alibaba will combine their logistics services to streamline deliveries, while Alibaba’s payment system Alipay will be available at Bailian’s stores.
Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang said the partnership with Bailian was an important milestone for China’s retail market, with the “distinction between physical and virtual commerce is becoming obsolete”.
'New retail reimagines the relationship between consumers, merchandise and retail space by leveraging mobile Internet and big data,” Zhang said in a company statement. “It will upend the traditional manufacturing and supply chain, the connection between merchant and consumer, as well as the overall consumer experience. Businesses will increasingly embrace big data and new innovations to better identify, reach, analyse and serve their customers, and their digital transformation will be empowered by Alibaba's ecosystem.”
Ye Yongming, chairman of Bailian Group, said that partnership would reshape the retail industry redefine commerce.
'A new consumer era calls for a new retail approach,” Yongming said. “Traditional commerce needs to embrace innovation and change to thrive if they are to ride atop this new consumption trend. New retail is not just the convergence of online and offline worlds. It also means we need to be able to leverage technologies such as the Internet of Things, AI and big data to provide consumers with new and immersive shopping experiences across channels and product categories anytime and anywhere.”
