Interesting that AuMake (company in the Australian...

Interesting that AuMake (company in the Australian retail/corporate daigou space) sees an opportunity like this moving into CBEC. It does not quite sit with the Aus-China tensions narrative either - they are working with an Alibaba affiliate. It also potentially adds to the channel mix for A2M.

Excerpt below:

AuMake taps social network for China delivery push (The Australian, 9 October 2020)

Export sales platform Aumake.com.au has launched an e-commerce marketplace that can help Australian companies sell goods into China.

It’s not the first to do so, with China search platform Baidu and e-commerce platform Alibaba long-established operators.

AuMake’s speciality was selling goods through both physical and online stores, but it is now launching a social e-commerce marketplace that sells goods through a multitude of social network and e-commerce sites.

The new regime will offer increased penetration into the Chinese market and a reach to younger Chinese consumers through peer-to-peer “influencers”. These could be friends, family or popular online identities.  AuMake said it had sold more than $125m of Australian and New Zealand products to “Asian influencers” over the past three years, with more than $60m of sales in the last financial year.

Australian milk and formula products and health supplements represent more than half the products sold, followed by consumables, make-up and skincare, and woollen products.

“The benefit of social e-commerce is the power of family, friends and KOL/KOCs (key opinion leader, key opinion consumers) to recommend and drive purchasing decisions,” AuMake said in a brochure.

Goods will be sold through content-sharing platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu and Mogujie, membership-based and team-purchase platforms.

AuMake said it was launching the platform in partnership with Shenzhen Jiezhou Technology, part-owned by Ant Financial, an affiliate of China’s Alibaba which operates Alipay, a huge mobile and online payments platform established in 2015.

It said China’s social e-commerce market was estimated to grow to 2419.4 billion yuan ($499bn) in 2022.

AuMake said it would leverage contemporary social media marketing features such as peer-to-peer review, gamification, short-form video and group-buying capability to create a social e-commerce marketplace specifically tailored to the Australian market.

It had launched a marketing campaign to support the new online platform launch, targeting over 15 million views during October across Australia, New Zealand and China.

Executive chairman Keong Chan said Asian consumers were increasingly using integrated platforms to buy products based on opinions within their social network, and less on what the brands, retailers or advertisers told them. “The social e-commerce marketplace we will create in the next stage will be specific to the Australian market, to allow high-quality Australian brands to form a closer connection to Asian influencers who can in turn relay brand stories to their social network and allow them to buy it immediately on the same platform,” Mr Chan said.