New models of e-commerce bring convenient shopping experience for consumers

New models of e-commerce have been on the rise, focusing on consumer experiences and meeting their needs for shopping in different scenarios, such as live-streaming sessions, social media platforms and community-based online shopping.

A staff worker sells children's clothes via livestreaming in Zhili Town of Huzhou, east China's Zhejiang Province, Feb. 8, 2021. (Xinhua/Xu Yu)

Last year, the volume of transactions completed via e-commerce platforms reached 37.21 trillion yuan in China, with the e-commerce sector demonstrating explosive growth on social media platforms and accelerating the digitalization of industries, according to a report on China’s e-commerce development in 2020.

At a meeting on new e-commerce recently held in Changchun, northeast China’s Jilin province, a report on new e-commerce formulated by the National Industrial Information Security Development Research Center and other institutes was released.

New models of e-commerce require a low threshold for salespersons and follow a different strategy in catching consumers’ attention. They can do more to convince consumers to place an order, provide platforms for enterprises in various industries to have their products sold more efficiently, and promote digital transformation so as to catch up with the latest trend, said Hua Ying, deputy director of the school of information with the University of International Business and Economics based in Beijing.

Based on traditional e-commerce shopping scenarios, products are mainly displayed in the forms of pictures and text, which is far from providing the all-round information that potential consumers seek, with many consumers seeking out more information about the products they purchase. However, live-streaming can give consumers an immersive shopping experience, with the new model of e-commerce facilitating a live broadcast that offers real-time interactions between the hosts and viewers, Hua explained.

Song Shuiguan is an inheritor of fruit pit carving, a national intangible cultural heritage in China. During live-streaming sessions that he hosts, viewers can watch the whole engraving process, which increases the chances that they will place an order during the session, with sales conversion rates being higher than on other sales platforms. “In the past, few people knew about fruit pit carving. Without these live-streaming sessions, it’s almost impossible for me to sell the products so easily,” Song disclosed.

Thanks to new models of e-commerce, nowadays it takes less time and effort for many products that were less well-known in the past due to time and location constraints to become readily known and conveniently purchased by consumers.

Another virtue of new models of e-commerce is that they are always consumer-oriented. An industry insider pointed out that in the ecology of traditional e-commerce, consumers look for goods they need; however, in the new shopping scenarios that employ a mechanism to precisely analyze users’ habits, personalized product recommendations are presented to consumers so that they make a purchasing decision more quickly.