If you have read “How to start selling your product and setting up a suitable store in China?“, by the time you are reading this post, you may have opened your shop and have got several orders. However, after a week or two, you possibly find that the number of total orders are going down, and the store and products are no longer getting visitors. This is because both JD, Taobao and Tmall will drive traffic to new stores to improve its impressions and click rate I.E. product page visits. However, free traffic support only lasts for a limited time and the main traffic source will shift to organic traffic or shared link access traffic.
JD`s traffic source tool:
Taobao Tmall traffic source tool:
Can free traffic maintain your daily store visits?
The free traffic on both JD and Tmall platforms is based on the product category. The resources on the platform, such as search pages, list pages, recommendation pages, platform first image posters, etc., displays the product multiple times. Keep in mind that because it is free traffic, the traffic provided is low quality and inferior, the platform will not refine the detailed customer source information. Therefore, the store’s views, visitors, product exposure, inquiries, orders and other data will be massive, lowering the ranking and comprehensive score of the store in the industry category, affecting the reputation of the store, word of mouth, brand image and eligibility to participate in platform activities. In serious cases, the comprehensive score of the store will be rejected for many times if it fails.
JD’s free traffic composition:
Taobao Tmall free traffic composition:
At this time, the official platform will give you some tips. The news notifications often received by the store often include information about Taobao through trains直通车, Taobao express trains快车, discount activities, etc. Your store needs to use some traffic promotion tools of the e-commerce platform: platform activities and advertising.
Both e-commerce platforms offer free and paid options
JD and Taobao have launched marketing events on their own platforms, such as March 8th Mother day, November 11th Chinese Single´s Day, June 18th summer sales and June 1st Children’s day. Most of the marketing events supports the platform´s merchants stores by generating impressions and traffic to the product pages. By issuing a large number promo codes, providing product discounts and preferential incentives, JD and Taobao support their storefronts by providing the proper infrastructure to make the event happen.
JD Marketing Events Center:
Taobao Tmall Marketing Events Center:
Applications for marketing events are mostly free of charge and stores can participate in events only after the platform´s approval. For example, events are generally running for a short term. The largest and longest ones are annual large-scale promotion events followed by periodic seasonal promotion events (festival promotion events, e-commerce membership events) and specific industry/category events. The most famous events are the annual large-scale events such as 618, Double 11 and Double 12.
The importance of participating in marketing events
If a brand offer high-end products, but does not participate in any promotion event, without the platform´s traffic support, it is hard to grow its sales and does not matter even if the brand is well established and famous. JD, Taobao and Tmall marketing activities have extensive and huge promotion channels, just like a large “funnel” to concentrate the platform’s traffic channels into one marketing activity, giving massive traffic support to the participating brand stores. In particular, large-scale marketing activities can attract shop traffic in a short period of time, increase product exposure and the number of shop followers, and increase the rate of product sales, thereby making it easier to increase brand awareness and word-of-mouth, and quickly occupy the market.
JD’s Events UI for Storefronts
Taobao Tmall UI for Storefronts
According to the online sales monitoring data from “Starmap Data” during the 2021’s 618 Sales Period (from 00:00 June 1, 2021 to 24:00 June 18, 2021), the total volume of online transactions was 578.48 billion yuan, up 26.5% when compared to 2020’s data. Tmall remained at the top, followed by JD and Pinduoduo in sales volume.
Source: Keycity
In short, participating in official marketing events supported by the platforms is a periodical, high efficiency, cost-efficient and high profitable strategy as at the same time it leverages the brand’s marketing and boosts its sales volume. For new brands which want to establish themselves quickly on an e-commerce platform, event campaigns must be done every time they are available