Chinese consumers buy a lot online, mainly buy through mobile phones, and they covet foreign brands. A Shanghai-based startup is catering to those preferences with a mobile app that lets Chinese shoppers see and buy foreign goods in live videos.
The Bolome mobile app broadcasts daily shows of at least one hour in which hosts examine and discuss products in overseas shopping malls or at the headquarters of advertisers in Japan and South Korea. During each show, Bolome features 20 products that consumers can order directly through the app.
“Our Inspiration comes from a fish seller in Tokyo, Japan,” Amanda Lei, co-founder of Shanghai Bole Network Technology Co. Ltd., the developer of the app, tells Internet Retailer. “He sells outstandingly well by showing live video of fish from Hokkaido on his iPad to local clients. Live video gives shoppers more product information and increases their confidence in shopping.”
Each video broadcast highlights about 20 products that consumers can purchase on the spot. During the video, shoppers can text messages to each other through the app, ask questions of the hosts and express their opinions on the products on display in polls. There is at least one hour of live video per day.
Three hundred global brands, mostly cosmetics and housewares companies from Japan and South Korea, are selling through the Bolome app, Lei says. She says sales through the app total tens of millions yuan per month. (10 million yuan equals US$1.5 million.) Sales from the daily live video presentations account for 35% of sales through the Bolome app and the conversion rate from live video is 30% higher than when consumers normally shop through the app, according to Lei. Besides selling through the live shows, Bolome lists products for sale as a typical shopping app would. The company buys products from brands, stores some products at warehouses it operates in Japan and South Korea and ships items to China once consumers order them.
Since Bole introduced the app in July 2015, 3 million Chinese consumers have downloaded it and about 60,000 watch each day’s video, Lei says. To encourage more consumers to watch, Bolome provides coupons and free samples to video shoppers during each broadcast.
“Live video helps Chinese consumers know our brand better. We have invited several lucky Chinese consumers of Bolome to visit our Korean headquarters,” Kim Gwang-seok, founder of South Korean cosmetics brand Charmzone, said recently during a live show on Bolome.
South Korean electronics company LG Electronics Inc. and Chinese search engine giant Baidu are among the companies that have invested a total of $43 million into Bolome in three financing rounds. The company now has 200 workers, half of them based in Japan and South Korea. Lei says the company is considering expanding into the United States and Europe this year.
Other e-retailers in China also use video to promote online sales. Taobao.com, the big online shopping portal operated by China’s Alibaba Group, recently said it would show more live video in its app. In a recent promotion, U.S. cosmetics brand Maybelline sold out about 10,000 lipsticks in 24 hours by organizing a video show on the Taobao app, according to Taobao.
For a full report on the opportunities for foreign brands to sell online into China, read “Open Door Policy,” which appears in the November 2015 issue of Internet Retailer magazine.
For more Chinese e-commerce data, please click here for the new-released Internet Retailer 2016 China 500.
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