Ymatou, a cross-border e-commerce site founded in Shanghai, plans to open 1,000 offline retail outlets in a hundred cities in cooperation with local governments within 3 years, with the goal of covering between 200 and 300 million emerging consumers in a third-level cities, said Zeng Bibo, the company’s founder and CEO.
He noted that these offline retailers will adopt a “more franchised autonomous” style and cover six major urban teams in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze Delta, the Pearl River Delta, Bohai Bay, central and southern Liaoning. Province and southwest China, serving emerging consumers in third and fourth-tier cities.
In terms of business model, new retail outlets will come with iconic outlets, spanning 2000 square meters and are basically located in recognized commercial districts of provincial capitals, combining some cutting-edge formats, such as live global streaming and communiqué. Fix experienced 800 square meter retail outlets and 400 square meter network retail outlets in and below third-tier cities.
Ymatou also signed a contract with the Chongqing Yuzhong district and announced that its first offline store will be in Chongqing, with its headquarters in the southwest and the flagship store established in the city this year.
In addition, the company is betting on the online e-commerce segment, which has a difficult sales channel for the classic industries, as more and more consumers switched to buying food online amid the COVID-19 pandemic. It aims to feed 1,000 live broadcasters who are expected to sell products worth more than one hundred million yuan ($14.5 million).
Founded in 2010, Ymatou is a consumer-to-consumer market, or C2C, dedicated to cross-border e-commerce. To date, it has more than 80 million users in 627 cities in China and employs more than 80,000 foreign buyers in 83 countries, in addition to the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea and Australia.
China’s cross-border e-commerce sector has grown exponentially in recent years, and middle- and high-income buyers in the country are not easy to diversify and personalize products and services.
Market consultan consulting iiMedia Research said the country’s cross-border online purchases are expected to be successful in sales of 12.7 billion yuan this year.