Just one year after its launch in China in 2013, Evernote was already claiming 4 million users. Last year, China has become its second largest market with reported 20 million users. Yinxiang Biji, it’s Chinese company, has recently announced its plans to go public in China.

In fact, Evernote has succeeded where many famous Western tech giants, such as Google or Facebook, have failed miserably. So, what was it that they were doing right? Let us break down main factors of Evernote’s remarkable success in China.

Navigating around Chinese censorship

Evernote has always stressed its main functionality as a private data storage for individuals, not a social platform and broadcasting service. Although, the original version does include some social functions such as note sharing, they have been either removed or played down in the Chinese product. This enabled Evernote to stay away from troubles with China’s powerful internet censors.

Speed and functionality

The company has realized that the key to good usability in China is the speed of synchronization and access – the core of its functionality. Keeping data centers in US would severely impact connection speed and turn away potential users, making it impossible to acquire critical mass of local early adopters. Hence the decision to setup local data center, which was also its first one outside of US.

Privacy assurance

Company’s CEO, Phil Libin, has published a letter assuring subscribers that Evernote takes securing the privacy of user data in China very seriously. The letter emphasized Evernote’s adherence to its three laws of handling user data by making it personal, protected, and portable.

Employing social media

Evernote quickly embraced Weibo and WeChat, two most popular Chinese social media platforms. The company has also been publishing its own blog filled with useful tips about efficient usage of its services while tailoring the message for the local audience. The blog was encouraging users to write about their personal travel experience with connection to Evernote apps – another good example of user engagement.

Localized customer service

When it comes to Chinese users, Evernote quickly understood the importance of speedy and high quality customer service . The company has been recognized for its efficient response to issues and complaints, both through social media, like WeChat channel, as well via chat on their website.

Successful choice of brand name

Evernote has made a smart choice in picking its Chinese brand name that proved to be an excellent fit on many levels. Evernote’s Chinese name is Yinxiang Biji (印象笔记) and can be translated as “memory notes”. Incidentally, the name also incorporates character 象, an elephant, that is used as Evernote’s logo. The name is both memorable and descriptive of the core functionality of the service.

Integration with local services

Part of Evernote’s China localization strategy was releasing API for integration with local apps. As a result, along with its support for traditional services like IFTTT and Pocket, its Chinese product integrates local services such as WeChat, Weibo, Duoguo (a restaurant guide website) UC browsers and others.

Localized Evernote Market

Most recently, Yinxiang Biji has launched its local version of Evernote Market store with products specifically selected and marketed for Chinese customers. Evernote’s fully functional web-based outlet was noted for its good user experience and original offers. It also itegrates Alipay as its online payment solution.

The post Successful China Marketing Strategies: Lessons from Evernote first appeared on Sampi.co.

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There are considerable challenges in achieving success in the mobile apps market. Those have to do with launching and promoting an app in the right store, figuring out monetization model that works and is sustainable, overcoming China-specific technical challenges and, finally, making sure that your product is not easily copied by a competitor.

Here is the list of 10 most important factors to consider before venturing into China’s mobile apps market:

The right mobile OS

Thanks to the low cost of entry level smartphones in China, two out of three users are on Android system which makes it the one to target first. iOS still represents about one third of the total market but Android will certainly continue to dominate China in the near future. Windows phones didn’t get much traction in China yet, while Blackberry and Nokia’s Symbian systems being even less relevant.

Fragmentation of Android apps market

There are literally hundreds of Android mobile stores, each focusing on a specific niche, demographics or geographic region. Understanding complex Android ecosystem is crucial to launching your app in the right store. Simply applying to all or most of them is not an option because each store has its own QA and approval process as well as billing system. The best strategy is to focus on the top 5 stores and monitor the performance of each of them. The most popular Android independent stores in China include AppChina, Anzhi, Gfan, Hiapk, Liqucn,Wandoujia, eoemarket, and 91Market (note that Google Play is not even in the top 20).

In addition, many large companies, such as China Mobile (largest mobile provider), Baidu (top search engine), QQ (popular messenger), as well as Huawei, Lenovo, Xiaomi etc., have their own store.

Mobile network speed

The speed of China’s mobile networks still lags behind Western countries, Japan or Korea. If your app is graphics-heavy making it loading slow, it will most likely be abandoned. If you are considering localizing an existing app for Chinese market, you need to make sure that it works fast enough on much slower network speed.

Hopefully, the ongoing development and introduction of 5G infrastructure will help alleviate this problem.

Social media integration

Another challenge of localization is the integration of the local social media channels. Your app won’t work in China (unless used with VPN) if signup or login options use Facebook or Twitter as those are inaccessible from the Mainland. Same goes for sharing and retweeting. If social media is essential for your app, make sure to integrate the most popular local platforms such as Sina and/or Tencent Weibo, YouKu or WeChat.

Cloud storage issue

Popular cloud storage services, such as Dropbox or Box.net, are often too slow or inaccessible from China. Out of popular Western services, only Microsoft Skydrive seems to be relatively stable at the moment. If cloud storage is required for your app’s functionality, consider using one of the local solutions, although they may not be as fast and convenient. 

Payment system

Local mobile-based payment services have won the war against any other payment method. Two of the most popular services are Alipay and WeChat Pay. Remember that Chinese use of credit cards is very limited as they seem to entirely skip the credit card era straight to the digital money world. Another popular payment system with mobile in-app purchases works directly through mobile carrier, such as China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile. This, however, require more complex integration of your app into their payment system, something that can’t be done without an experienced local partner company.

Everyone takes a cut

Apps stores fees range wildly, something to be taken into account when choosing the most suitable one as well. QQ for instance, takes up to 70% of an app’s revenue, while China Unicom takes 30%. In addition, each store has its own guidelines and procedures as well as its own government tax and banking rates. Note, that government tax and various regulation fees can easily reach up to 30% on top of the app store cut!

Piracy concerns

If your app is successful there is no question that it will be copied. All of the world’s most popular apps have local copycats. Partnering with a local partner that is familiar with the apps store ecosystem can also help ensure that the copycat apps are pulled from the store to be replaced by the official ones. On the other hand, if you are simply coming up with a concept for an app and it is a good one, such “partner” can simply appropriate it. Therefore, due diligence is paramount in choosing your local partner.

Monetization model

Purchasing apps outright has been in decline worldwide. In China, people are even less willing to pay for an app, no matter how insignificant the price would be. This means that more creative monetization strategies should be considered. One of them would be selling ads. Recently, BBC ran a story about Chinese mother who developed flash card app for their kids which is now supplementing her income by $1,000 every month from the ads alone.

Another model is based on in-app purchases. It makes more sense to give away an app for free to get users more familiar with it. Once, hopefully, they start liking it, they would be more willing to pay for extras. This model works well for games and chat apps.

Finally, premium model is another one to consider: user downloads an app with limited functionality but has to pay for more enhanced features.

Apps for brands

Finally, there is another type of apps that aims at building brand awareness or serves as a marketing tool to supplement and support offline or web-based sales. If your app doesn’t require payment system or complex integration with other services, it can be launched much more easily. Also, such app would not be in any danger of  being copied as it has no value of itself without the brand behind it.

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One of the most critical components for a successful conversion of online consumers is being able to communicate with them in real, or almost real time. In this post we are going to look at how to incorporate and use live support for Chinese website.

Chinese online consumers have already been spoiled by near instant customer support on major ecommerce sites. For example, large percentage of shoppers on Taobao would often initiate online chat session with a seller before taking a decision to make a purchase.

Regardless of whether it is a product sold from a website or an online service, Chinese visitors would expect to be able to ask questions and get answers within minutes.

Luckily, this can be accomplished in several ways and we are going to look at each of them next.

Live support for Chinese website with QQ

QQ messenger is still the most popular chat program in China. Practically every Chinese is familiar with QQ from the early days of the internet. Incorporating QQ into a website is also quite easy – all it takes is pasting a piece of code to your website to display a functional QQ icon.

By clicking a QQ icon, a visitor can start chatting immediately as long as the program is installed on their computer or a mobile device. Fortunately, this is the case for the vast majority of Chinese anyway.

Phone based support with Chinese toll free number

The good old toll free phone number is the traditional way get customers to call you directly and it would probably work well if you target somewhat less tech savvy visitors. Toll free numbers in China start with 400 and can be applied for with China’s telephone service providers. Typically, they offer several different packages and are fairly inexpensive.

Telephone companies are constantly adding more new features to those numbers such as autoresponders, forward services, voice mails, various types of notifications etc. They also allow to choose a number from an available pool, although the good numbers go quickly. While picking a 400 number it is best to avoid the “unlucky” digits such as “four”. “Eights” and “nines” are the best, so are the repetitive numbers such as 55, 66 etc.

How does live support with WeChat work

There are many good reasons to include WeChat contact on the webpage and having live support for Chinese website is just one of them. Once a visitor to a website starts following your company WeChat account, there are many ways to keep them engaged which is a whole separate topic.

Nowadays, increasing number of companies in China choose to provide customer service exclusively through WeChat because it offers much more than just a live chat. For example, WeChat can send pre-programmed answers in response to a specific inquiry with predefined keywords. It can also grab an information about users such as their present location and tailor the answer based on that criteria. More advanced companies can even integrate WeChat customer service into a sophisticated system that incorporates various types marketing automation.

One drawback of using WeChat as a live support channel is the fact it takes manual scanning of a QR code by a visitor with their cellphone. While this may be convenient for someone visiting from a desktop, browsing site on the mobile device makes that scanning impossible. The workaround is to save the QR code as a picture in the photos and then import it to WeChat. Unfortunately, this is not a straight forward process and many people are simply unaware of how to do that.

Incorporating Live Chat for Chinese Website

Live chat app is, perhaps, the most natural way to offer live support for Chinese website. Live chat can be integrated with practically any website in a form or a 3rd party plugin. There are many services that offer this type of functionality and they mainly differ in features and price plans. Basic features usually include support for mobile apps, automated responses, alerts and escalation scenarios, various levels of security, ability to share files, routing options etc.

Some of the most popular services that offer Chinese support are Zopim, LiveChat, Zoho Sales IQ as well as many others. Some of them, like Zopim, even offer free plans with limited features set and the prices for paid plans are also fairly affordable in the range of $15-30 per month – well worth the investment.

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Here we are reviewing several of those companies which are based on variety of different business models, products and services.

China sharing economy: 6 most innovative services

Didi – the “Uber killer”

Perhaps the most well-known example of China sharing economy is the ride-sharing service DiDi aka Didi Chuxing, the Chinese equivalent of Uber. In fact, last year, after spending billions of dollars on Chinese market, Uber has sold its Chinese company to Didi which now dominates the ride-sharing market providing transportation services for close to 400 million users across over 400 cities in China.

Before acquiring Uber China, Didi Chuxing was itself the result of the merger of rival firms Didi Dache and Kuaidi Dache (backed by the two largest Chinese Internet companies, Tencent and Alibaba respectively).

One major difference between DiDi and Uber and one of the reasons it won over Uber is the fact that the service is used by both private drivers and taxi drivers alike. Getting taxi drivers on their side helped DiDi in gaining commanding market share while Uber was busy fighting with them (as it still does in other markets).

The battle of bike sharing apps

After sharing car rides, came the bike sharing apps. In fact, nothing has changed the familiar landscape of large cities like Beijing or Shanghai in recent years like thousands upon thousands of colored bikes parked all over the cities, another sign of emergence of China sharing economy.

The new service took advantage of Chinese traditional love of biking and the availability of the technology to make easy sharing possible (more on that in upcoming posts). The market is shared between four main bike sharing apps that are currently stuck in competitive deadlock: Mobike and Ofo being the two largest competitors followed by Xiaoming Danche and Xiangqi Chuxing.

Each company has its own color associated with the bikes: orange for Mobike, yellow for Ofo, blue Xiaoming Danche and green Xiangqi Chuxing. The rainbow views like those below are quickly becoming a permanent fixture in major Chinese cities. Well, at least until the next crackdown:

Huochebang – Uber for trucks

Huochebang , or so called “Uber for trucks”, is one of the latest ventures of China’s largest search engine Baidu. The company was founded in 2014 and has already achieved the famed status of Unicorn of China sharing economy recently surpassing $1 Billion valuation.

The company is positioned to become a major player in China’s trillion yuan logistics industry and is considered “the largest and the only nationwide platform in China”, according to Wu Wenjie, managing partner of Baidu Capital, the financial backer of the startup.

As Bloomberg was reporting, Huochebang works with 2.3 million trucks and handles as much as 100,000 orders daily to haul everything from seeds and farming tools to bulkier items such as cement and coal. The company processes as much as $120 million in shipping fees daily and has about 1,000 service centers sprinkled across China supporting drivers.

Tujia – Chinese AirBNB? Not quite.

AirBNB, one of the pioneers of sharing economy, hasn’t been particularly successful in China. Most of the local copycats also couldn’t successfully replicate the model for Chinese market. However, one company Tujia.com, founded in 2011, did become a success story in the space achieving a unicorn status.

Tuijia attributes its success to significantly altering AirBNB business model. Early on they have realized that a model that is primarily based on trust won’t get very far due to different cultural perceptions and established habits of Chinese travelers. As a result, all the properties listed on Tuijia website are managed by the company itself rather than being an intermediary or mere facilitator like AirBNB.

Sharing for a rainy day

A few years ago, a popular US show Shark Tank featured a group of entrepreneurs with an idea of sharing umbrellas. The concept was laughed at and slaughtered by merciless “sharks”. In China, the cause was taken over by Molisan, an umbrella sharing app.

According to SixthTone, the service has only been introduced in Guangzhou and Fuzhou so far. For the modest fee of 2 yuan ($0.30) per day, users can pick up one of the company’s umbrellas by scanning a QR code and return it later. People with a high enough score on Sesame Credit — a credit rating system by tech giant Alibaba — can forego the 20-yuan deposit.

Molisan is not only one in this space, another startup Hujie has been developing the same solution. The umbrellas are simply attached to fences with a lock that can be unlocked with app by scanning the QR code.

Power to the people

Cellphone running out of power? No problem! At least four Chinese startups are introducing a solution in the form of cellphone charger sharing.

As SixthTone recently reported, an industry pioneer Shenzhen Laidian Technology Co. Ltd.’s business model is to set up charging spots in public places that attract heavy foot traffic: such as restaurants, shopping malls, train stations, and airports. For a small fee, a user can borrow one of the fully charged batteries after scanning a QR code with their phone, and they can return the charger later at any station.

Although, some are optimistic about the concept, there has also been a great deal of skepticism. Some users expressed concern that chargers can be used to steal personal data while others criticized their quality.

The post China Sharing Economy: Six Most Innovative Services first appeared on Sampi.co.

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I have gained experience working with Google Postmaster tools and I’m happy to share it with you.

How to get started?

Step-1: You will need the existing Google App or @gmail.com email, if you have it, go to Step-2, if you don’t – create it here.

Step-2: Log into your account and go to postmaster.google.com.

Step-3: Click on “+” icon to add your domain from which you are sending emails.

Step-4: You will be required to verify the ownership of your domain in one of two ways.
A – Adding TXT records in your domain DNS settings (similar to when you authenticate your domain with Mailigen).
B – Adding CNAME in your domain DNS settings.

Step-5: When given records in your domain DNS are added, click on verify.

Step-6: Finally click on your verified domain to see the results (if the tool shows “No data to display”, make sure that you are sending domain authenticated campaigns up to the order of hundreds).

How to understand each tool?

SpamRate – Shows the volume of spam complaints (abuse). Only emails authenticated by DKIM are eligible for spam complaint calculation. For the best email campaign results you should keep spam complaint rate below 0.1%

Example of High level domain reputation group spam rates (last 30 days).

IP reputation – Shows the reputation of IPs from which you send out emails. By clicking on a data point, you can display a sample of IP ranges from which your emails were sent.

Example of good engagement campaign sending IPs reputation (last 120 days).

Domain reputation – Shows the level of your domain reputation – critical factor in optimizing email campaign results.

Example of good engagement campaign sending group reputation (last 120 days).

Meaning of reputation levels and their effect on email campaign results:

Bad – a history of sending an enormously high volume of spam. Mail coming from this entity will almost always be rejected at SMTP or marked as spam.

Low – known to send a considerable volume of spam regularly. Mail from this sender will likely be marked as spam.

Medium/Fair – known to send good mail, but is prone to sending a low volume of spam intermittently. Most of the email from this entity will have a fair deliverability rate, except when there is a notable increase in spam levels.

High – has a good track record of a very low spam rate, and complies with Gmail’s sender guidelines. Mail will rarely be marked by the spam filter.

• Spam filtering is based on thousands of signals, and Domain & IP reputation are just two of them.
• If your domain reputation is lower than IP reputation, you should pay attention to email engagement and find out which part of your content is with low, bad deliverability in Google.

Feedback loop – Shows the volume of spam rate. You should keep spam rate below 0.5% to avoid Mailigen account suspension.

Example of campaign sending group that is enrolled in Google FBL where one sender got 0.7% spam rate for all his sendouts (last 7 days).

Authentication – Shows traffic that passed SPF, DKIM & DMARC, over all received traffic that attempted authentication.

Example of mailigen.com domain authenticated traffic rate (last 7days).

As an Email Delivery Expert, I recommend to use DMARC tools, like DMARCIAN , to monitor DMARC success rate & Email Fraud.

Encryption – Shows TLS encrypted traffic vs. all mail received from that domain (Mailigen sends out TLS encrypted emails).

Example of campaign sending domain group encrypted traffic rate (last 120 days).

Delivery errors – Shows rejected/temp-failed traffic vs all authenticated traffic coming from that domain, within a single graph.

Example of domain delivery error rate where the reason was – Dmarc policy of the sender domain (last 7 days).

Can I add other users who will be able to manage my domain reputation?

Yes, just click on manage users, then on “+” and add your domain manager @googlemail.com, @gmail.com or Google Apps email address!

When manager email is added, be sure to let them know. They will need to add your domain in their postmaster.google.com account!

Aleksandrs Vilums is System Analyst & Email Compliance of Mailigen, primary email marketing provider.

The post Using Google Postmaster Tools to Monitor and Improve Your Email Campaign Results first appeared on Sampi.co.

The post Using Google Postmaster Tools to Monitor and Improve Your Email Campaign Results appeared first on Sampi.co.

It all starts with reputation. Is your domain reputation good? Do you use a good email list? Does your email template have good content? Do you have a successful subject line and sender name? Do you send your email campaigns from a good Email Service Provider (ESP) like Mailigen? If yes, then most of your emails will be delivered, not bounced, and email deliverability in China will be good.

At the end it’s all about engagement or how your recipients interact with your emails, improving or impairing your reputation. If you use purchased or rented lists or lists that are not compliant with Can-Spam act of 2013 or other guidelines, like Bulk Sender guideline by Google, then your campaign recipients will impair your reputation and next time your delivery and deliverability rates will be lower.

Engagement metrics, that improve your email deliverability in China

1. Opens. Good open rate gives a signal that your emails are expected and wanted. If your average campaign Open rate drops below 7%, you should:
   •  Send more email campaigns to recipients who opened your emails, using Mailigen segments activity-based filter (e.g. if you have 4% OR, send twice as many mails to last 3 month opens).
     
   • Send re-activation email campaigns for last 5 month zero opens (before you send re-activation campaign, make sure that the subject line, sender name and content in template are engage-able and with good deliverability).
   • Try to send campaigns for smaller segments, like one campaign for women and another for men.
   • Use Mailigen Time Match function to send emails based on subscriber’s time zone.
2. This is not spam (TINS). If your reputation dropped and some emails started to fall in the junk, improve your email deliverability in China by convincing your Chinese recipients to mark your messages as not spam. It can be a difficult task to ask for TINS, but there are ways to do it:
   • If you have a good relationship with your subscribers, ask them, e.g. through email or phone, to check your campaigns and mark them as not spam if they appear somewhere in the junk.
   • Send a welcome message with attractive content, asking to mark your emails as not spam and important.
3. Reply. When your recipients reply to your emails, it improves your deliverability score. But keep in mind:
   • You should avoid sending email campaigns with noreply@ email addresses.
   • You should send email campaigns from an email that is active and being read.
   • If a subscriber replies to your email with a sentence like “unsubscribe me from your newsletter”, it may affect your deliverability score. Make sure that your unsubscribe link is easily visible.
4. Mark as important. You have probably seen icons like star & marker in Gmail.com or flag in Outlook.com. In China, popular email boxes like QQ have a similar function. When email receivers click on these icons, it improves your email deliverability score.
   
5. Add to address book. This was important years ago and it still is. When recipients add your email to their address book, they have whitelisted it. Whitelisted senders have a good deliverability.
6. Categorize emails. If recipients categorize your emails, it gives a signal that the emails are good and they want to receive them.
7. Email forwarding. It indicates that content you’re sending is relevant to your subscribers and your subscribers email users.

Engagement metrics, that impair your email deliverability in China

1. Abuses. If the email receiver marks your message as spam or moves it to the Spam folder, it negatively affects your deliverability score. To reduce abuse rate:
   • Make sure that Chinese email recipients received the content they wanted and subscribed for.
   • Add permission reminder merge tag above your HTML template to remind recipients how they subscribed and why they received your Chinese email campaign.
   • Add additional unsubscribe link above your HTML template content.
     Keep your abuse rate low in a range of 0.1%-0.5%, that will help to avoid suspension of your account. You can check your Abuse Complaints in campaign reports bounce statistic section.
2. Unsubscribes. Unsubscribes also impair your deliverability in situations where the email receiver didn’t use your email unsubscribe link (There is an unsubscribe link below email in Outlook or near the sender name and email address in Gmail or QQ. The recipients can also use these links to unsubscribe from your email list.).
   
3. Deleted unread. These are emails that were deleted without opening. To limit deleted unread emails, send email messages that are expected, relevant and delivered at the right time. Do not send too many emails. Try to figure out what kind of email content, subject line and sender name recipients would like. Try to engage subscribers presenting the goods that they like. If subscribers open your emails and stay connected, they are waiting for something great.

Aleksandrs Vilums is System Analyst & Email Compliance of Mailigen, primary email marketing provider.

The post Email Marketing: Engagement Metrics And Email Deliverability in China first appeared on Sampi.co.

The post Email Marketing: Engagement Metrics And Email Deliverability in China appeared first on Sampi.co.

Chinese online shoppers also grew to trust online payments and the vast majority is quite comfortable using it to pay for purchases on the internet. Alipay, the most popular Chinese online payment system by Alibaba, holds the largest market share. It powers two largest ecommerce platforms, Taobao and Tmall and is extensively used in large number of third party applications and platforms.

Main Chinese Online Payment Systems

As of the end of 2015, Alipay accounted for almost 70% of the entire Chinese online payment market. It is fair to say that almost everyone in China with a cellphone and a bank account has Alipay account which is somewhere around 700 million.

Alipay transaction fees are also much lower than PayPal. In general, cross border transactions are the most expensive but it depends on the type of contract a merchant has with Alipay as well as the volume.

The second largest online payment system is TenPay developed by Tencent. In fact, TenPay also powers WeChat Pay, the payment system used by WeChat users. Thanks to this app’s explosive growth, TenPay was able to increase its market share quite significantly during 2015 to about 20%, primarily on the account of Alipay.

WeChat Pay is now extensively used for many types of transactions. With web payments, customers simply scan the QR Code on their mobile phone with WeChat to make a payment to a website. For mobile users, WeChat Pay is used for payment within WeChat Official Accounts to enable sales from within the app.

Both Alipay and WeChat Pay are increasingly used for offline transactions at traditional stores and restaurants in China and even abroad. A customer simply opens the app in order to allow the merchant to scan their QR code with a special scanner or, often, just another smartphone. As many phones now have fingerprint scanning sensor, placing a finger on it is all it takes to complete a transaction (otherwise, a customer has to type in their secret code on their phone). Alternatively, a customer can scan a merchant’s QR code to send the payment but this way is becoming less common at the traditional point of sale.

Since those type of transactions are free to customers, Alipay and WeChat Pay serve as substitutes for carrying cash or credit cards and offer both security and convenience.

Alipay and TenPay (WeChat Pay) account for almost 90% of current mobile payment with other players, such as Lakala, JD wallet, YeePay, 99Bill and others quite far behind.

As for foreign alternatives, PayPal was not able to get any meaningful user base so far and is unlikely to do so in the future. Apple Pay still barely registers in China mobile payment market, although it is still quite new.

The post What You Need to Know About Chinese Online Payment Systems first appeared on Sampi.co.

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Didi-Kuaidi, valued at $15 billion, boasts more than one million drivers in 360 cities, compared to Uber’s roughly 100,000 drivers in 20 cities. It has also recently invested $100 million in Uber’s main rival Lyft. Two companies agreed to offer services to each other’s users in the countries where each isn’t currently present.

What are the reasons for Uber in China being unable to become the market leader despite having an early mover advantage?

The claim that a foreign service provider being squeezed out by the government in favor the local competitor doesn’t really hold water. Beijing’s recently published draft law on regulating private car-hailing services is going to affect both rivals equally. In fact, Uber China is already structured as a local company in the eyes of Chinese law. Uber Global is listed as an investor of Uber China, among several others mostly local companies.

There are, however, three main reasons why Didi-Kuaidi has managed to capture commanding market share and all of them have to do with Chinese rival’s better understanding of the market.

First reason is the fact that Didi-Kuaidi, unlike Uber, doesn’t see traditional taxi industry as the enemy. In fact, it treats it as a partner and cooperated with taxi drivers by distributing their mobile apps among them to be used as an additional channel to attract more passengers. This allowed Didi-Kuadi to quickly gain more drivers, enabling the company to scale much faster and in more cities than Uber in China.

The second reason is strategic partnership with the right internet conglomerates: Alibaba and Tencent. On the opposite side, Uber has managed to secure strong backing of another internet giant Baidu, the third member of the infamous Chinese BAT (the collective term used to describe three companies that practically run Chinese internet).

Unfortunately to Uber, Tencent and Alibaba are much better positioned to add value to a car sharing service. Tencent is behind WeChat, most popular mobile social media app that has now integrated private cab hailing capability within the app itself. Uber has already complained that WeChat is shutting them out of the app but there is little they can do about it.

Alibaba, the largest ecommerce company in the world, has been integrating similar capability into its Alipay mobile wallet used by hundreds of millions of Chinese on daily basis.

On the other hand, Baidu does have a potential to help Uber getting more clients through its mobile navigation app, although it is still not as popular as WeChat or Alipay Wallet and has many rivals in this market. Recently, Baidu started to add Uber pickup points to its map – a new service that Uber has been introducing in some cities.

The third reason of why Uber in China couldn’t catch the lead is the fact that it was too slow to introduce features that Chinese users seem to like. Didi-Kuaidi has been much more innovative in this regard by offering more ride options to its users. For example, it has a popular group ride-sharing service along defined routes called “Hitch.” The company even tapped into busy travel market by offering bus services to tour groups and transportation to events. In addition, in an effort to help with drunk driving problem, the company has also launched a new “chauffeur service” that enables customers to hire a designated driver to take them back home in their own car.

So far, it hasn’t been easy for Uber in China but it certainly isn’t going anywhere. Even a tenth of China’s lucrative market of 800 million city dwellers represents a much larger business than in many of other Uber’s locations where it dominates the market.

The post Uber in China: 3 Reasons Why It Still Lags Behind first appeared on Sampi.co.

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Loading speed is one of the most important metrics of a website performance and is directly linked to bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave rather than continuing on to view other pages within the same site) and search engine ranking. Typically, if takes more than 5 seconds to load a page, a visitor would be most likely to move on. Loading time within 2 seconds is considered to be the optimal.

Not surprisingly, website loading speed in China is also a major factor in website ranking with search engines like Google or, in China’s case Baidu.

Unfortunately, even if your website is loading fast in your main market such as US or Europe, it is almost certain that it will be slower in China. There are two main reasons for it: website that are physically hosted outside of China have to pass the “Great Chinese Firewall” – a set of censorship methods setup by Chinese authorities and designed to restrict internet access to websites hosted on foreign servers. The process slows down data transfers and, ultimately, affects the loading speed of foreign based websites.

How to Test Website Loading Speed in China

I’ve personally tried several of the tools that are often recommended but found the results highly unstable or plain unreliable. First the tools that are, in my opinion, don’t do a very good job. Then, at the end, there is the one that I recommend.

WebPageTest.org

This is quite popular but clearly outdated tool which is obvious from the old-fashioned design. One plus, however, is that it allows selection of different browsers to test: Chrome, Firefox, IE etc. Unfortunately, for China there is just one choice – Shanghai. This can be completely inadequate as the loading speeds across China vary quite a bit.

Last time I tried, it got stuck on me and this was all I got:

Conclusion: not recommended

Gomez Networks

This is a very basic tool, although with slightly more choices for the cities: Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Xian. Not a particularly exciting interface and doesn’t test HTTPS (only HTTP):

Conclusion: still too limited

Dotcom-Monitor.com

This tool has a much better designed interface and it allows selecting multiple locations and test them simultaneously. However, the results I got while testing Baidu.com loading in China didn’t make any sense – 4.5 sec to load the number one China’s website in Shanghai? I don’t think so.

Conclusion: unreliable

Site 24×7

This modern looking tool allows testing with several cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou and Qingdao. Unfortunately, it doesn’t allow to run simultaneous tests but one by one. However, when testing website loading speed in China, the results were much more believable: Baidu’s loading time in Shanghai was 0.6 sec. Also, the tools shows some useful breakdown of loading time for different site elements:

Conclusion: acceptable but not the best

CE Cloud 360 by Qihoo

This is the tool that is local to China. It is free to use and run by Qihoo-Haosou, one of the most popular Chinese search engines. The only drawback of this one is that it is entirely in Chinese, otherwise it’s perfect.

CE Cloud not only tests the site from every province and major Chinese city but gives a color coded map of China. Hovering over a map shows a more detailed info for each location and there is a report shown at the table below with even more data.

This is by far the best tool out there for testing website loading speed in China.  Its straight forward interface ensures that even someone with zero Chinese skills can use it just fine.

Conclusion: the best

The post How to Test Website Loading Speed in China first appeared on Sampi.co.

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In the last 3 years, online advertising revenues in China have been growing at the rate of about 40% on year to year basis and show no signs of slowing down in 2015. According to iResearch, it is projected that this year, the total market will reach 216 billion yuan (almost $40 billion), up from 154 billion yuan in 2014.

Advertising with search engines is still the most popular choice (36.6% of the market), followed by ecommerce ads and brand graphic ads (banner advertising) at 24.1% and 17.2% respectively.

In those two categories, the leading providers are Baidu which holds about 60% of search engine market and Taobao, one of the ecommerce properties of Alibaba.

The infographic also features the results of surveys which were intended to find out what type of improvements users would expect in China digital advertising market in the future. One third of the respondents would like see more correlation between the ads and their interests. This further underscores the need for marketers to learn more about their target audience in order to improve their advertising ROI.

Here is the full infographic:

China Digital Advertising Market

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