Amazon launches a showroom for imported goods in Beijing

Amazon.com Inc. last week opened a showroom in Sanlitun Square, a popular shopping destination in Beijing, featuring imported goods from the e-retailer’s U.S. and U.K. e-commerce sites.

The store looks like a giant Amazon shipping box and covers an area close to the size of a basketball court. Consumers can browse a selection of products in such categories as children’s products, kitchenware, apparel and electronics. Shoppers can try the products, listen to explanations and buy them from Amazon’s China e-commerce site, Amazon.cn, by scanning a product’s bar code on their mobile devices.

The goods include some of the 10 million products Amazon sells in China via the imported products section of Amazon.cn called Haiwaigou, which means “buy from overseas” in Chinese. Launched in 2014, Haiwaigou enables shoppers to browse and buy products on Amazon’s U.S. site in Chinese and to access Chinese-language customer service.

The showroom also has an area highlighting Amazon Prime, which Amazon introduced in China last month. Chinese shoppers who enroll in Prime get free shipping on orders exceeding 200 yuan ($29.50) on millions of eligible overseas goods as well as on domestic goods, Amazon says. The annual membership fee is 388 yuan, just over $56, which is lower than the U.S. annual fee of $99.

Amazon this month also announced it has added products from its U.K. site to the Haiwaigou section of Amazon.cn, which is No. 4 in the Internet Retailer 2016 China 500, which ranks the leading online retailers in China. Amazon is No. 1 in the Internet Retailer 2016 Top 500 Guide, a ranking of e-retailers in North America.

Amazon offered deals on Black Friday on more than 100 international fashion brands, including UGG, Stuart Weitzman, Ivanka Trump, Dr. Martens, Rimowa, Bottega Veneta, Furla, Estee Lauder, Kose, Sisle, Pandora, Braun and Daniel Wellington.

On Black Friday last year Amazon reported that sales of overseas goods in China increased fivefold from the prior year. Amazon also says that in 2015 it attracted four times more new online visitors in China during the week of the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States compared with 2014.

Source: Internet Retailer